For a webmaster, an old domain can look inactive and still be doing something useful. It might be handling a redirect, an old email address, a landing page, or an account that nobody remembered was still tied to it. An automated review can flag a domain as weak, but "not valuable" and "not used" are not always the same thing. Would you let AI decide a domain is safe to expire without a manual check?
No, relying completely on artificial intelligence to decide if a domain is safe to expire creates serious financial and security risks for website owners.
AI will never know everything. My domain is pretty much abandoned. I keep the blog up because I have content in there showcasing a NZ scammer and I don't want to take the digital spotlight off him. He's since been in very real trouble with the police, so maybe my stuff might not be necessary. What AI won't see is that the domain is tied to my Apple account and my email is the recovery email for many websites.
Paying one extra renewal is annoying, but losing the wrong domain can be much harder to fix. Yeah, that Apple recovery detail is exactly the kind of thing a spreadsheet will not show. A domain can look dead and still be holding one important door open.
nicenic's framing is the right one: "not valuable" and "not used" are different categories, and AI can only score the first. I agree with Peter Reinhard that a full auto-decide creates security gaps — and sarahk's Apple recovery example is the case in point, since no traffic-based model will ever see it. The part I'd add is the order of operations: renew first, investigate second. The cost asymmetry nicenic mentioned is real — one more year of registration is cheap, while re-acquiring a dropped name is sometimes impossible. I hold some names on newer extensions where renewal pricing is all over the map, so once a year I do a manual pass before deciding: MX records (is any mailbox on this domain still receiving mail?), any account recovery addresses tied to it, and anything odd still sitting in DNS that I forgot about. Only if all three are clean does it go. AI can do the scoring pass, but the final call stays human.
I guess where AI could be useful is for the guys who buy thousands of domains and have wholesale rates to renew them. I had a domain seller email me years ago about a hyper-niche name I could’ve used for link building. I was literally his only potential buyer, which was proven when we spent years going back and forth - me offering double the (retail) registration cost as a courtesy, and him holding out for thousands. An actual person was reading those emails back then! By year two, they should have either written me off as a lost cause or taken the easy win to dump a domain that was otherwise completely worthless to them. I think AI would have pointed that out.