Aged Domains and AI Search: The New Gold Rush for LLM Visibility with Alex Drew (James Dooley Interviews Alex Drew)

James Dooley: Why aged domains are a hot topic again in the age of AI. Today I'm joined with Alex Drew and obviously we've spoken off air quite a lot about aged domains and the roller coaster ride of people wanting them, people then not wanting them and now the LLMs are around and it's working so well. So can you just kind of explain a little bit about the aged domain marketplace and what's happening at present of why it is such a hot topic.

Alex Drew: I think it's not just hot. It's just getting started and that is even better than hot because hot is like the tipping point. Like it's trendy. It's just emerging and I've seen multiple people saying that influencing AI Overviews and not just Overviews, like being recommended, is the start of a multi-billion dollar industry, even much bigger than that. And I do agree. Now, when it comes to getting their data based on which, or retrieving data or getting the data on which they train on, they can't just observe newly created sites or sources with no authority. They have to look at something which has historical records and aged domains are a prime example of that. Obviously, um, if you'd ask me, like, what is better, um, a listicle or a guest post or brand recommendation on an established website that's been around for 20 years or a 20-years-old aged domain? I don't know. I'd say do both if you can because you need diversity in the first place. That, that's a good one from even from the good old days of SEO. However, I think with aged domains, it just gives them a slightly different perspective and I think it will become even more popular. Now, we can go into again, um, buying mentions on aged domains or building your own private networks of aged domains. I kind of recommend... I think both work, but it really depends on if you have the capabilities to run it and update them and set up them properly. But at the end of the day, it's just a breath of fresh air because just like SEO is dead, we've had the expired domains or aged domains or previously owned domains are dead. They're not. And all the tests we've did, we've done, and I assume, um, plenty other companies, even yours, have done, show that they work extremely well and that LLMs might not be that good at understanding the former topic of the aged domain as they perceive the authority of the aged domain and the history of the aged domain. In which case, if you place something on that aged domain, it will have much more weight than on a brand-new domain, for instance.

James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. I mean, obviously having an aged domain versus getting a fresh brand-new domain, you've already got some, probably got some branded signals, some branded search, some referring domains. So, you've got that power. So, it just gives you that head start right from the word go. Why? What are most people doing when they're looking to acquire these aged domains? What, what they're looking to do? Is it a mixture of all? Are they looking to build money sites on there? They're looking to build PBNs on there? What's the reason of them buying these aged domains from yourself? I know I'm using it maybe in different ways, but, like, just interested to see what the different mechanisms are that they might be wanting to buy these aged domains.

Alex Drew: Well, there have been trends and I like... You know me, I've been in these aged domains and we even attempted multiple joint ventures in the past and worked and, and you kind of bought a lot of aged domains even from us and from other places as well. There have been trends, uh, before the Helpful Content Update everyone was launching money sites. That was the highest return on investment method or that's business practice you could do. Just buy an aged domain, ideally somehow topically related to what you're putting on, but not necessarily, and then, you know, pushing as much content as you had, you, you could. Ideally if you knew your semantics and put on a topical map, you would rank even higher, better. But then it got killed because there was no brand to begin with. So you had more generic search queries than you had brand queries and you, you know what happened then. After the Helpful Content Update, kind of that chunk of the market kind of went away and we had a huge spike in iGaming, um, companies buying these aged domains for multiple reasons for, you know, canonical, 301 redirects, redirects, recovery, mirror sites, money sites, so forth and so on. And now we're seeing this LLM trend picking up again. Just the other day we had a handful of sales from someone and I, I've checked their profile. They, they, they're definitely not, not going to build content money sites on them. They're definitely not into iGaming. So most likely they're going to use them as setup perhaps to have third-party unrelated recommendations about their business, perhaps listicles or whatever works right now. So I think this will pick up and most people don't yet get, but we are at the beginning of a gold rush in, uh, aged domains. And the, the beautiful part is that I don't think the, the industry will ever stop, or at least anytime soon, because there are so many businesses and organisations that are just failing and someone has to do something with their websites or domains. And we're in a good position as marketers to take advantage of that.

James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. In a minute, I want to talk about the AI visibility and why the aged domains are working so, so well for seeding those LLMs and getting AI to recommend you. But prior to moving on to that, with regards to the aged domains, what should people be looking for with regards to what, what constitutes a good aged domain? So, I'm going to, I'm going to rhyme a few off and then you can decide to me what you think is good because I hear some people just by going off DR from Ahrefs. I hear some people going that they're looking at the Trust Flow and the Citation Flow on Majestic because they feel that the DR on Ahrefs can be easily manipulated. Some just say I just look at the raw referring domain count. Some say they look at old-school DA and PA from Moz. Some people look at how much traffic did it used to get. Some are trying to check out what the, how many branded searches the domain name gets. Some people are looking at, has it got a Google Business Profile maybe being attached to it. Some people are looking at the types of links. So that's the, the referring domain count, but does it have a Wikipedia page? Does it have Wikipedia backlinks? What would you be looking for that you would then go, wowzers, need to be getting that? What do you personally think is a good metric or metrics to be looking for that seem to perform well?

Alex Drew: Well, ideally... Well, all of those, from knowledge panels to the domain of the former business being perceived as an entity. You have a Google My Business with an active link pointing to the former website. You have branded searches. You have all the good stuff. It's indexed. Ideally, it even has a website on it, has, you know, good crawl budget and... But it might be an overkill. Sometimes you don't need all these. So, and sometimes the price of such domains, even if talking of auctions or maybe you can be lucky and drop catch it or someone can sell it to you, like a bankrupted business. So, but you might not need all that. You might need just one signal depending on what you actually do. And if all of these is kind of backed up by good metrics, then it's fine, but you might not need all of these. So, for instance, from an AI visibility point of view, I'd lean towards getting the former business to be some sort of entity and perceived as entity. I think that is the most important one. And then you, you could fake the traffic if you really want to because it's an entity. You're kind of searching the entity, right? Like CTR and all these things. But I don't want to go in deep into, into SEO or black hat SEO. For me, if Google, like, understands the former brand as an entity, has it somewhere in the Knowledge Graph, that is a huge win. There have been one website, one aged domain dominating in a very highly competitive iGaming market, which is bringing in almost a million a month in, in revenue for those keeping the number one spot. And all they had in comparison with all the other competitors was a Knowledge Graph. That was the only thing that they had and the links were relatively mediocre when they built more links. It didn't have prior traffic. It was even dropped. It actually went through the whole lifecycle and it dropped. So all this narrative, well, maybe it worked back in the days but now with Google becoming much better. I think that the, the corroboration with the fact that we kind of kept record of this and we perceive it as an entity which is connected with all the other things in our network gives it a huge boost. In other case, it could be a GMB, for instance.

James Dooley: Why do you think it's become such a hot topic to start acquiring aged domains again? It should have always been a hot topic, to be honest with you. Why do you think it's come back so much now and people seem to be less bothered about the backlinks from it and more about you mentioning there the entities? Do you feel that as markets have started to evolve more into understanding brand identity and knowledge panels and the power that they bring? So if you can get an aged domain that have got this straight away, it's great for money sites. Or it is because of the LLM seeding. It's that third-party corroborative source.

Alex Drew: Yeah, I think it's because of the LLM seeding and everything becoming very trendy. I think very few people go as deep as you do. So they do not have this, like, scientist tinfoil hat of, like, let me try things out. They're like, everyone else is doing it. Most likely this works because there are so many services selling it. So there is something to it. Let me try to do it in-house, buy aged domains to do it. So that is how I see, uh, things actually, um, moving. Regardless, very few people know what to look for when it comes to these domains, which is the problem. That's why I think, um, if you are buying it as a service, see if they're committing to results rather than the deliverables. The deliverables being, we're going to get you 10 listicles or five aged domains or whatever. Like, see if those, whatever they give you, can actually move the needle and get you the AI views or the mentions or the recommendation. I think that is very important. As for the depth of the problem and the subject of aged domain, I think very few people bother with it. They just got to invest in whatever makes sense. But why people buy it in the first place? Because they see as a, as a shortcut, just like with mentors. If I can spend, invest in 30 minutes one-on-one with you and pick your brain on something that will help me save one year or $1 million, I think that is a worthy conversation to be had. If I can have a 20, 30% success rate on buying 10 domains, launching 10 sites, and out of those 10 sites I can get, like, let's say 20, 30, 40, 50% success rate, I've already saved so much time on, on building things from scratch. But you, you need to have that mentality because I think most people fail with aged domains and we went very, very deep even from a Blue Ocean perspective on what aged domains are and who are the non-customers. We've identified a shitload of non-customers that nobody's even trying to sell to or educate on the subject because everyone thinks that they buy one domain, they launch a website or one-pager and they should be successful. It doesn't work that way, really.

James Dooley: Yeah. It might be not the right domain or it might not be the, the, the right sort of, like, matching between the previous topic and the new one. It might not be the right timing if you're going through a Google update, for instance. So there are many, many, many things. That's why the approach of, like, buying a handful and launching couple to identify the winners and scale, that will pay off for everything else. I think another thing as well with regards to why it's come back with a massive boom is how fast it is to be able to build out on the sites. Now, I think previously, like, people was like, it was quite daunting to buy 50 domains and then have a web designer come and create 50 websites, do all the content for those websites. Nowadays, it's just so simple with Claude Code. Claude Code, like, you could build them within a couple of hours. You could have them semantically relevant. You could have all the articles being written. You need to make certain you don't obviously get done by the scaled content abuse. So you need to stay below the threshold of what needs to be done. But you can be building up momentum, building lots of quality content, have sexy-looking websites. And I think that's another huge reason why aged domains have come back with a bang because now people can own these strategic assets to be able to position the brands on these third-party sources to basically recommend who they are.

Alex Drew: I agree. And it's the easiest thing to do because negotiating placements on third-party websites, like sort of like, or doing digital PR or any sort of PR where, like, you're being mentioned takes time. This is easy. If you can find the domains and you know what type of domains and what to actually do with them, ideally you need to have someone in charge of doing it or you can just hire or outsource it. But if you know what you're doing, this is the easiest thing. Gather sort of like... It's a, it's a no-brainer, literally. And it's like in terms of SEO, like if I were to compare SEO years, this would be like 2005 or six where you would just buy 10 domains, place 10 links, and rank number one in Google for almost any term. And I, I think it's the exact same case right now with, with aged domains and getting into AI views or AI to recommend you.

James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. Anyone who's watching this, if you're not using aged domains, it's working like gangbusters. It's working so, so well. Like you said there, if you're getting multiple domains that can build that third-party corroboration, consensus is key. Consensus is the new kind of backlink kind of methodology, the new PageRank. Build that consensus. Get your brands being cited by ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews and in AI Mode. Them three, in my opinion, are the main three LLM models that's helping to cite your brand and get those enquiries or get those sales. I think it's huge. Alex, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you very much.

Alex Drew: Thank you, James. Cheers.