Chinese artificial intelligence companies use .com, and most use English names.
I enjoy reading news about Chinese AI startups because I believe they will lead corporate China in the future. As most companies tend to follow leaders, studying domains acquired by top AI startups may tell me trends in domain buying in China.
Recently, AI-Startups.org published a list of the Top 15 AI startups in China. Based on the list, I used Baidu to find out domains used by these startups, as shown below.
| Rank | Startup | Domain |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | SenseTime | SenseTime.com |
| 2 | UBtech | UBtech.com |
| 3 | Megvii | Megvii.com |
| 4 | Mobvoi | Mobvoi.com |
| 5 | Rokid | Rokid.com |
| 6 | Roobo | Roobo.com |
| 7 | ByteDance | ByteDance.com |
| 8 | Liulishuo | Liulishuo.com |
| 9 | Cambricon | Cambricon.com |
| 10 | Appier | Appier.com |
| 11 | Synyi | Synyi.com |
| 12 | Tianrang | Tianrang.com |
| 13 | SandStar | SandStar.com |
| 14 | Elsa | ElsaSpeak.com |
| 15 | HiHedge | HiHedge.com |
Characteristics of the domains can be summarized as follows:
- All 15 startups use .com.
- All except one domain (ElsaSpeak.com) match their corresponding brand.
- Only two are Pinyin-based. The rest are English or English-like.
- All domains are fewer than 10 characters (excluding extension).
- Two-word names are popular.
The conclusion is obvious: .com is king in China too. Specifically, English-based brand-matching .com will continue to be popular. In other words, the EnglishDotCom domain strategy is the way to go.
You mean to tell me, they’re not using .AI, .IO, .TOP or any other .WHATEVERS??
Other extensions are used, but the best AI startups seem to like .com.
The artificial intelligence of the near future will have another artificial system more powerful than the current one and is called Quantum Intelligence.
Quantum computing is becoming the talk of the town.
Quantum Computing in reference to what is artificial intelligence will convert a space formed a hole space time that nobody will know why it happens.
I’m surprised there aren’t any .AI domains. They seem to be the go-to choice for AI companies these days.
I just did a Baidu search and found many Chinese companies using .ai, such as Gluon.ai, Llingju.ai, and Ones.ai. It’s just that the best ones happen to prefer .com.
Do you think they will like a brandable such as:
AiHQs.com
Aitificial intelligence Headquarters?
I don’t know without doing any end user research.
I count more than 7 names which are not english. To be honest I don’t know what “english-like” means. It could as well be french-like etc.
Also the most recently funded AI startups use .AI.
You may be right. I was looking at the names from the perspective of non Pinyin. I should have said that very few domains are Pinyin. As I said in anther comment, yes, there are also many Chinese startups using .ai. It just happens that the best AI startups prefer .com.