Prior to the start of the build-up to the holiday shopping period, we conduct an 'out-of-season' analysis of the current state of the landscape relating to Black Friday domains. The research follows on from SnapDragon's 2025 overview of brand protection threats associated with the Black Friday season, and serves as a start point for ongoing analyses as the 2026 period moves closer.
The history of registration activity for domain names connected to Black Friday unsurprisingly shows a strong annual cycle, peaking in Q4 of each year. As of June 2026, a pre-existing 'baseline' of around 4,100 such domains were found to be registered. The domains encompass a range of naming patterns and styles, with significant numbers featuring additional keywords explicitly relating to e-commerce or special offers, specific product types, or explicitly targeting particular country markets. Around half of the domains were found to feature live associated websites - comprising a range of content types including active e-commerce or the promotion of other product and service areas, such as payday loans, cryptocurrency and gambling. Over one in three of the domains in the dataset also have active e-mail functionality, and the registrations cover a wide range of domain extensions (TLDs), including significant numbers hosted on higher-risk TLDs.
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Following SnapDragon's 2025 overview of brand protection threats associated with Black Friday and the holiday shopping period[1], and in advance of the build-up to this year's season, we have investigated the related domain name landscape, in order to gain an overview of the current scale of potential infringement risks (and to serve as a start point for ongoing analysis this year).
Black Friday - the day after the US Thanksgiving holiday, which falls on the fourth Thursday of November - has become increasingly popular for holiday shopping (and associated promotions) in recent years. Accordingly, as a result of this heightened awareness, it has in parallel also been hijacked by bad actors to drive consumers to their own online material, with the intention of selling counterfeit or otherwise infringing goods, or promoting other damaging content.
As has been noted in a number of previous studies[2,3,4,5], levels of elevated activity of this type are often reflected in patterns of related domain registrations. As an illustration of how this trend has continued to the current time, it is instructive to consider the dataset of domains with names containing 'black(-)friday' (i.e. with an optional hyphen) which are currently registered. This analysis was carried out using data from domain zone-files, giving comprehensive coverage across all gTLD (generic top-level domain) extensions.
As of June 2026, there were around 4,100 such domains. Excluding the approximately 300 which are most likely to be legitimate registrations by brand owners (on the basis of the explicit use of a corporate domain name registrar), Figure 1 shows the registration history of the remaining 3,800, grouped by their original month of registration.
Figure 1: Numbers of registered gTLD domains with names containing 'black(-)friday', by original month of registration (from 2001 to 2026)
The figures show a striking annual cycle, with numbers of registrations (unsurprisingly) peaking markedly in the fourth quarter (Oct - Dec) of each year (i.e. centred on the Black Friday period). A subsequent search in September showed that this figure had already grown to 5,453 registered 'black(-)friday' domains, an increase of 32% in 15 weeks.
In addition, there is some suggestion in an overall growth of levels of activity over time, although this may in part be an artefact caused by the fact that the analysis considers only those domains which are currently still registered, and will therefore exclude any historical registrations which were registered but have subsequently lapsed - i.e. the (potentially large numbers of) examples which may have been registered for just a short period (of, say, a year) and intended only for use in a particular individual season.
It is also instructive to look for other trends and patterns in the set of approximately 3,800 Black Friday domains of potential interest or concern. The first observation is that relatively few of these domain names themselves as explicitly brand-specific. For example, only nine of the domains (0.2% of the total) include the name of any of the top ten global luxury brands[6], and only a further 22 (0.6%) feature the name of any of the top ten global retail brands[7]. The conclusion is therefore that - even where specific brands are being targeted through the use of infringing websites - the registration of generic Black-Friday-related domain names is a much more popular tactic by bad actors. (This is despite the fact that some brand owners - notably including (from the sub-dataset of approximately 300 probably legitimate domains) Beats (with 91 registrations) and Lululemon (23) - have taken the proactive approach of registering portfolios of brand-specific domains defensively, to prevent their potential registration and use by bad actors.)
Indeed, the dataset of general Black Friday domain registrations is dominated by examples containing generic e-commerce terms ('shop', 'sale', 'outlet', etc.) or keywords relating to special offers ('deals', 'vouchers', 'coupons', 'giftcards', etc.), references to specific product types ('clothing', 'watches', 'tablets', etc.), or country names. These types of names are more amenable to a wider range of uses by bad actors, including websites targeting either single ('mono-brand') or multiple ('multi-brand') brands, or promoting other types of products or services - in addition, of course, to the potentially large numbers of sites associated with legitimate brand promotions by official parties.
Other general observations from the data include the facts that:
- 1,934 of the domains (50.9%) return a live website response (i.e. some sort of active content)
- 1,415 (37.2%) have active MX (mail exchange) records, indicating that they have been configured to be able to send and receive e-mails and - even in the absence of any associated live website - could be associated with active e-mail or phishing campaigns
- The top ten domain extensions (TLDs) represented in the dataset are: com (2,738 domains), shop (171), net (137), info (102), org (98), xyz (54), world (36), sbs (34), click (30), store (26). Whilst the presence of some of these extensions in the list is unsurprising, in view of the large numbers of domains they host generally (such as .com and .net), or their clear relevance to e-commerce (.shop and .store), others are more noteworthy - particularly some of the new-gTLDs in the list such as .xyz, .world, .sbs and .click - many of which have been previously noted as being disproportionately frequently associated with infringing activity[8,9,10].
Amongst the live domains, a range of content types were identified. Examples include sites promoting sales across multiple brands or platforms, or featuring material relating to any of a diverse range of other products or service types, including payday loans (a trend previously noted in 2024), cryptocurrency and gambling. Examples of some of these sites are shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2: Examples of live websites associated with Black Friday domains
These observations highlight the scale of the pre-existing Black Friday domain and website landscape even outside the holiday shopping season, at a point where numbers are only set to grow as the year continues. Many of the identified infringements utilise generic, rather than brand-specific domain names, highlighting the need for a flexible monitoring approach rather than the use of exact-brand matching.
Additionally, of course, domain names comprise only one specific content type in an online environment where activity is becoming ever more increasingly interconnected across channels. This is especially true in the e-commerce sphere, where alternative areas such as short-form video content and messaging apps are becoming ever more relevant.
Overall, these trends, coupled with the observed range of types of content of particular concern, provide compelling illustrations of the importance of proactive monitoring and enforcement by brand owners – particularly at times of heightened activity. However, the substantial scale of the risk even out-of-season shows that brand protection should be treated as an ongoing requirement, rather than just being considered a short-term campaign issue. For programmes to be truly effective, brand owners must also be mindful of the importance of a joined-up approach, with collaboration between multiple teams, including marketing, legal, digital, and security.
References
[1] https://snapdragon-ip.com/black-friday-brand-protection-guide-resource/
[2] https://www.cscdigitalbrand.services/blog/how-will-black-friday-ecommerce-domains-trend/ (2020)
[3] https://www.cscdigitalbrand.services/blog/holiday-shopping-events-part-2/ (2020)
[6] https://www.kantar.com/campaigns/brandz/global
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_retail_companies
[8] 'Patterns in Brand Monitoring' (D.N. Barnett, Business Expert Press, 2025), Chapter 5: 'Prioritization criteria for specific types of content'
[10] https://circleid.com/posts/20230117-the-highest-threat-tlds-part-2
This article was first published on 15 September 2026 at:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/black-friday-domains-why-brands-should-preparing-etgtf/
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