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We checked 3 million new domains: only about 1 in 200 is really about AI
Written by Steven White ·
About 5% of newly registered domain names contain the letters "ai", but most of them have nothing to do with artificial intelligence. Of the 3,014,445 names that appeared in 808 domain zone files in the week ending 21 October 2026, 139,357 contained "ai", yet only 12,378 (0.41%) were explicit references to AI and another 5,607 (0.19%) were likely ones. Over the latest month the explicit share was 0.50%: about 1 in 200 new domains is really about AI.
The rest are ordinary words such as mail, detail and hair, place names such as Dubai and Shanghai, and Chinese pinyin, where ài (爱) means "love". If you are naming an AI product, the practical part is at the end; you can also check a name right now with our domain search.
Data: domains-monitor.com zone lists, analysis by Register.Domains. Data as of 21 October 2026.
The naive count and the honest count
Counting every new name that contains "ai" gives a stable figure of roughly 5%, whichever period you pick. Separating names that actually refer to AI from accidental matches brings it down by a factor of about ten.
| Period (to 21 Oct 2026) | New names observed | Contain "ai" | Explicit AI names | Explicit + likely |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| One day (21 October) | 217,271 | 10,897 (5.0%) | 1,146 (0.53%) | 1,670 (0.77%) |
| One week | 3,014,445 | 139,357 (4.6%) | 12,378 (0.41%) | 17,985 (0.60%) |
| Latest monthly list | 11,539,644 | 549,606 (4.8%) | 58,199 (0.50%) | 82,746 (0.72%) |
In plain numbers: the substring count suggests about 1 in 20 new domains is "AI". The explicit count says between about 1 in 240 and 1 in 190, depending on the period.
Where 139,357 "ai" matches come from
We sorted every weekly match into four groups, based on whether the letters "ai" stand for artificial intelligence or are just part of another word.
| Group | What it means | Names (week) | Share of "ai" matches | Share of all new names |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Explicit | "ai" on its own or joined to dictionary words, e.g. ailaw.dev, aivoicecraft.com, softwarelabai.com | 12,378 | 8.9% | 0.41% |
| Likely | "ai" joined to a coined word or brand-like string | 5,607 | 4.0% | 0.19% |
| Ambiguous | Cannot be decided from the name: initials, personal names, other languages | 34,463 | 24.7% | 1.14% |
| False match | "ai" inside an English word or a Chinese pinyin syllable | 86,909 | 62.4% | 2.88% |
| Total | 139,357 | 100% | 4.62% |
Six in ten matches are plainly not about AI. English is full of "ai": mail, email, detail, hair, train, paint, gain, maintenance, repair. Mandarin adds a second large source: in pinyin, the romanised spelling of Chinese, ai is a syllable of its own and the ending of many others (hai, tai, mai, cai, lai), so Chinese-language names produce "ai" constantly.
We checked the checker
An automatic classifier makes its own mistakes, so we reviewed 60 names from each group by hand.
| Group | Reviewed | Clearly about AI | Not about AI | Unclear |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Explicit | 60 | 45 | 7 | 8 |
| Likely | 60 | 14 | 23 | 23 |
| Ambiguous | 60 | 4 | 48 | 8 |
| False match | 60 | 0 | 58 | 2 |
Even the "explicit" group had errors: a city name ending in "ai" read as a word plus "ai", personal names, a Vietnamese phrase, and an internationalised (non-Latin) name whose ASCII encoding happens to contain "ai". Applying these rates to the whole week puts names really about AI between about 12,900 and 24,200, or 0.43% to 0.80% of all new names. The samples are small, so read this as a range check rather than a precise rate. Both ends stay under 1%, and the middle of the range is close to 1 in 200.
Brand + "ai" beats "ai" + brand
Among the 12,378 explicit AI names of the week:
- 53.7% put "ai" at the end (brand + ai), like softwarelabai.com.
- 40.8% put it at the start (ai + word), like aivoicecraft.com.
- 5.5% have it in the middle, like inboxforai.com.
- 26.7% use a hyphen, and the median name is 11 characters long before the extension.
Which extensions AI names land on
Explicit AI names lean towards .com even more than the market as a whole: .com took 55.8% of them, against 38.2% of all new names in the same week.
| Extension | Explicit AI names (week) | All new names in that extension (week) | AI names per 1,000 new names |
|---|---|---|---|
| .com | 6,911 | 1,150,292 | 6.0 |
| .online | 407 | 64,700 | 6.3 |
| .net | 397 | 61,699 | 6.4 |
| .org | 364 | 56,108 | 6.5 |
| .app | 301 | 39,231 | 7.7 |
| .xyz | 296 | 529,378 | 0.6 |
| .ru | 286 | 36,551 | 7.8 |
| .top | 201 | 109,164 | 1.8 |
| .tech | 165 | 12,625 | 13.1 |
| .site | 155 | 40,868 | 3.8 |
Two things stand out. .tech has the highest density in the top ten: 13 of every 1,000 new .tech names are explicit AI names, about twice the rate of .com. .xyz is the opposite case: it added 529,378 names in the week (and dropped only 49,379), but just 0.6 per 1,000 were about AI. Over the latest month, though, .xyz ranked second for explicit AI names (6,658, or 11.4%). Volumes in .xyz swing sharply from one period to the next. Our reading is that first-year promotions drive these swings, but zone data alone cannot prove it.
The AI vocabulary: what survives a second look
The same trap applies to other AI words. Counting substrings, "llm" looks like a popular term in new domains, but most matches come from words like sellmore, fullmeta and enrollment. The table compares the raw count with what remains after removing obvious unrelated words.
| Keyword | Raw matches (week) | After removing unrelated words | Share on .xyz | What gets mixed in |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| agent | 5,121 | cannot be separated | 14% | Estate, insurance and travel agents; Spanish and Portuguese "agente" |
| agentic | 561 | 561 | 17% | Almost nothing |
| llm | 1,915 | 219 | 2% | sellmore, fullmeta, enrollment, install |
| prompt | 1,698 | 1,698 | 67% | Word pairs on .xyz (see below) |
| gpt | 895 | 892 | 22% | Almost nothing |
| sora | 796 | not measurable | 8% | oracle, impresora, advisor, given names |
| copilot | 541 | 541 | 77% | Word pairs on .xyz |
| neural | 389 | 389 | 48% | Word pairs on .xyz |
| chatbot | 332 | 332 | 75% | Word pairs on .xyz |
| grok | 284 | 271 | 2% | Russian words containing "igrok" |
| claude | 212 | 169 | 2% | French first names (some remain) |
| llama | 211 | 83 | 1% | villa, stella, Spanish "llamar" |
| gemini | 132 | 120 | 13% | ministry, zodiac and company names |
| openai | 60 | 42 | 2% | openair |
| anthropic | 26 | 19 | 5% | philanthropic |
| deepseek | 17 | 16 | 0% | Almost nothing |
Some patterns in this table:
- "Agent" is mostly not about AI agents. Only 150 of the 12,378 explicit AI names contain "agent". The unambiguous AI-era form, "agentic", appears in 561 new names.
- Some keywords live on .xyz in pairs. 77% of "copilot" names, 75% of "chatbot" names and 67% of "prompt" names were on .xyz, against 17.6% of all new names. Many combine the keyword with an unrelated English word (copilot + payday, chatbot + winter). That pattern is consistent with automated bulk registration. Zone data does not show who registered them, so we cannot say why.
- Product names are small numbers. Names containing major AI product and company names run from about a dozen to a few hundred a week (deepseek 16, openai 42, claude 169, grok 271 after cleaning), and some of those still overlap with ordinary words or personal names.
How this compares with other counts
Hostinger published a keyword analysis of 6.2 million registrations made through its own platform between October 2025 and September 2026. It counts "ai" only when it starts or ends a name, excludes "dubai", and adds words such as agent, model, brain and mind to its AI theme. With that broader definition, it puts the AI theme at 1.5% of its registrations in September 2026 (Hostinger, October 2026). The data and definitions differ from ours: one registrar's customers versus zone lists for 808 extensions. Both point the same way, though: AI names are a small slice of new registrations.
For scale, the global domain base was 401.6 million registrations at the end of June 2026 (Verisign, Domain Name Industry Brief, Q2 2026).
The .ai extension itself, the country code of Anguilla (IANA), is a separate market. Its zone file listed 1,066,646 names on 21 October 2026. Those names are not part of this count.
How we counted
- Source: domains-monitor.com daily, weekly and monthly lists of names that appeared in or disappeared from zone files. The weekly list covers 808 extensions.
- What "new" means: a name that appeared in the zone file during the period. Names registered without nameservers do not appear, and a dropped name that is registered again counts again.
- What we read: the part of the name before the extension (the label), not website content and not ownership records.
- Classification: every label containing "ai" was segmented against an English dictionary of about 370,000 words and a Mandarin pinyin syllable list, then placed in one of the four groups above.
- Keyword families: plain substring counts, then a second count with obvious unrelated words removed (for example "openair", "philanthropic", "llm" between two letters).
- Check: 60 names per group reviewed by hand.
- Method version: 1, 21 October 2026.
What this data cannot tell you
- Coverage is uneven. Generic extensions (.com, .net, .org and the newer ones such as .app or .xyz) are covered in full. Country-code extensions are partial: they make up 12.5% of the week's names, and coverage varies from one country to another.
- .ai is not counted here. The weekly lists include only part of the .ai activity, so this analysis says nothing about demand for .ai names.
- A registration is not a product. A new AI name may be a startup, a side project, a reseller's stock or a defensive registration. Without other evidence we cannot tell which.
- One week is a snapshot. The day, week and month figures differ (0.41% to 0.53% explicit), and extension rankings move. Compare equivalent periods before calling a trend.
If you are naming an AI product
The data describes a crowded corner: most explicit AI names are a word followed by "ai", and more than half of them go to .com. Before you commit to a name:
- Search the exact name across extensions first with our domain search. If the brand + ai version is taken in .com, it often still exists in other extensions.
- Compare the alternatives on what they signal. .ai says "AI" outright, .tech already carries the highest share of AI names in our data, .app suits a product people install or log into, and .io is another short, tech-flavoured option. Our guide on whether to buy a .ai domain covers that choice in detail.
- Read the name the way a filter would. If your brand plus "ai" spells an ordinary word, a place or a name in another language, people and software will misread it, just as our classifier did.
- Decide on the hyphen early. About one in four explicit AI names uses one. If you pick the version without the hyphen, consider registering the hyphenated one too, or the other way round.
- If your first choice is gone, our guide on what to do when a domain name is taken walks through the options.
Cite this data
Suggested citation: "Of 3,014,445 domain names that appeared in 808 zone files in the week ending 21 October 2026, 139,357 (4.6%) contained 'ai', but only 12,378 (0.41%) were explicit references to artificial intelligence (Register.Domains analysis of domains-monitor.com zone lists)."
Data: domains-monitor.com zone lists, analysis by Register.Domains. We will keep tracking this. Later figures will appear as new, dated editions, so the numbers above stay tied to the period they describe.
