423 top-level domains nobody visits

IANA delegates 1,438 top-level domains. Every one of them resolves, has a registry operator, and appears in the root zone. We checked how many of them carry a website that a real person loaded last month.

This is not the same as “nobody has registered one”. A TLD can hold thousands of registered names and still appear here — the test is whether any address under it received enough real Chrome traffic to be measured. What the number says is that 423 extensions have no measurable audience at all.

Where the empty ones are

The 1,438 split four ways, and the four behave nothing alike. Country extensions are almost all in use. Brand extensions are mostly not.

Country extensions are 90% in use — 31 of 309 are empty, and those are mostly territories with populations in the thousands. Generic extensions are 78% in use.

Brand extensions are the outlier: 226 of 362 — 62% — carry no measurable traffic. A company applied to ICANN for its own corner of the root zone, paid the fee, signed a registry agreement, and then never launched a site anybody visits.

The brand extensions nobody launched

These were delegated in the 2014 wave. Each cost its applicant a US$185,000 evaluation fee before annual registry costs, and each has been in the root zone for more than a decade.

.gmail is the one that stops people. Google has held it since August 2014 and has never pointed a website at it. So has .nra, .wtc and .gmx. Defensive registration is the obvious explanation — owning the extension stops anyone else running it — and at this scale it is a decade-long lease on a name nobody uses.

And the ones with exactly one

Below the empty extensions sits a stranger group: delegated extensions with a handful of origins, often exactly one. Usually it is the registry operator’s own holding page.

.azure has one. Microsoft runs one of the largest clouds in the world and has a top-level domain named after it carrying a single measurable origin.

How this was counted

• The root zone. 1,438 delegated extensions from IANA, typed from the ICANN registry agreements. This is the same spine the price index on this site is built on.
• “In use” means at least one origin in the CrUX top-origins list — 17,628,280 origins in total. 1,015 extensions clear it.
• What this is not. CrUX has a traffic floor. An extension with a handful of genuinely private sites would land here as “unused”, and a registered-but-parked name never appears at all. So this measures audience, not registrations — the two are different, and only one of them is usually published.