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Using .ai as your domain because it “means AI”?
That’s like using a special font in a social media post to fake bold text: clever, but not exactly built for it. Yep, it’s yet another workaround!

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We’ve all seen those posts: someone wants to highlight a word, so they use a Unicode font that looks bold. It does the trick… until the platform changes how fonts render, accessibility tools choke on it, or search engines ignore it.

The same logic applies to a certain trend in tech branding: using country code top-level domains (ccTLDs) like .ai, .io, or .tv as if they were generic ones like .com, .tech, or .org.

It’s creative. It’s popular. But it’s not without risk.

So, What Is .ai, Really?

Despite its strong association with artificial intelligence, .ai is the ccTLD for Anguilla, a small island in the Caribbean. The same way .it belongs to Italy, not “information technology,” and .tv is for Tuvalu, not television.

These domains are assigned based on ISO 3166 country codes.

What Could Go Wrong?

When you use a ccTLD, you’re tying your brand identity to the administrative and geopolitical stability of a specific region. That might not seem like a big deal, right?

Take .io as a case study:

• .io is the ccTLD for the British Indian Ocean Territory.
• That territory is now being handed over to Mauritius following international pressure.
• In theory, if the ISO country code is revoked, ICANN could retire the domain.

Will it happen? Probably not.
Could it happen? Well, yes.

The fact that your startup’s future might hinge on an obscure diplomatic dispute between two countries should at least send you some bad vibes. It’s OpenAI.com, not Open.ai, btw.

Should You Avoid ccTLDs?

ccTLDs can be powerful branding tools. They’re short, trendy, and memorable, but they come with some caveats. Should you avoid them? Not at all! Most of them are stable and actively maintained. But maybe what your’re actually looking for is a gTLD: that g stands for generic, such as .org, .tech, .photo.

But this may be the subject for another post.

Ah, one last thing: do you want to know what kind of domain you’re dealing with?
Check it on the IANA Root Zone Database, where all TLDs are listed.