Choosing the Right Domain for Your AI Startup

AI is no longer science fiction. While the numbers involved in the AI ​​industry may seem like fiction – by 2024, major tech companies, like Alphabet, Meta and Amazon have invested over $200 billion in AI, and the market expected to exceed $400 billion by 2027 – artificial intelligence has arrived. with a bang with the launch of ChatGPT in 2022 and it hasn’t slowed down.

And it seems worth the investment. According to the Financial Times, AI companies now generate revenue faster than comparable non-AI technology companies. The growth of AI technology-based startups has created a competitive market, and with many of these brands offering a SaaS-style offering, domain names have become a critical asset for AI startups looking to stand out. As a result, there has been a surge of interest in .ai domain names. This national top-level domain, originating from the modest Caribbean territory of Anguilla, is now a valuable commodity, which raises the obvious question: Is a .ai TLD the best choice for forward-thinking AI startups?

The domain landscape for AI startups

.ai is now the second most popular domain extension among newly funded startups, with 7.6% choosing this area. As always, .com remains the most popular TLD with more than two-thirds of new startups opting for it, while 4.4% use .io.

With these statistics in mind, it’s no surprise that .com dominates among the most valuable AI companies: OpenAI.com, DataBricks.com, and UiPath.com are a few examples. On the other hand, x.ai, Character.ai, Perplexity.ai and Claude.ai provide high-profile examples of companies owning .ai domains.

It is worth noting that the .com domains chosen by the above AI success stories are largely compound names or non-English words, while many companies that succeed with a .ai domain use unique words in the language English, relevant to the industry or service.

Clearly, .ai domains offer many benefits to new startups, including greater availability and (in many cases) lower upfront costs than .com domains. They also offer a laser-focused brand identity, which can be a big plus if you’re actually launching an AI brand, but can cause problems in the long run if your startup diversifies or your use of AI is more of a background integration than a flagship product.

Our research on the evolution of .AI and .Com

To help AI startups make the right domain and branding decisions, we recently conducted a survey to determine public perception of credible domain names. To ensure that our respondents regularly interact with AI companies, we asked how often they use AI-based services: all respondents who responded to our survey answered “frequently” or “occasionally.” Here’s what we found:

1. .Com remains the strongest option, but .AI offers a branded shortcut

.com remains king among domain extensions, but .ai is growing in popularity and clearly differentiates your brand as AI-driven. Despite this, a majority of respondents still choose .com as their preferred extension for an AI brand. Among all of our respondents, AI.com was considered slightly stronger than .ai – for example, authorizedAI.com vs approved.ai – but this is not true for all demographics. For AI brands, .ai ranks ahead of .com among 18-24, and they are just as likely to favor approved.ai over authorizedAI.com. Continuing to prove itself, .ai now matches the well-established .net in credibility among many demographics, and is the obvious choice among tech-specific domains, ranking higher than .io and .tech. As always, brands need to understand their audience when choosing a domain, and if they are younger or more tech-savvy, then a .ai domain can be a very wise choice.

2. Extra words hurt credibility

When choosing a domain name, AI startups must balance competing criteria. Although .com remains the most successful TLD choice overall, the strongest name and domain combination will not always be available (or affordable) as a .com. We found that an AI company’s credibility was undermined for 96% of customers when a complementary word (other than AI) was used in the domain name. For example, getauthorized.com or authorizedapp.com for a startup called “Authorized”.

3. Simple English words or short-to-pronounce names provide credibility

Whether you’re looking for a .com or .ai domain, make sure what comes before the period is short, memorable, and ideally just one English word. There is consensus among investors that just one word in English increases your chances of receiving fundingwhich makes a .ai domain all the more attractive, as there is more single-word availability under this extension. For brands looking for a .com extension, our research into AI names and domains found that customers favor short, easy-to-pronounce words, exemplified by fast-growing AI startups like Suno and Glean.

Choosing the Right Domain for Your Goals

AI is an exceptionally competitive market in 2024 and, as in any competitive market, it can be difficult for AI companies to differentiate themselves from their competitors.

Unless you’re marketing to a very tech-savvy demographic, it’s hard to explain why your machine learning algorithms are superior to a competitor’s! Indeed, for many AI startups, their models may be identical to those of their competitors, especially if they are white-label third-party AI technologies. In these highly commodified markets, the strength of your name, domain name, and brand is especially important and among the first fundamental decisions you must make as a founder.

Currently, .ai domains remain easier to associate with single-word names than .coms. .Coms containing a single English word can fetch high seven-figure sums, while the largest publicly reported .ai sale to date was for you.ai. at $700,000. When looking for the best name possible, a .ai domain gives you more options if you want to invest in a strong exact match domain and have some remaining capital to get your business off the ground. However, if you decide to go with the almost universally trusted .com for a heavily AI-focused brand, but find a single-word .com out of reach, you might consider the .com usage model. OpenAI.com. AI.com as a practical and credible alternative. Data from our Marketplace shows that these domains have a lower average sale price than single English word .ai domains and, perhaps because of OpenAI’s ubiquity, many consumers trust them.

As always, you should carefully consider the future of not only your business, but the broader business landscape when choosing a domain. What appears to be a priority for AI today may well be standard integration in the future: with the proliferation of AI across industries, it may soon become an expected feature rather than a USP, making AI on your behalf or in a redundant .ai domain, unless you develop a unique AI. technologies.

Finally, when making this primary branding choice, it’s important to keep in mind that many domains are available through payment plans, potentially making a one-word .com domain more accessible than it is. does not appear there initially. Balance budget, brand and ambition, and choose an area that fits all three.