Lieferando.de's Stealthy Acquisition of German Restaurant Domains

A data analyst scraped nearly 9 million .de domains from the Common Crawl project, filtering for approximately 30,000 related to German restaurants. A Golang program revealed that about 63% remained active. Surprisingly, around 5.7% (over 1100) of these active domains were 'captured' by Lieferando.de, displaying their logo and a link to their site, rather than redirecting. This suggests Lieferando.de employed this domain strategy before and after the pandemic, using a form of 'domain hijacking' for low-cost SEO and growth hacking. The large number of defunct restaurant domains also reflects the struggles of the German restaurant industry from 2019-2023.