That's interesting, and I wish the author would've dug into that more. The claim is that people were typing .com when searching for them, but a search would've resulted in a search page, not direct traffic.

As far as direct traffic, they migrated to .com on 1/15/23, at which point supertokens.com already had 1,473 referring domains and 16.6K backlinks. I think it's more likely that the traffic they saw was the result of that instead of people typing the exact domain name (which is relatively rare).

I'd also submit that this is the story as told by their agency, who probably also told them to write this content marketing piece based on that explanation.

The claim is that we saw traffic patterns on the .com mirror that of the .io even though nothing was on it yet and we had not migrated.

Our inference or best guess based on the above is that people were typing supertokens.com directly in the URL bar on the browser. Like you said - I would not have expected that (and still doubt it) but dont have any alternative explanations for why that would be the case.

Our agency doesnt know we've even written this. I still need to share it with them.

Not being into web development at all, how can you see "traffic patterns" for a domain you do not own or control?

I assume there is inevitably a period of time during which you own the domain, but haven't migrated yet.

Or typing "supertokens"<ctrl+enter>