A domain can now say it is for sale, in DNS
A new DNS record type, _for-sale, allows domain owners to indicate that their domain is for sale without taking the site down or parking it. This record is published as a TXT record at _for-sale.example.com and can include information such as the asking price and contact details. The record is designed to work while the domain is still in active use and is intended for brokers and automated availability services rather than the general public.
- ▪The _for-sale DNS record is defined by RFC 10023 and registered with IANA.
- ▪The record can include a version tag, free human-readable text, contact or information URI, asking price, and proprietary code.
- ▪The record is designed to work beside a live site in DNS and does not affect the site's functionality.
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Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | The Website Specification |
| Canonical URL | https://specification.website/spec/foundations/for-sale-dns/ |
| Publication time | Sat, 08 Aug 2026 13:26:51 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-08T14:25:41.764Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-08T14:25:41.764Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | pzbnqr3WzqAl · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Home/Spec/Foundations/_for-sale DNS recordsFoundationsOptionalUpdated 2026-08-08_for-sale DNS recordsIf a domain is genuinely for sale, say so in DNS. A TXT record at _for-sale.example.com advertises it to brokers and availability services without taking the site down or parking it.What it is _for-sale is a reserved DNS leaf node name, defined by RFC 10023 (Informational, July 2026) and registered with IANA. A TXT record published at _for-sale.example.com signals that example.com, although registered and resolving normally, is available for purchase. _for-sale IN TXT "v=FORSALE1;furi=https://example.com/for-sale" The record carries a mandatory version tag followed by at most one tag=value pair: Tag Meaning Example ftxt= Free human-readable text ftxt=Eligibility criteria apply.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Website Specification.
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