How to Choose a Domain Name

You have a budget and a shortlist, and no obvious way to turn one into the other. Three things decide most of it: what you can spend, what your business actually does, and how contested your corner of the market is.

Start with the extension

There are now more than 360 million domain names registered across well over a thousand extensions. Despite that, .com remains the default for commercial buyers in the United States, and the reason is almost entirely historical: three decades of advertising spend trained people to assume it. A customer who half remembers your name will type .com first.

That default is weaker than it was. .io and .ai carry no penalty in software and artificial intelligence, .co is widely understood as a deliberate choice rather than a mistake, and .xyz has become one of the most popular new extensions, especially with tech, AI, financial and web3 companies (Alphabet’s own site is abc.xyz). Short .xyz names, including numeric ones, now trade as sought-after assets in their own right. A well-matched industry extension can read as more confident than a compromised .com. The question is not whether the alternatives work. It is whether your audience will hesitate.

What the tiers cost

Prices move, and anyone quoting you a fixed table is guessing. As rough orders of magnitude:

• Three-letter .com — six figures and up. These trade as a recognised asset class and almost never sell cheaply.
• One-word generic .com — six figures, often seven for a category-defining term.
• Two-word .com — four to five figures, depending entirely on how commercial the phrase is.
• .net and .org — commonly a small fraction of the .com, though the gap has widened as .com pulled away.

One caution on valuation method. Search volume used to be treated as a proxy for a domain’s worth, on the theory that an exact-match name would rank for its keyword. Google specifically targeted that in 2012, and it has not been a reliable basis for pricing since. Value now sits in memorability, credibility and advertising efficiency — not in a search ranking you get for free.

Match the name to the business

Local service businesses are usually better served by a geographic compound — KansasCityRoofing.com rather than a generic one-word name that costs twenty times as much and says nothing about where you work.

Companies that advertise heavily should pay up for something short. Every syllable you remove is spend you stop wasting on a name people mishear. This is where a premium domain pays for itself fastest.

Non-profits still carry .org credibly, and the convention is well enough understood to be an asset rather than a limitation.

Anyone planning to expand should avoid narrowing themselves geographically or by product line. A name that describes this year’s business is a name you will be buying your way out of.