Alphabet is one of the most valuable companies in the world. It owns Google, YouTube, Waymo and a collection of technology businesses that reach billions of people. Its market value runs into the trillions.
Yet when Google created Alphabet as its new parent company in 2015 to give its expanding businesses greater independence and Google greater focus, the natural domain for the new corporate name was already taken. Alphabet.com belonged — and still belongs — to BMW, the auto manufacturer’s international fleet management and business mobility company.
So Google went round the problem and chose abc.xyz for Alphabet’s domain address — with .xyz being a newer, deliberately open-ended domain extension with no prescribed category or industry association.
It was a whimsical solution. “ABC” begins the alphabet; “XYZ” finishes it. The address became part of the name itself.
Alphabet could get away with it. Few companies had Google’s established brand heft or its recognition as the world’s dominant search engine. And as a corporate parent, Alphabet had little need to reach a broad public audience.
But, nonetheless, the choice challenged an assumption that had governed corporate naming for decades.
How .com became the address of business
The .com extension was one of the original top-level domains created for the early internet. The letters “com” came from “commercial.” In March 1985, Massachusetts computer company Symbolics registered Symbolics.com, the first .com domain.
Very little happened for several years. Then the World Wide Web arrived and commercial use of the internet exploded.
Amazon.com, Yahoo.com and AOL.com entered popular culture. Companies put URLs on advertising, packaging and business cards. Television commercials ended with them. Radio announcers said “dot com.” The technology boom of the late 1990s became the “dot-com boom.”
Something that began as a technical classification came to signify business on the internet.
That association remains powerful. Say the name of a company and many people still instinctively assume its address ends in .com. Forty years of repetition have given the extension familiarity, legitimacy and permanence.
And as business moved online, that familiarity acquired economic value. Domain names became valuable assets for a simple reason: scarcity. That scarcity created a market, and some of the prices are extraordinary.
Rocket Companies reportedly paid $14 million for Rocket.com in 2024. Voice.com sold for $30 million in 2019. HubSpot co-founder Dharmesh Shah paid $15.5 million for Chat.com in 2023 before selling it to OpenAI for an undisclosed amount.
Then came AI.com.
In 2026, Crypto.com co-founder and CEO Kris Marszalek acquired the domain for $70 million, reportedly the largest publicly disclosed domain sale.
There is a rich irony in that transaction. Artificial intelligence has made .ai one of the hottest alternative extensions, yet someone building an AI business was prepared to pay $70 million for AI.com.
The prices of premium domains are reaching extraordinary levels at precisely the moment when we are becoming less dependent on domains to find companies.
In the early internet, we learned a web address, remembered it and typed it into a browser. The exact-match .com had enormous navigational value. Then Google found the website for us. AI-enabled search takes the change further.
We can ask an AI assistant about a company, compare suppliers, recommend a product or answer a question without ever visiting the company’s website – which questions the future value and purpose of domains.
Which brings us back to AI.com. Why pay $70 million for a domain when fewer people may ever need to type it?
In an interesting paradox, the functional value of a domain may be diminishing even as the scarcity value of the best domains increases. We may need domains less for navigation, while valuing the best ones more as scarce brand assets.
Has the .com lock been broken?
Businesses now have far more choices. Hundreds of extensions compete with .com, and some have developed meanings of their own.
The most significant is .ai. Technically the country-code domain for Anguilla, a small British Overseas Territory in the Caribbean, it has been transformed by artificial intelligence into a powerful category signal. Put .ai after a company name and it immediately declares an AI business, carrying with it some of the excitement, investment appetite and growth expectations surrounding the category.
That is both its strength and a potential limitation. The passing of .cloud as a signal of the technological future offers a glimpse of what could eventually happen to .ai. Cloud computing didn’t disappear; it became ubiquitous, part of the infrastructure of business. What disappeared was its distinctiveness. Tying a company name to a breakthrough technology can provide immediate relevance, but it can also date the business when yesterday’s breakthrough becomes tomorrow’s commonplace.
There are alternatives available, as Alphabet demonstrated. But domain extensions aren’t interchangeable. Each brings associations that affect how a company presents itself.
.com — Commercial authority. The .com remains the standard against which the others are judged. An exact-match .com gives a company a sense of permanence and authority before you know much else about it. It feels established. The problem, of course, is that many of the best ones disappeared years ago and can cost millions to acquire.
.ai — Artificial intelligence. The .ai extension is currently the most interesting alternative because it actually contributes meaning. For the right company, Name.ai can be stronger than an awkward NameSomething.com. But it makes a strategic commitment: you are defining the company through AI. That may become limiting as the business evolves — or as AI becomes so ubiquitous that the distinction loses its value.
.co — Company. The .co extension is clean, short and perfectly serviceable, but it can carry a faint sense of compromise. Name.co can look like the address a company chose because Name.com belonged to somebody else. That matters less for a startup and more for a company trying to project scale, permanence or category leadership. There is also the perennial risk of people remembering it as .com.
.io — Technology. The .io extension has acquired credibility in software and startup circles, where it can feel contemporary and entirely natural. Outside that world, it is much less intuitive. For a substantial corporate enterprise, it can also retain something of the startup about it — attractive if that is the desired signal, less so if the company wants to convey maturity and scale.
.org — Organization. The .org extension is one of the few alternatives with associations as deeply established as .com. It conveys institution, purpose and public interest, which makes it powerful for nonprofits, foundations and membership organizations. For a conventional commercial enterprise, those same associations make it an odd fit.
.xyz — Open-ended and unconventional. Alphabet’s use of .xyz shouldn’t be mistaken for evidence that it has become equivalent to .com. abc.xyz works because the construction itself is memorable: ABC to XYZ. Remove the wordplay and the extension can feel arbitrary, even slightly eccentric. Alphabet makes it work because the domain completes the idea — and because Alphabet can afford to disregard convention.
Other extensions, from .app and .tech to .net and .biz, provide still more possibilities. But the principle is the same. Choosing an extension isn’t simply an exercise in finding something available. It says something about the company using it.
So, back to the central question: does your business name really need a .com?
Increasingly, no.
Search has already eliminated the need to remember web addresses. AI takes that much further, finding companies and serving up information without requiring us to visit their websites at all. The navigational advantage of the exact-match .com is becoming less important.
And herein lies the paradox. As the practical need for an exact-match .com diminishes, the premium attached to the best ones is increasing.
Forty years of use have given .com a familiarity, permanence and commercial authority no other extension can match. Scarcity adds to its value: For any business name, there can only ever be one exact-match .com.
But its absence is no longer sufficient reason to reject an otherwise strong name. A natural qualifying word with the name may provide an effective .com address. Another extension may also work, although it needs to be chosen carefully. As we have seen, every extension carries associations of its own.
The .com still carries a premium and, for the right name, may command an extraordinary one. But a great name need no longer depend on owning the exact-match .com.
BrandingBusiness is a global B2B branding agency dedicated to building powerfully effective B2B brands that lead with clarity and perform with purpose. For more than 30 years, we have helped forward-looking clients to navigate change, enter new markets, unify cultures, and drive sustainable momentum toward their growth plans.