Defaults.Exposed › Reports

IPv6-Only Domains: 80,737 Sites Living Without IPv4

Published 2026-08-18

Figures as of 2026-08-16 · methodology v9. This is a recurring report; each edition re-measures the same population so the numbers can be tracked over time. All figures are aggregate — we never publish an individual business’s grade or name an individual registrant’s domain.

The headline: one domain in 3,440 has cut the IPv4 cord

Out of 376,928,781 graded domains in our August 2026 census, exactly 80,737 publish an IPv6 address at the apex and no IPv4 address at all — 0.021% of the graded internet, or roughly one domain in 4,668.

That number deserves a moment. IPv6 has been a standard since 1998 (industry knowledge: RFC 2460, superseded by RFC 8200 in 2017). The last big regional pool of fresh IPv4 addresses in Europe ran dry in late 2019, and IPv4 space has traded on a secondary market ever since. After a quarter century of “IPv4 is running out,” the population of domains that have actually stopped publishing an IPv4 address would fit inside a mid-sized football stadium.

And here is the twist the adoption headlines skip: IPv6 presence is not rare at all. 67.4 million graded domains — 17.9% — publish an AAAA record. They just keep the A record too. IPv6 rides shotgun on much of the connected web. The domains where it drives alone are a rounding error on a rounding error.

Key numbers

• 80,737 graded domains are IPv6-only — an AAAA record at the apex with no A record (August 2026 census, methodology v9).
• That is 0.021% of 376,928,781 graded domains — about one in every 4,668.
• 67,375,975 graded domains (17.9%) publish an AAAA record at all — so among domains that have IPv6, only about one in 834 (0.12%) has dropped IPv4.
• IPv6 presence varies wildly by TLD: 64.7% of graded .digital domains have an AAAA record versus 5.2% of .jp.
• .nl leads the large ccTLDs at 55.9% AAAA coverage across 3.08 million graded domains; .com sits at 20.4%.

What counts as “IPv6-only” here?

The definition is narrow and worth stating exactly, because it drives everything below.

A domain lands in this cohort when our census finds an AAAA record (an IPv6 address) at the domain apex — the bare name, no www — and no A record (no IPv4 address) at that same apex. The domain was otherwise alive enough to grade: working delegation, answering nameservers.

Two things this definition does not capture. First, subdomains: a domain can be IPv4-less at the apex while www, mail, or api still carry A records, and the reverse is equally possible. We measured the apex; the www host may differ, and for some of these domains it will. Second, intent: DNS records don’t announce why they exist. This cohort is a mix of deliberate IPv6-only pioneers, cloud setups where the apex is v6-native by design, and — inevitably — domains where someone deleted an A record and never noticed. The census can count the cohort precisely; it cannot read minds.

So treat 80,737 as what it is: the population of graded apexes reachable by address record over IPv6 and nothing else. Some of that is the future arriving early. Some of it is a typo.

How rare is 0.029%, really?

Rare enough that almost any comparison flatters it.

Within our own census, the top of the grade curve is famously thin — and the IPv6-only cohort is thinner still than most elite groups we track. For every domain that has gone IPv6-only, there are about 4,668 that haven’t. For every IPv6-capable domain that dropped IPv4, 833 kept it.

That second ratio is the interesting one. The first ratio could be explained by ignorance: most domain owners have never heard of an AAAA record, so of course they haven’t gone v6-only. But the 67.4 million domains that already publish AAAA records are, by definition, run by people or platforms that got IPv6 working. They did the hard part. And 99.88% of them still won’t let go of the IPv4 address. That is not an awareness gap. That is a judgement — shared by nearly everyone who has actually deployed IPv6 — that the IPv4-less web is not yet safe to inhabit.

They’re probably right, for now. Client-side IPv6 has grown enormously (industry knowledge: Google’s public measurements have hovered around 45% of its users reaching it over IPv6 in recent years), but that still leaves a large share of the world’s eyeballs — and a long tail of corporate networks, older ISPs, and monitoring systems — that can only speak IPv4. An IPv6-only apex is invisible to all of them unless a translation layer sits in front of it. Dual stack is the web’s insurance policy, and almost nobody has cancelled it.

Where does IPv6 adoption actually stand?

Presence first, then the drop-IPv4 question. AAAA coverage across the graded census is 17.9%, but that average hides a spread from “majority” to “barely started” depending on where a domain is registered. The gradient mostly tracks hosting infrastructure: TLDs dominated by a few large registrars and hosting platforms inherit whatever those platforms do by default.

Read the extremes. A graded .nl domain is more than ten times as likely to have an IPv6 address as a graded .jp domain — 55.9% against 5.2% — which has far more to do with the default behaviour of Dutch hosting providers than with any national enthusiasm gap. .digital and .click sit at the top because their registrations concentrate on modern platforms that ship AAAA records automatically. Meanwhile .com, the giant that anchors every global average, sits at 20.4% — which is why quoting any single worldwide IPv6 figure without naming the population is close to meaningless.

The lesson repeats across our census: infrastructure decisions made by a handful of large hosts move these numbers far more than millions of individual choices do. When a big platform turns on AAAA records by default, a TLD’s adoption curve jumps. Nobody’s platform, so far, has dared to turn off A records by default. That is the missing jump — and it is why the IPv6-only cohort is 80,737 rather than 8 million.

Is an IPv4-less website viable in 2026?

Technically, yes, with an asterisk the size of the IPv4 internet.

An IPv6-only apex works perfectly for every visitor whose network speaks IPv6 end to end. For everyone else it simply does not exist: the browser asks for an address it can use, gets nothing, and fails. The practical workarounds are all flavours of the same idea — put something dual-stacked in front. A CDN or reverse proxy that listens on both protocols can front an IPv6-only origin, and in that architecture the origin being IPv4-less is invisible to the public and genuinely sensible: origin servers don’t need scarce IPv4 addresses if only the edge is public-facing. (That pattern would not appear in our cohort, though — the public-facing edge would still publish an A record. Our 80,737 are IPv4-less at the published apex itself.)

Which is what makes this cohort a useful early signal rather than a curiosity. The economics point one way: IPv4 addresses cost real money on the transfer market while IPv6 space is effectively free (industry knowledge — price levels vary; the census carries no pricing data). Every year the cost of insisting on a public IPv4 address per site gets a little harder to justify, and client-side IPv6 keeps climbing. The 80,737 are, in effect, running the experiment for everyone else: publishing to the IPv6 internet alone and accepting the missing audience. When that number starts doubling census over census, the transition will finally be doing the thing it has spent 25 years not doing. This edition’s job is to put the baseline on record.

For a working domain owner in 2026, though, the practical guidance stays boring: dual stack. Add the AAAA record — 82.1% of graded domains still haven’t — and keep the A record. You join the 17.9% who are ready for the IPv6 internet without going dark for the IPv4 one.

How we measured this

• Population and denominator: 376,928,781 graded domains from the August 2026 census round (figures as of 2026-08-16, methodology v9). This is the graded-rows basis used in our score histograms; it contains roughly 0.05% re-scan duplicates, immaterial at this scale. All percentages in this article use this denominator unless a table states its own.
• IPv6-only definition: an AAAA record present at the domain apex with no A record at the same apex, on a domain that was otherwise alive enough to grade. Count: 80,737.
• Apex only. We measured address records at the bare domain. Subdomains — including www — may publish different records; a domain can be IPv4-less at the apex and dual-stacked at www, or vice versa. The cohort should not be read as “80,737 fully IPv4-free websites.”
• Presence, not intent. DNS cannot distinguish a deliberate IPv6-only deployment from an accidentally deleted A record. The cohort contains both.
• AAAA coverage figures (67,375,975 domains; per-TLD table) count the presence of an AAAA record among graded domains per TLD, derived from raw record data — not from any check’s pass/fail status, which follows different rules.
• Vantage: measurements taken from our EU-based census infrastructure during the August 2026 round. DNS answers can vary by resolver and time; figures are point-in-time.
• Industry context is labelled. RFC dates, IPv4 exhaustion history, market pricing, and client-side adoption levels are public industry knowledge, not census measurements, and are marked as such where they appear.
• Aggregate only. We report counts and shares at TLD level and above. We never name, grade, or publish data about an individual registrant’s domain.
• Data is stored and processed within the EU.

FAQ

How many websites are IPv6-only? In our August 2026 census, 80,737 out of 376,928,781 graded domains published an IPv6 address (AAAA record) at the apex with no IPv4 address — 0.021%, or about one in 4,668. The true number of fully IPv6-only websites is fuzzier, since we measured the apex and a www subdomain can carry different records.

What percentage of domains support IPv6 at all? 17.9% of graded domains — 67,375,975 of 376.9 million — published an AAAA record at the apex as of 2026-08-16. Coverage ranges from 64.7% in .digital and 55.9% in .nl down to 5.2% in .jp, driven mostly by what large hosting platforms enable by default.

Can I make my website IPv6-only? You can, and it will work flawlessly for IPv6-connected visitors — and not at all for IPv4-only ones, who still represent a large share of global traffic (industry knowledge: roughly half of Google’s users, on its public measurements, still reach it over IPv4). Unless a dual-stacked CDN or proxy fronts your site, IPv6-only means accepting that missing audience. For almost everyone, dual stack is the right answer.

Does having an IPv6 address improve my security grade? IPv6 support is one of the 34 externally observable checks in our methodology, and under the v8 no-data rule a missing record is handled as not-applicable rather than an automatic failure where the check doesn’t apply. More broadly, an AAAA record signals a maintained, modern DNS setup — and in our data, maintenance is what separates grade bands far more than any single record.

Why do so few IPv6-capable domains drop IPv4? Because dropping it costs audience and saves little. Among the 67.4 million domains that already publish AAAA records, only about one in 834 has removed its A record. Keeping IPv4 preserves reachability for every visitor; removing it currently benefits almost no one except operators paying for scarce IPv4 space at the origin — and those tend to hide behind dual-stacked edges anyway.

What This Means

For IT managers and infrastructure teams, the 82.1% of graded domains that still have no AAAA record at all is the more immediately actionable number. Adding IPv6 support to a modern domain typically takes minutes — most hosting platforms and CDNs enable it with a toggle or automatically provision AAAA records. There is no security downside to adding it while keeping your IPv4 address, and there is a growing reachability benefit as client-side IPv6 adoption continues rising. The question is not whether to add IPv6; it is whether you have a reason not to have done it yet.

The TLD variation data has a practical use for anyone assessing hosting provider decisions. The gap between .nl at 55.9% AAAA coverage and .jp at 5.2% is almost entirely a function of what hosting providers in those markets enable by default, not what individual operators chose. If your organisation’s domains are hosted on a platform that does not enable IPv6 by default, you are inheriting that platform’s inertia. It is worth checking whether your provider supports IPv6 and whether you need to enable it manually.

For the 80,737 IPv6-only domains in this census, the risk is real but narrow: you are invisible to any client or monitoring system that cannot speak IPv6. Corporate network monitoring, legacy security tools, and some ISPs still route IPv4-only. If your domain is IPv6-only at the apex and you have not verified that a dual-stacked CDN fronts it, there is a non-trivial chance that some of your own security tooling cannot reach it.

Data to Cite

• “Only 80,737 of 376,928,781 graded domains publish an IPv6 address with no IPv4 address — 0.021% of the measured internet, roughly one in 4,668.” — defaults.exposed August 2026 Domain Security Census (432M domains)
• “17.9% of graded domains — 67,375,975 — publish an AAAA record at all, but 99.88% of those IPv6-capable domains keep their IPv4 address alongside it.” — defaults.exposed August 2026 Domain Security Census (432M domains)
• “Among domains that already publish IPv6, only one in 834 has dropped IPv4 — a judgment shared by nearly everyone who has deployed IPv6 that the IPv4-less web is not yet safe to inhabit.” — defaults.exposed August 2026 Domain Security Census (432M domains)
• “.nl leads large ccTLDs with 55.9% AAAA coverage across 3.08 million graded domains, versus 5.2% in .jp and 20.4% in .com.” — defaults.exposed August 2026 Domain Security Census (432M domains)
• “82.1% of graded domains still publish no AAAA record — adding IPv6 while keeping IPv4 is the practical recommendation for almost every domain operator.” — defaults.exposed August 2026 Domain Security Census (432M domains)
• “The IPv6-only cohort of 80,737 domains is thinner than almost any elite group in the census — smaller than the population of domains earning a B grade or better.” — defaults.exposed August 2026 Domain Security Census (432M domains)

See where your own domain stands

Whether you’re dual-stacked, IPv4-only, or one of the 80,737, your domain’s security posture is measurable from the outside — and most of what failing domains are missing is free and quick to fix. The barrier is almost never cost; it’s that nobody told the owner it mattered. You can check your domain privately and free, and see exactly which of the 34 checks you pass.

Check your domain →

Read the adoption piece: The State of IPv6 2026 →

Related reading: The Internet Security Grade Curve · The Best TLDs for Domain Security

Aggregate data only. Data stored and processed in the EU.

Check your domain free at defaults.exposed — see your domain’s full DNS and security posture, including whether you have IPv6 configured and how it affects your overall security grade. Takes 30 seconds. No account needed.

How to cite this report

Press / blog: defaults.exposed (2026). IPv6-Only Domains: 80,737 Sites Living Without IPv4. defaults.exposed August 2026 Domain Security Census (432,127,908 domains scanned, asOf 2026-08-16). Retrieved from https://defaults.exposed/en/articles/ipv6-only-domains

Academic: defaults.exposed. (2026, August 18). IPv6-Only Domains: 80,737 Sites Living Without IPv4. In defaults.exposed Domain Security Census: August 2026. https://defaults.exposed/en/articles/ipv6-only-domains

In-line citation: (defaults.exposed, August 2026 Domain Security Census, n=376,928,781)

About the defaults.exposed August 2026 Census

The defaults.exposed Domain Security Census is a recurring independent measurement of the public domain namespace. The August 2026 edition scanned 432,127,908 domains between 1–16 August 2026 and graded 376,928,781 of them using methodology v9. Scans are conducted from EU infrastructure. No individual domain, registrant, or business is named in any report. All figures are aggregate distributions. Data is stored and processed within the EU.

Methodology: defaults.exposed/en/articles/domain-security-scoring-methodology-v9 Full census report: defaults.exposed/en/articles/the-state-of-domain-security-2026