Buying a domain that already has traffic — and checking it is real

Existing traffic can justify a higher price on a domain — but only a small slice of it usually survives the handover. Most "10,000 visits a month" claims break down into bots, referral spam, and links pointing at pages you are not going to keep. The job before you buy is to work out which visitors are real, which are durable, and which are worth money to your business rather than to the previous owner's.

What kind of traffic you are actually buying

Traffic on a resale domain comes from a handful of distinct sources, and they behave very differently after a sale.

• Type-in traffic. People typing the name straight into the address bar. This is the most durable kind because it does not depend on any page, link or ranking. It is also the rarest, and it tends to cluster on very short, very literal names.
• Search traffic to existing pages. Real, sometimes substantial, and highly perishable. If you replace the content, the rankings usually go with it. Rankings attach to pages and their link profiles, not to the domain in the abstract.
• Referral traffic from live links. Someone linked to a page years ago and people still click. Durable as long as the target URL keeps resolving to something useful.
• Expired-content traffic. An old app, forum, plugin or product that used to live here. Often the largest number in the report and almost always worthless to a new owner, because the visitors want the thing that no longer exists.
• Bots and spam. Crawlers, uptime monitors, scrapers, referral spam. Inflates any log-based or server-side number, sometimes by a factor of five or more.

Before you look at a single figure, ask the seller which of these five they think they have. A seller who cannot answer that question probably has not looked.

The verification checks that actually mean something

Screenshots are not evidence. Ask for read-only access, or for the seller to share a live session, in this order of usefulness.

Google Search Console

The single most useful artefact. It shows real search impressions and clicks by query and by page, plus indexing status and any manual actions. Look for: which pages earn the clicks, whether the queries are commercial or navigational, and whether impressions are stable or in decline over 16 months. A domain with a manual action or a history of spam is a liability, not an asset.

Analytics with sessions and sources

A total visit count tells you nothing. You need the source/medium breakdown, geography, and landing pages. Red flags: enormous direct traffic with a sub-two-second average engagement time, single-page sessions at near 100%, traffic concentrated in one or two countries that have nothing to do with the content, or spikes that begin and end abruptly.

Server logs or registrar-level stats

Useful for parked domains where there is no analytics tag. If the domain is parked with a monetisation provider, ask for the parking dashboard — it will show unique visitors and click-through, and revenue if any. Parking revenue is the cleanest proxy for genuine type-in demand you will get.

Wayback Machine and link history

Free, and it takes ten minutes. Look at what the site was at each stage of its life. A domain that spent 2018 as a gambling affiliate farm carries baggage you may not want. Check the backlink profile too: a hundred quality editorial links is an asset, ten thousand forum-profile links is a cleanup project.

Cross-check the numbers against each other

Search Console clicks should roughly track analytics organic sessions. If Search Console shows 400 clicks a month and analytics shows 9,000 organic sessions, something is wrong with the story. Discrepancies are not automatically fraud — tagging is often broken — but they need an explanation before you pay.

How to put a number on traffic you can verify

Value the traffic on what it is worth to you, not on generic CPMs. Two approaches, both crude, both better than guessing.

• Paid-equivalent. Take the verified organic clicks for the queries you actually care about, and multiply by what you would pay per click for those queries. That gives an annual media-equivalent value. Discount it hard — 50% or more — because you will lose rankings during migration and because a click on someone else's content is not a click on your offer.
• Revenue-equivalent. If the domain has any commercial history, ask for the revenue figures and the underlying account, not a spreadsheet. Small content sites and parked domains typically trade at a multiple of annual profit, and the multiple sits in the low single digits to low teens depending on stability and diversification.

Be honest about the split. On most premium names, the brand value of the string dwarfs the traffic value. A short, literal, category-defining domain is priced on what it does for your positioning, credibility and paid-search costs for the next decade. The current 3,000 monthly visits are a rounding error in that calculation, and paying a large premium for them is usually a mistake.

What breaks when the domain changes hands

Plan for loss. The mechanics that erode traffic post-sale:

• Content replacement. New site, new URLs, ranking reset. Even with clean 301 redirects, expect a dip and an incomplete recovery.
• Missing redirect map. If you do not get a full URL list before the transfer, you cannot redirect what you cannot see. Crawl the site yourself and save it.
• Email and DNS cutover. Any traffic tied to app endpoints, feeds, or embedded assets will break the moment nameservers change. Ask what is currently pointed at the domain besides the website.
• Intent mismatch. The visitors were looking for a free tool; you are selling a B2B subscription. Real traffic, zero value.
• Seasonality. A month of data shown in a peak month is not a baseline. Insist on 12 to 16 months.

A reasonable working assumption: you keep the type-in and brand-navigational traffic almost in full, roughly a third to two-thirds of organic search traffic if you redirect carefully and keep comparable content, and close to none of the expired-content traffic.

Structuring the deal so verification comes first

Never send funds against a promise. On Names.com, transfers run through escrow, so neither side pays or transfers first — which gives you a natural window to do the checks while the deal is live rather than before the seller has committed. Do the following in order:

• Agree price and terms in principle, subject to data verification.
• Get read-only Search Console and analytics access, plus 12 to 16 months of history.
• Crawl the live site and archive it, so you have a redirect map and a content record.
• Open escrow. Confirm the registrar, that the domain is out of any transfer lock, and who holds the auth code.
• Move the domain, verify control in your own registrar account, then release funds.

If the traffic claim is central to the price, say so in writing and make the price contingent on the data holding up. If a seller resists read-only access to their own analytics, treat the traffic as zero and re-price accordingly. Plenty of good names sell on the strength of the string alone — see how keyword domains for brands are valued when there is no traffic in the picture at all. That is the honest baseline, and any traffic premium should be argued up from there with evidence.