What Your Domain TLD Reveals About Your Business (And What We Learned Tracking 22,000 Sites)

When someone registers a new domain, they're making a statement — even before they've written a single line of code.

.com says "I'm building something serious and timeless." .ai says "I'm in the AI wave." .online says... well, we'll get to that.

MRRScout has indexed 22,381 new websites discovered in early 2026. We wanted to understand what the TLD distribution tells us about intentions, categories, and business quality signals in the current landscape.

---

The TLD Landscape of New Sites in 2026

Here's what we found across our entire database:

The first thing that jumps out: the classic .com has the ninth-highest count in our dataset. It's been lapped by six different new gTLDs, including .app, .co, and .ai.

---

The Biggest Story: .ai Now Beats .com

In our dataset, 1,359 new sites use .ai versus 873 using .com. That's .ai representing 6.1% of new sites versus .com at just 3.9%.

This isn't a surprise if you've been paying attention to the domain market — .ai registrations have been growing at a staggering rate since ChatGPT's launch. But seeing it in our own dataset is still striking. For every new .com site we discover, we're discovering 1.6 .ai sites.

What's actually on these .ai domains? Our classification data gives us a clearer picture:

• AI Tools is the second-largest category we track (3,938 sites, 17.6% of database)
• Products like FluidForms (AI intake forms), FerretForge (AI skill development), and Syrto (financial intelligence) are the kinds of "real" products behind the .ai registrations
• But a significant portion of .ai registrations appear to be domain squatting, coming-soon pages, or products that haven't launched yet

The .ai boom is real — but it's also generating a lot of noise.

---

The Three TLD Tiers

After looking at these patterns, we think of TLDs as falling into three broad tiers for new site quality:

Tier 1: Intent Signaling TLDs (Higher Quality)

.app, .io, .dev, .ai, .co

These TLDs tend to attract founders building real products. There are three reasons:

1. They cost more. A .dev or .app domain from Google costs $12–25/year at launch. That's not a huge barrier, but it filters out a lot of low-effort spam registration.

2. They carry category connotations. .dev signals "built by a developer, for developers." .app signals a software product. Founders who choose these TLDs are making a conscious branding statement.

3. The community expects it. Posting on Hacker News, Product Hunt, or indie hacker communities with a .io or .app domain reads as credible. .xyz reads as temporary.

In our data, the Developer Tools category (843 sites, 8.1% monetization rate) heavily uses .io and .dev. This is consistent with developers-building-for-developers culture — they register intentional domains and ship with pricing from day one.

Tier 2: E-commerce Signaling TLDs

.store, .shop, .co

.store (2,721 sites in our data) is almost exclusively e-commerce. Our E-commerce category is the third-largest in our database at 2,796 sites — a near-perfect mapping. Founders selling physical or digital products through Shopify or WooCommerce tend to grab a .store domain because it tells their customers exactly what they're getting.

The .co TLD is interesting — it straddles the startup tier and the e-commerce tier. Originally popularized as a startup domain (Twitter's t.co, etc.), it's now broadly used across both tech startups and online retail.

Tier 3: Low-Signal TLDs

.online, .xyz, .site, .cloud, .tech

These four alone represent over 50% of our database (10,360 sites combined). That's not because founders are choosing them thoughtfully — it's because they're cheap. Often $0.99 to $2.99/year in the first year.

.online and .xyz in particular are the go-to for:

• Domain speculators
• Coming-soon placeholder pages
• Sites that spin up quickly and disappear equally fast
• International founders (particularly from South and Southeast Asia) where cheap TLDs are more common

This doesn't mean every .xyz site is junk. Google itself uses abc.xyz. But in our platform data, .online, .xyz, and .site have the lowest proportion of sites with genuine monetization signals (our "Other" catch-all category, with 1.0% monetization rate, skews heavily toward these TLDs).

---

What This Means If You're Searching for Real Opportunities

If you're using MRRScout (or any discovery tool) to find early-stage products worth tracking as competitors, acquisition targets, or inspiration — here's a practical TLD filter:

Higher signal to look at first:

• .ai, .app, .io, .dev → software products and technical tools
• .co → startups and consumer brands
• .store → e-commerce (if that's your interest)

Lower signal to deprioritize:

• .online, .xyz, .site → high noise, lower quality on average

Our Discover page already filters by category, which implicitly captures a lot of this. As we improve our scoring system, TLD will be one of the signals factored into the NicheScore calculation.

---

The .ai Bubble Question

The obvious follow-up: is the .ai TLD in a bubble?

By volume, possibly. But by quality, the .ai registrations in our dataset skew toward genuinely AI-focused products — not just domain squatters. AI Tools has the second-highest absolute count (3,938) but only a 6.8% monetization rate, suggesting a lot of products are still in early stages (or perpetually free).

The natural selection pressure will play out over the next 12–18 months. Sites that don't ship a paying product will let their domains lapse. We'll track the survival rate — and share the data here when we have enough observations.

---

The Bottom Line: TLD as a First Filter

If you're using MRRScout to find early-stage products worth following — as a potential user, competitor researcher, or acquisition scout — TLD is a fast first signal, not a final verdict.

High-signal TLDs (.ai, .app, .io, .dev) are worth looking at first. Low-signal TLDs (.online, .xyz, .site) deserve more skepticism but occasionally hide genuine products.

What really matters is the combination: TLD + category + monetization signals + domain age. A .xyz site in the Education category with a Stripe integration and a 45-day-old domain is far more interesting than a .ai domain with no payment signals and a blank coming-soon page.

That layered view is exactly what MRRScout's scoring system provides. The full database — 22,381 sites and growing — is available on MRRScout Discover.

Where does MRRScout's data come from? All statistics in our articles come from MRRScout's intelligence platform, which continuously monitors 24,000+ newly launched websites across Reddit, Product Hunt, Hacker News, BetaList, certificate transparency logs, and domain activity feeds. Sites are classified as monetized only when active payment infrastructure is detected — not based on self-reported MRR or founder claims. Data snapshots are timestamped in each article. Full database: mrrscout.com/discover.

---

Filter by TLD, category, and monetization signals at mrrscout.com/discover.