Thoughts

Andrew Miller

January 12, 2025

How Artificial Intelligence will affect domain names

Like many of us, I have spent a lot of time reading about and studying AI, at many levels. How will it impact our business and domain names? How will it change my kids’ college preparation and career trajectory? How will AI affect our lives for better or worse? For this RST post, I will focus on the domain name category, and even narrower, the most valuable, category defining, exact match brand domain names that I and Hilco Digital Assets invest in and advise on. I read a fascinating article this week titled, “AI means the end of Internet Search as we Know It”, published in the highly respected MIT Technology review. One quote stood out, “The biggest change to the way search engines have delivered information to us since the 1990s is happening right now. No more keyword searching. No more sorting through links to click. Instead, we’re entering an era of conversational search. Which means instead of keywords, you use real questions, expressed in natural language. And instead of links, you’ll increasingly be met with answers, written by generative AI and based on live information from all across the internet, delivered the same way.” I believe that as this plays out, it will have the most material impact on increasing the strategic importance and value of category defining, exact match domain names in my 26 years involved in this asset class. I did a ChatGPT query for how to book a hotel room from category defining branded, Booking*com. ChatGPT tells you what to do but the undebatable fact is, one still needs to have a trusted, recallable address to navigate to from the query. Exciting times and much more on this here all throughout this year, Here is a link to the article, https://lnkd.in/eEDXPe2C

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