We ran real RDAP lookups against the world's 1,000 most-visited domains and measured their actual registration age. Here's what the data shows.
Domain age gets cited constantly as an SEO trust signal, but there's surprisingly little public data on what "old" actually means at the top of the web. So we checked: we pulled the Tranco list — the research-standard replacement for the discontinued Alexa rankings — and queried the real RDAP registration record for each of its top 1,000 domains.
Of 1,000 domains queried, 499 returned a usable registration date (the rest timed out under bulk query load against registry RDAP servers — a methodology note we detail honestly in the full paper, not hidden). Among those 499:
| Age bracket | Share of domains |
|---|---|
| 0–5 years | 6.0% |
| 5–10 years | 12.2% |
| 10–15 years | 12.8% |
| 15–20 years | 14.8% |
| 20–25 years | 17.4% |
| 25+ years | 36.7% |
Mean age: 20.33 years. Median: 21.25 years. Oldest resolved domain: 40.62 years. Youngest: 1.07 years.
Over a third of the internet's highest-traffic domains were registered in the 1990s or early 2000s. Fewer than one in sixteen were registered in the last five years. New entrants to the top-traffic tier are rare — and when they do appear, they tend to be product launches under long-established parent companies rather than genuinely new independent sites.
This doesn't mean domain age causes high traffic. It means the two are strongly associated at the top of the web, consistent with the broader idea that trust, backlinks, and indexed history accumulate over time rather than appearing overnight.
Curious where a specific domain falls on this spectrum? Use the free checker above to pull its live RDAP registration record — exact date, age, registrar, and expiration.
The complete paper (abstract, methodology, limitations) and the raw 499-row dataset are published openly on Zenodo under CC-BY-4.0, with a permanent DOI:
Suggested citation: Domain Age Finder (2026). Domain Age Distribution Among the World's Most-Visited Websites: A 2026 RDAP-Based Snapshot. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23878126