RFC 10023: Domains Can Now Say "For Sale" in DNS Itself

Until this week, there was no standard way for a domain to tell the world it was for sale. WHOIS and RDAP can tell you a domain is registered, but registered has never meant unavailable. Anyone who has hunted for a domain knows the ritual: the lookup says taken, the site is a parking page or a half-dead blog, and you are left guessing whether an offer would be welcome or ignored. That guessing game just got an official alternative. RFC 10023, published by the IETF on July 30, 2026, defines a DNS convention called _for-sale that lets a domain holder declare, in the zone itself, that the domain can be bought.

Short answer first, as usual: this is a genuinely useful piece of internet plumbing, it is immediately usable today, and it has nothing to do with your rankings. It will not make any domain rank better or worse, and Google has said nothing about it, because it is not aimed at search engines at all. It is aimed at the domain market: registrars, brokers, availability tools, and anyone who checks whether a name can be obtained. That includes, as it happens, people who do SEO for a living. Let us take it apart.

How the Record Works

The mechanism is one DNS TXT record. You add a leaf node called _for-sale to your zone, and its content must start with a version tag:

_for-sale.example.com. IN TXT "v=FORSALE1;"

That alone is a valid declaration. The version tag is mandatory and case-sensitive, and any TXT record at that node without it must be ignored by tools that process the convention. After the tag, you can optionally add exactly one tag-value pair per record, chosen from four defined content tags:

• ftxt= holds short human-readable text: "v=FORSALE1;ftxt=Call for info."
• furi= holds exactly one URI where a buyer can learn more, with only http, https, mailto, and tel schemes recommended: "v=FORSALE1;furi=mailto:[email protected]"
• fval= holds a machine-parsable asking price with a currency code: "v=FORSALE1;fval=EUR999"
• fcod= holds an opaque code that only cooperating systems understand, for example a registrar that maps the code to a sales page in its own backend.

You can publish several records in one RRset, say a price plus a contact URI, as long as each record carries the version tag and one pair. A few operational details are worth knowing. The RFC recommends a TTL of one hour or less, so stale for-sale claims do not outlive the decision to sell. The record can sit at any level of the DNS, including a subdomain, and it works even while the domain is actively in use, which is a deliberate design choice: you can run your business on a domain and still signal you would entertain offers. And when the domain is no longer for sale, the convention is simple: remove the record. An asking price in fval=, the document is careful to say, is indicative, not binding.

The document itself is an Informational RFC authored at SIDN Labs, the research arm of the registry that runs .nl, and it went through IETF review and consensus. That pedigree matters for adoption: this is not a startup’s pet format, it is the operational community writing down a convention it intends to use.

What It Changes for the Domain Market

The interesting part is who reads this record. The RFC talks about “processors”: registrars, brokerage services, and availability tools that can now check one DNS name and answer a question that previously required scraping parking pages and guessing. A registry can let its lookup tool say “registered, but marked for sale” instead of a flat “taken”. A broker can verify that a listing actually corresponds to a domain whose holder marked it for sale, instead of trusting a marketplace database that may be stale. Over time, if adoption follows, the sketchy middle layer of the domain market, the guesswork, the cold emails to WHOIS-privacy walls, the parked pages pretending to be marketplaces, gets a little more honest, because the authoritative signal lives in the zone that only the domain holder controls.

For SEO practitioners specifically, there is a quieter use case. Anyone who researches expired and parked domains, for brand protection, for consolidating old properties, or for evaluating a competitor’s footprint, has been inferring “this looks buyable” from circumstantial evidence. A _for-sale record turns that inference into a fact you can query with one dig command:

dig +short TXT _for-sale.example.com

If you have ever maintained a spreadsheet of interesting domains and their guessed availability, you can see the appeal of a column that is actually machine-readable.

What It Does Not Do

Now the reality check, because a new RFC with the word “domain” in it will inevitably produce confident nonsense within a month. The _for-sale record is not a ranking signal. Search engines do not read it, and there is no mechanism by which it could affect how your pages rank. Publishing one on an active domain does not tell Google your site is abandoned, and removing one does not make anything crawl faster. If you see a checklist somewhere telling you to add _for-sale hygiene to your SEO audits for ranking reasons, you are watching the same reflex we described with the OKF panic: a new standard pattern-matched to SEO because it involves a domain name.

The security section of the RFC is also worth taking seriously, because it is written for exactly the people who will build tools on top of this. TXT content is attacker-controlled text: a tool that blindly renders ftxt= values or follows furi= links invites cross-site scripting, homograph tricks, and phishing redirects. The RFC is blunt that processors must not auto-redirect users based on a furi= value. There is a scam angle for ordinary users too: a for-sale flag on a lookalike domain can lend it a veneer of legitimacy in a social-engineering pitch. None of this makes the convention bad; it makes it a normal piece of DNS, which is to say, trust the signal, sanitize the content.

The other honest caveat is adoption. A convention only matters when processors process it. Today, the day after publication, almost nothing reads _for-sale records yet, and a record on your zone is a message in a bottle. That will change or it will not, and the registrar side, where SIDN sits, is the natural place for it to start. The cost of participating early is one TXT record, which is about as low as adoption costs get.

Where a Crawler Fits

We will be direct about our own interest here. A site crawler is precisely the kind of processor this RFC imagines: it already resolves DNS for every domain it touches, and adding one more lookup per domain is cheap. We are evaluating a _for-sale check for Seodisias, surfacing, during a crawl or an audit, whether a domain you are analyzing carries a for-sale declaration. For expired-domain research and competitor analysis it is a small but real signal, and unlike most small signals, this one comes with an RFC that defines exactly how to parse it. If that lands, it will be because the check is useful, not because the record affects rankings; it does not.

In the meantime, the standing advice does not move. The parts of your domain’s DNS that actually matter for search are the boring ones, resolution, redirects that work, a site that answers with the right status codes, and you can verify all of that with a technical SEO audit or a full crawl of your site today.

The Bottom Line

RFC 10023 is a small, well-made convention that fixes a real gap: there was no standard way to say “this registered domain can be bought”, and now there is, one TXT record away. If you hold domains you would sell, publishing the record costs you a minute and may eventually save you from brokers guessing on your behalf. If you research domains, learn the dig query now, because the signal will only get more common. And if anyone tells you this has ranking implications, you already know the direction-check to apply: this record talks to the domain market, not to search engines, and confusing the two audiences is how every new standard gets its month of bad advice.