Valor Web

Valor Web estimates what a website or a domain is worth. Type a domain and it returns a price, and below the price, the whole sum that produced it, so anyone can see where the number comes from and disagree with a specific step instead of with a black box.

How a website gets a price

The chain is the one a buyer would follow, done with public data:

1. Popularity: the domain's position in the Tranco list and the Chrome UX Report rankings.
2. Visits: the position becomes estimated monthly visits through a power-law curve fitted on published traffic studies.
3. Revenue: visits become potential display advertising revenue, with a different rate per country tier of the audience.
4. Price: profit times a market multiple, adjusted by authority, age, brand and security, with a range that widens when the data is thin.

Everything is deterministic and auditable: the same signals always give the same price, and the formula's constants live in one config file with their source next to each one.

Life after Alexa

The first version, written in 2019, leaned on Alexa ranks like most tools of its kind. When Amazon shut Alexa down in 2022 every figure went stale. The 2026 rebuild replaces each signal with a source that is still alive:

• Authority from the Common Crawl web graph: 133 million domains ranked by harmonic centrality, kept in a SQLite file of its own and rebuilt every month.
• Age from RDAP, falling back to the Wayback Machine where a registry has no RDAP.
• Security from Google Web Risk and Cloudflare's filtering resolvers.
• Server location from DB-IP, and brand from Wikidata.

None of them contacts the website being valued. A domain someone types can be malicious, so every signal comes from a third party and the site itself is never fetched.

Selling a website

Owners can list a website for sale once they prove control of its domain with a DNS TXT record, which is checked again every day: if it disappears, the listing is suspended. Buyers and sellers talk in threads attached to each listing, with blocking and scam reports. Valor Web never touches the money: no escrow and no commission.

How it is built

The 2026 version is a Laravel 13 application on PHP 8.4, rendered on the server with Blade, Tailwind CSS 4 and a little Alpine. There is no single-page front end: every valuation page is plain HTML that search engines can read, which is where most of the traffic comes from.

Valuations never run inside a request. Typing a domain queues a job and shows a loading page that polls until the price is ready. Fast sources (DNS, rankings, RDAP, security, geolocation, Wikidata) answer in the first pass and publish the price; slow ones (the Wayback Machine, the Common Crawl index) are enriched later on a queue of their own and the price is recalculated from the stored signals, without touching the network again. Every source has its own rate limit, shared across workers, so a bulk recalculation of 15,700 websites waits its turn instead of getting the server banned.

The link graph is a second database. Common Crawl publishes the ranking of 133 million domains as a 9 GB text file. Loading it into MySQL was not an option, so it lives in a single SQLite file next to the application, read through its own Laravel connection: one lookup reads a handful of B-tree pages, about a quarter of a millisecond, with no memory to speak of. A scheduled command checks every month for a new release, downloads it, sorts it with sort and inserts it in key order, which takes ten minutes instead of hours, and swaps the file in with a rename so nobody ever reads a half-built graph.

Nothing reaches the website being valued. Before any lookup, the domain is screened through Cloudflare's malware and family resolvers over DNS-over-HTTPS; adult, pirate and malicious domains are refused and their pages answer 410. Ownership for the marketplace is proven only through DNS, so the seller's site is never downloaded either.

Sign-in has no passwords. An email address, a six-digit code sent to it and Cloudflare Turnstile through Laracaptcha. Codes are stored hashed and limited per address, per day and per failed attempt.

Several of my packages do the rest. Larablog serves the blog from Markdown files, about forty long-form articles on how websites are valued, published on a schedule. Laracards draws the social cards: one per website at the same URL the old site used, so years of shared links still show an image, and one per article.

Migrating the old site

The rebuild replaced a Yii 1 application that had stopped working when its APIs closed. Its database held 16,000 websites. Each one was imported with its original date, its old figures kept apart as history and used only where no current signal exists, and then recalculated from scratch. Every public URL of the old site still answers with the same path, including the pagination and the numbered sitemaps, so nothing that search engines had indexed was lost along the way.

Status

Online since 2019. The rebuild kept every public URL of the old site, so nothing indexed was lost, and around 15,700 websites carry a current valuation.