Most domain scorers hand you a number between 0 and 100 and let you guess what it means. That's not scoring. That's reheated DA/DR repackaged as a confidence trick.
DQS reads thirteen signals and writes a sentence. The number exists — 0 to 100, tiered at 70 / 50 / 25 — but the sentence is what the product is for.
The thirteen signals
- Length. Short is monetarily better, with diminishing returns past 6 characters and a cliff at 10+.
- TLD premium.
.com>.io≈.ai>.app≈.dev> long-tail gTLDs > novelty TLDs. - Pronounceability. Consonant-vowel alternation, no awkward clusters. We run a phonotactic regex and a syllable counter.
- Dictionary match. Single English dictionary word is a small boost; double word compound is a bigger boost.
- Commercial-intent keyword shape. Substring match against a curated list of buy-side keywords (shop, sale, hire, buy, etc.) and tech category terms (ai, data, cloud).
- Wayback presence. Count of historical snapshots and first-seen year. A domain with 20 years of archived content has built-in brand equity; a never-resolved name is a blank slate (fine) but not rich history.
- Brandable combo. Short + pronounceable + dictionary-free + clean phonotactics = brandable. Heavy positive weight.
- Spam-pattern flag. Regex against known spammy shapes (buy-cheap-*, *-now-*-free, drug-name variants). Hard penalty.
- Saturated suffix. Domains ending in -bot, -app, -io-derivative, -gpt during hype peaks get flagged as category-saturated.
- Digit penalty. Digits reduce resale unless they're semantically meaningful (3d, 24, 360).
- Hyphen penalty. One hyphen hurts. Two hyphens usually disqualify. Three-plus is automatic zero.
- Homoglyph flag. If the domain contains look-alike unicode characters, it's flagged as defensive/typo-squat shape, not a buy.
- Length × TLD interaction. A short
.comis disproportionately more valuable than a short.info. We compute the interaction term.
What you see
Every row in your feed shows the number plus a sentence like:
> "genuinely brandable and commercial ai intent, plus compact"
You can tell a client, a partner, or your own future self why the domain may deserve further research. That's the whole point. A domain you can explain is a domain you can defend.
What DQS doesn't do
It doesn't estimate exact resale value. It doesn't predict auction price. It doesn't tell you whether a specific buyer is in the market. These are downstream questions that depend on your network, timing, and the specific buyer mood that day. DQS is a discovery filter: which drops deserve your next fifteen minutes of research.
If you want to argue with the output, /support — we review every signal weight quarterly and pay attention to where the score and the sentence diverge from what a human expert would say.