DNS lookups doubled in two years. There are only 14% more domains.
The registries behind .com, .org and every other generic domain answered 856 billion queries a day in June 2026, up from 390 billion in June 2024. Verisign’s chief executive: “a good portion of that is due to AI.”
A snapshot to June 2026, from ICANN’s monthly registry reports, published 30 October 2026. Live figures, updated monthly →
Twice the DNS lookups, 14% more names
A .com name now draws 3,308 lookups a day
The four largest registries all doubled
Verisign, which runs .com and .net, went from 301 billion lookups a day to 661 billion while its domains grew 5%. Public Interest Registry (.org), Identity Digital and Google Registry grew faster still. Verisign told analysts on 22 October that it now averages about 800 billion queries a day across its own infrastructure (Q3 call).
Who is asking
The reports don’t say. The people closest to the traffic say AI.
- Jim Bidzos, Verisign’s chief executive, on 5 February: companies building AI models are “basically scraping the internet and collecting data. We see that in the increase in our queries.” Agents, he said, “are going to be using the DNS” too (transcript).
- Cloudflare counted “user action” crawling, the fetches an AI assistant makes when someone asks it a question, up more than 15-fold in 2025 (Radar 2025).
What it means for a name
More of the asking is done by AI tools. What those tools already know about a name decides whether it comes up when someone asks them for one.
Source: ICANN monthly registry activity reports, every gTLD, January 2019 to June 2026. Lookups: DNS queries received. Domains: names under management. Live figures: namedesk.app/stats/dns-queries.