The .ai domain didn't grow. It detonated. In 2018, webatla logged 10,807 new .ai registrations across the whole year — a sleepy little ccTLD ticking over at roughly 900 a month. In 2025, we logged 478,794. That is the same TLD, a little over 44 times bigger, and the inflection point lines up almost to the day with the moment the world started talking to chatbots.
This is the story of how a Caribbean country-code domain became the default address bar of the AI era, told entirely through webatla's own monthly new-registration counts. The numbers below are our series and ours alone — no estimates, no round-tripping through third-party totals.
The quiet years (2018-2021)
For most of its life, .ai was a curiosity. It's the country-code domain (ccTLD) for Anguilla, a British Overseas Territory in the Caribbean, delegated by IANA back on 16 February 1995. The two letters just happened to also spell the abbreviation for "artificial intelligence" — a coincidence worth, as we'll see, tens of millions of dollars a year.
But for a long time nobody cared. Here's what the early run looked like in our data:
| Year | New .ai registrations | Avg / month |
|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 10,807 | 901 |
| 2019 | 11,850 | 988 |
| 2020 | 17,446 | 1,454 |
| 2021 | 21,097 | 1,758 |
2018 was a flat plateau — somewhere between 800 and 1,100 registrations every month, all year. The pandemic nudged things up: 2020 stepped to a 1,454/month average as the whole web swelled, and 2021 kept that drift going to 1,758. Respectable, organic, boring. If you'd told a domain investor in 2021 that this TLD would soon out-register most of the legacy gTLDs, they'd have laughed.
The inflection: late 2022 and a chatbot
ChatGPT launched on 30 November 2022. You can see it land in our data within weeks.
December 2022 posted 3,868 new .ai registrations — already the first real spike, well above that year's 2,238/month average. Then January 2023 hit 6,715. That's a +74% jump month over month, December to January, with no holiday season, no registry promotion — just a sudden, global realization that "ai" was now the most valuable two letters in tech.
The full-year comparison is the part that still looks like a typo:
| Year | Total | Avg / month | vs. prior year |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 26,851 | 2,238 | — |
| 2023 | 141,620 | 11,802 | ~5.3x |
| 2024 | 244,799 | 20,400 | ~1.7x |
| 2025 | 478,794 | 39,900 | ~2.0x |
2023's monthly average of 11,802 is roughly 5.3 times the 2022 average of 2,238. The TLD didn't grow into demand gradually; it got yanked upward the instant a consumer product made "AI" a household word. This is one of the cleanest single-event signals you'll find anywhere in domain data, which is exactly why we keep datasets that let you watch fresh registrations by TLD over time.
The new plateau — and a record run
What's notable is that 2023 wasn't a one-off bubble that popped. The new level held and then kept climbing. 2024 nearly doubled 2023 (244,799), and 2025 nearly doubled again to 478,794 — by itself 44.3 times the entire 2018 total. Across 2018 to 2025 that works out to a compound annual growth rate of about 72% per year.
Then the run got even hotter at the turn of 2026:
| Month (2026) | New .ai registrations |
|---|---|
| January | 46,081 |
| February | 60,818 |
| March | 71,227 |
| April | 25,715 (partial) |
| May | 9,104 (partial) |
March 2026's 71,227 is the single biggest month in our entire .ai series — the all-time peak on record. To put the whole arc in one number: from January 2018 through May 2026, this series contains 1,166,209 new .ai registrations.
A necessary, honest caveat
Look at that table again and you'll see April (25,715) and May (9,104) fall off a cliff after March's record. Do not read that as a decline in .ai demand. Today is 22 June 2026, and registration data takes time to settle — there's collection lag, late-arriving records, and reconciliation that hasn't finished yet for the most recent weeks. Those last one or two months are almost certainly incomplete, not evidence that the AI domain rush is over. Every prior month in this series filled in over time, and these will too. We'd rather show you partial data clearly flagged than quietly hide it and pretend the curve is smooth.
What .ai actually is — and Anguilla's windfall
The reason this matters beyond a pretty chart: a tiny Caribbean government is funding itself off the AI hype cycle.
.ai's namespace is owned by the Government of Anguilla, which sets policy as the sponsoring organization of record. For roughly three decades the registry was administered by Vince Cate, a US expatriate who'd moved to the island in the mid-1990s and, by his own account, was handed the ccTLD by IANA's Jon Postel and passed most of the revenue to the government. In an early-2024 interview, Cate pegged the registry at "about US$3 million per month" — "already like a third of the government's budget."
The IMF put 2023 .ai revenue at roughly EC$87 million (about US$32 million), just over 20% of Anguilla's total government revenue, rising to around US$39 million in 2024. By late 2024 the TLD had passed 500,000 registrations and the government signed a five-year deal — announced 15 October 2024 — handing back-end registry services to Identity Digital, the US provider behind hundreds of gTLDs. Identity Digital took over operations on 15 January 2025, reportedly returning about 90% of revenue to Anguilla.
A couple of practical quirks worth knowing if you actually register one:
- .ai requires a minimum 2-year term, available from 2 up to 10 years. There is no one-year option.
- There are no residency requirements. Despite being Anguilla's ccTLD, anyone worldwide can register; open second-level registration has been available globally since 15 September 2009.
What this means if you track domains
If you watch TLDs for a living — investing, brand protection, competitive intelligence, or just trend-spotting — .ai is the textbook case for why fresh-registration data beats a static snapshot. A point-in-time count would tell you .ai is "big." Only the monthly series tells you when it got big, how fast, and whether the curve is still bending up. That timing is the signal.
The same approach surfaces the next .ai before it's obvious. The TLD that's quietly stepping from 900 to 1,700 a month — the way .ai did in 2019-2021 — is the one worth watching, and you can only spot it if you're tracking new registrations month over month rather than reacting to headlines.
Once a TLD is on your radar, the follow-up questions are about what sits behind those domains: what each site runs, and the registration record for each one. And if you're starting from zero, our guide to downloading the full list of active domains walks through the realistic options. You can always browse the full TLD directory to see where .ai sits among everything else.
FAQ
Is .ai really an AI domain? No — that's the fun part. .ai is the official country-code TLD for Anguilla, a Caribbean British Overseas Territory, and has been since 1995. The "AI" meaning is a happy coincidence the market ran with.
Are .ai registrations actually declining in 2026? No. The low April and May 2026 figures in our data are incomplete — recent months are still settling as of this writing (22 June 2026). The most complete recent month, March 2026, was the highest on record at 71,227.
Why does .ai cost more than other domains? The registry mandates a minimum 2-year registration term (you can't buy a single year), and .ai is a significant revenue source for the Anguillan government, which keeps the bulk of the proceeds.
How many new .ai domains has webatla counted? From January 2018 through May 2026, 1,166,209 new .ai registrations in this series — with 2025 alone accounting for 478,794 of them.
Get the data
This entire post is one TLD pulled from data we refresh every day. Download the All Active Domains dataset → and you'll have every live domain across every TLD — .ai included — as clean JSONL for a flat €29, ready to slice however you like. If it's the fresh registrations you're after — the early-warning signal that caught .ai's inflection — the Domain Investor dataset is built for tracking which TLDs are heating up right now. Or browse all datasets to see what you can layer on top.