by David Barnett and Lars Jensen (ShortDot)
Introduction
The rate of adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) systems over the last few years, particularly in online and technology-related contexts, has been striking. Automated web-based queries now account for over half of all traffic (51% as of 2024)[1], and nearly three-quarters (74%) of webpages now include some AI-generated content[2]. Overall, traffic generated by AI technologies saw a growth of over 500% in the five months to May 2025[3], and a 2025 study of 3,000 websites found that 63% of them already receive traffic from AI-generated referrals[4]. Looking forward it is predicted that, by 2028, AI-powered search and recommendation engines will drive more web traffic than traditional search[5].
Looking more generally at the landscape, it is estimated by Gartner and other sources that, by 2026 or 2028, 20% of online transactions will be carried out by AI agents[6,7,8,9]. Furthermore, by the end of 2026, 40% of enterprise applications may be integrated with task-specific AI agents, potentially generating 30% of enterprise application software revenue by 2035[10]. Additionally, by 2030, there may be in the region of 500 billion to 1 trillion connected devices, comprising the wider ecosystem of the 'Internet of Things' (IoT)[11,12,13] and (in the absence of mediating factors[14]) this will almost invariably result in an enormous growth in the proportion of DNS traffic categorised as 'machine-to-machine' communication.
It is likely that a significant proportion of these connected entities will require unique DNS identifiers, and many industry commentators are increasingly of the opinion that there will be a desire for a many - particularly agentic AI systems - to be associated with unique domain names[15]. These names could serve as a 'birth certificate' or 'trusted identity' for the systems in question, helping to establish user confidence and familiarity. Any evolution along these lines would have an enormous impact on the overall size of the domain landscape (currently around 350 million names), and it may not be unreasonable to suggest that, by 2050, there may be of the order of 10 to 50 billion registered domains. This propounded evolution of the landscape echoes previous studies suggesting that, in the future, the growth of agentic AI will demand a new layer of verifiable identify infrastructure[16] and that it may be desirable for each distinct AI agent to be tied to an 'immutable root' (i.e. identifier)[17]. This trend would be in some ways analogous to the transition from the IPv4 to the IPv6 system for allocating IP addresses, which created a step-change in capacity from 232 (around 4 billion) to 2128 (around 3 × 1038) possible combinations.
Of course, the shape of the AI-related domain name landscape is already changing. Numbers of .ai domains (for example) have massively spiked since the launch of ChatGPT (notably also driving a fundamental boost to the revenues of parent country Anguilla)[18]. Across the full domain name landscape more generally, there are many tens of thousands of examples featuring keywords pertaining to popular and emerging technologies ('ai', 'crypto', etc.), and this demand is only likely to grow. Such trends may emerge in parallel with the forthcoming second phase of the new-gTLD (generic top-level domain) programme, which might see a push towards the availability of much larger numbers of new brand-, industry- or technology-specific domain-name extensions. Other possible evolutions in business behaviour - such as a possible move towards technology entrepreneurs taking advantage of greater opportunities for AI use and automation, so as to establish and run much larger numbers of businesses - may also drive increased demand in the domain-name landscape.
These comments must also be considered against the backdrop of the fact that the current domain landscape is already - in some regards - beginning to run low on capacity. Whilst the total proportion of all possible domain names which are actually registered is still extremely tiny, there is a relative shortage of short, memorable domain names (particularly those comprising dictionary terms) across popular domain name extensions (TLDs). For example, there are currently essentially no .com domains of 4 characters or fewer available for registration, and very few (short) dictionary terms[19]. These observations are already generating a push towards the use of alternative domain name styles and emerging TLDs, in addition to distinct channels altogether (such as blockchain domains and the Web3 environment)[20].
In terms of the overall landscape of web addresses associated with (agentic) AI systems specifically, what might these trends look like? Two possible directions for development include: (a) the emergence and growth of dedicated domain names for specific AI agents (potentially of the form (for example) [role]AI.[TLD]), with the name signifying the function of the system in question; or (b) the increasing use of AI-specific subdomains (say, AI.[site].[TLD]) within the trusted webspaces (i.e. hosted on the primary domain names) of popular companies, to host agentic systems or other AI functionality. Companies are likely predominantly to continue to use popular legacy TLDs such as .com for the foreseeable future but - as part of these evolving trends - may start to branch out into other existing TLDs, or new extensions emerging from phase two of the new-gTLD programme. Exactly which extensions do succeed will ultimately depend on issues around usability and trust (rather than necessarily just comprising an AI-specific label).
Case studies - the current landscape
As illustrations of the current state of the landscape pertaining to the two specific possibilities discussed above, we consider two datasets, as outlined below.
1. Agentic-AI-style domain names
For this analysis, we consider a list of 100 keywords relating to professions or industry areas (with a specific focus, where possible, on examples where AI applications may be relevant). For each of these, we consider whether a domain name consisting of the keyword, either prefixed or suffixed by the string 'ai', is registered, across each of the top-50 largest existing gTLDs (by size of the domain name zone file, i.e. the data file containing the names and configuration information of all registered domains). Therefore, for 'accountant' (for example), on .com, the analysis looks to determine whether accountantai[.]com or aiaccountant[.]com are registered as domain names. This methodology thereby yields 200 possible (or 'candidate') domain names for consideration, across each of the 50 TLDs, or 10,000 candidate domain names in total.
The analysis shows that, of the 10,000 possible domain names of this format, 2,053 (20.5%, or just over one in five) are already registered. A more granular analysis is shown in Figure 1, showing a 'registration map' of which names are already registered (shown in red), versus those which are absent from the zone file (and therefore potentially unregistered and available) (in green).
Figure 1: 'Registration map' for 'agentic-AI-style' domain names (red = registered, absent from zone file = green), where the second-level name (SLD) (i.e. the part of the domain name to the left of the dot) is shown on the vertical axis and the TLD (domain name extension) is shown on the horizontal axis. The dataset is sorted by (vertically, decreasing from top to bottom) the number of TLDs (out of 50) across which the SLD exists as a registered domain, and (horizontally, decreasing from left to right) the total number of SLDs (out of 100) which exist as a registered domain across the TLD in question. Results are shown for the top 50 most commonly registered SLDs.
The top five most commonly registered SLD strings in the dataset are aiagent (with 'agent' likely referring to its technical, AI-related definition in most cases), agentai, aiart, aimusic, and aimarketing, existing as registered domains across 47, 41, 38, 38, and 36 (respectively) of the 50 TLDs considered in the analysis. Only three of the 200 strings do not appear as the SLDs of registered domain names across any of the 50 TLDs.
The top TLD in the dataset is .com (for which 197 of the 200 considered strings exist as the SLDs of registered domains), followed by .net (144), .org (139), .xyz (134), and .app (107). Only one TLD of the 50 (.ovh) does not feature any of the considered SLD strings as registered domains.
Some examples of some of the registered .com domains which also resolve to live website content are shown in Figure 2. Many of the remainder resolve to lower-threat content such as placeholder and parking pages, suggesting perhaps that they have been proactively registered for future intended use, or may be being held as tradable commodities in their own right, given the potential use-cases for these types of name. aiagent[.]com (for example) resolves to a page offering the domain name for sale and requesting offers in excess of $1.5 million, and aibanking[.]com, aibarrister[.]com, aicontroller[.]com, aidesigner[.]com, and aiinvestment[.]com are all explicitly soliciting offers in excess of $100k.
Figure 2: Examples of 'agentic-AI-style' .com domain names resolving to live website content: aiaccountant[.]com, aianalyst[.]com, aidoctor[.]com, aiparalegal[.]com, aiphotographer[.]com, aireceptionist[.]com
2. AI-specific subdomains
The second piece of analysis considers the extent of the existence of AI-related subdomains (taking the specific example of URLs of the form AI.[site].[TLD]), on each of a series of the most popular (i.e. highest traffic) websites across the Internet. In particular, we consider the 47 most highly visited websites generally, derived from data from Similarweb and Semrush[21] (truncated from a top-50 list, but considering only examples comprising full, second-level domain names), and a dataset of the top 20 information technology (IT) company websites (according to Semrush[22]) - i.e. one example of an industry vertical where AI may be particularly relevant (noting that two domains, live.com and office.com, appear in both lists).
The analysis shows that a specific hostname of the form AI.[site].[TLD] was found to resolve (i.e. is configured with an active DNS entry) for 20 of the top 47 websites globally (i.e. 43%, with 19 of these explicitly also generating a live HTTP (i.e. website) response) (Figure 3), and for 8 of the top 20 IT websites (40%, with 6 also showing a live HTTP response). This does not, of course, preclude the existence of other AI-specific areas of the websites which may use alternative naming conventions, such that these figures represent very much a lower limit on the proportion of these sites already featuring dedicated AI-related sections.
Figure 3: Examples of AI-specific subdomains (of the form AI.[site].[TLD]) on domains within the top-50 list of most popular websites: ai.google.com (re-directs to ai.google), ai.facebook.com (re-directs to ai.meta.com), ai.baidu.com, ai.microsoft.com (re-directs to microsoft.com/en-us/ai)
Discussion and conclusions
Many of the points discussed in this article are reminiscent of terminology used in the futurology study 'From Malthus to Mars'[23]; the work describes certain emerging capabilities as '10x technologies', referring to their capacity to be ten times more effective than their predecessors, and expand accessibility to a far wider audience. Furthermore, some of the predictions referenced in this article are even more significant, and potentially have the ability to push 'from 10x to 100x' growth, representing a fundamental step-change in capabilities and with the power to drive fundamental evolutions of the online landscape.
As AI continues to evolve in an ever-more-interconnected online ecosystem, it is likely that domain names will remain a foundational component of the overall landscape, comprising a permanent, trusted layer which is able to give every connected entity a unique identifier.
Some of these trends are already being observed, even across the existing legacy infrastructure, with significant growth in the numbers of registered domains with specific relevant name structures and/or containing relevant keywords. It will be interesting to see how near-future developments, such as the forthcoming second phase of the new-gTLD programme, the inevitable continued growth and evolution of AI technologies, the increasing interconnectedness of online channels, and the ongoing emergence of new AI use-cases and other areas of online technology, will contribute to this overall picture.
References
[1] https://www.imperva.com/blog/2025-imperva-bad-bot-report-how-ai-is-supercharging-the-bot-threat/
[2] https://ahrefs.com/blog/what-percentage-of-new-content-is-ai-generated/
[3] https://searchengineland.com/ai-traffic-up-seo-rewritten-459954
[4] https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-traffic-study/
[5] https://www.semrush.com/blog/ai-search-seo-traffic-study/
[7] https://onereach.ai/blog/agentic-ai-adoption-rates-roi-market-trends/
[8] https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/6894066
[12] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11085491/
[13] N. Quadar, A. Chehri, G. Jeon, M.M. Hassan, G. Fortino (2022). Cybersecurity Issues of IoT in Ambient Intelligence (AmI) Environment. IEEE Internet Things Mag., 5, pp. 140-145. doi: 10.1109 / IOTM.001.2200009.
[14] https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f6fb/3f56f29f23cb8724fce2a7667f08e1641eb4.pdf
[15] For example, from Domain Summit Europe 2025:
- L. Jensen, 'ShortDot, Age of AI and a Once-in-a Generation Opportunity' (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53QTT2iLme)
- B. van Dalfzen, 'Domains in the Age of AI: Innovation or Extinction?' (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnuHmi4ESQI)
[16] https://www.kuppingercole.com/watch/future-of-identity
[17] 'A Novel Zero-Trust Identity Framework for Agentic AI: Decentralized Authentication and Fine-Grained Access Control'; https://arxiv.org/html/2505.19301v2
[18] https://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2024/05/15/cf-an-ai-powered-boost-to-anguillas-revenues
[19] 'Patterns in Brand Monitoring' (D.N. Barnett, Business Expert Press, 2025), Chapter 9: 'Domain landscape analysis'
[20] 'Patterns in Brand Monitoring' (D.N. Barnett, Business Expert Press, 2025), Chapter 13: 'Analyzing trends in Web3'
[21] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-visited_websites
[22] https://www.semrush.com/website/top/global/information-technology/
[23] https://frommalthustomars.com/
This article was first published on 9 October 2025 at:
