Fresh data: 28% of Y Combinator and Techstars startups using .ai domains

Accelerator-backed startups increasingly turn to .ai and other alternatives.

Fresh analysis from top level domain firm Identity Digital shows that young startups are increasingly turning to non-.com domains, in particular .ai.

The firm analyzed the domain choice of over 4,000 startups from Y Combinator and Techstars from 2020 to the present, and found some significant shifts. This chart shows that .com usage is waning, while startups selecting .ai domains are soaring:

A whopping 28% of startups in these two accelerators this year are using .ai domain names.

Also notable in this chart is that .io is slowly losing favor, perhaps as more firms swap it for .ai. (Identity Digital is the registry for both .io and .ai domain names.)

Identity Digital’s analysis also shows that firms that choose .com are frequently selecting names that don’t exactly match their brands. 54% of .com domains used by firms in this year’s batch weren’t exact matches, often counting a prefix such as “get” or “use” ahead of the brand. This compares to 85% of firms that chose a non-.com domain.