A ‘For Sale’ sign on your property: RFC 10023

Since July 2026, there has been a new way to make it clear that your domain name is for sale. And the great thing is: you don’t need a special website or landing page to do so.

I came across this today in a post on LinkedIn and it immediately caught my attention. This is exactly the sort of development I like to delve into.

RFC 10023 allows you to use DNS to indicate that your domain name is for sale, what the asking price is, and where interested parties can find further information.

You can do this simply by adding a number of TXT records under _for-sale.yourdomain.nl.

Anyone who’s reasonably familiar with DNS or the CLI can then easily retrieve that information using a dig command:

dig TXT _for-sale.hydraulisch.nl +short

AI agents

But the most interesting aspect is the AI agents.

More and more searches are being carried out by software and AI assistants. Suppose someone asks an AI agent to find a suitable domain name for a new business. That agent can now discover directly via DNS that a registered domain name is, in fact, for sale, including any asking price and sales link.

No sifting through HTML, no following redirects and no trying to identify sales pages. Just a DNS query.

And if you combine that with, say, MCP and automated payments, it suddenly becomes interesting. In theory, an AI agent could then not only identify that a domain name is for sale, but also, with the user’s consent, initiate the purchase process.

The larger providers, such as Atom and NameShift, are already using this. I tried it out myself today.

IsThatDomainForSale.com

Naturally, I then wanted to do something with it myself. So today I launched IsThatDomainForSale.com.

On this website, you can check whether a domain name is being offered for sale via RFC 10023, see what information has been published, and, if necessary, generate the required DNS records yourself.

As a test, I have added the new records to my own domain, hydraulisch.nl, including an asking price of €799.

Children’s shoes

It’s all still in its infancy, but I think it’s an interesting development. Especially as AI agents will soon be searching for domain names independently more and more often.

And actually, what I find particularly impressive is that something like this is simply handled via DNS. A technology that has formed the basis of the internet for decades has gained yet another interesting application.

I’m curious to hear what you think of this. Will we soon be selling domain names to AI agents rather than people?