In the era of AI explosion, domain names are undergoing a new revaluation.

Domain names, which have evolved over 40 years from the internet to the mobile internet, are now undergoing a new value reassessment in the AI ​​era.

In 2025, AI.com was sold for $70 million, once again drawing market attention. But this is not an isolated incident. Over the past two years, transactions of AI-related domain names have continued to heat up, with significant activity in the trading of premium .com, .cn, and pinyin domain names.

In the past mobile internet era, traffic was controlled by super apps.

Users obtained information through WeChat, Douyin, Xiaohongshu, and Taobao, rarely actively entering website addresses. The importance of domain names was constantly diminished, even being considered an "old asset" of the internet age.

But the emergence of AI has changed all of this, because AI is not human.

Humans can directly open apps to access content, but for AI to answer questions, it must first find the source of information. Whether it's ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Kimi, or Doubao, the generation of answers relies on the crawling, indexing, and referencing of publicly available web content.

This means that AI inherently depends on the open internet.

A website with an independent domain name can be indexed by search engines, accessed by AI crawlers, and become a source of information referenced by large models. Meanwhile, a large amount of content on closed platforms is becoming inaccessible "information silos." As search evolved from "entering keywords" to "directly asking AI," the logic of information distribution on the internet also changed.

In the past, domain names were the URLs users entered; today, domain names are becoming the source of information for AI recommendations.

In the future, users may not remember a particular article, but AI will remember which website it came from; users may not actively visit a platform, but AI will prioritize reliable, stable, and easily identifiable information sources.

In this environment, a concise, professional domain name that is highly consistent with the brand is essentially the digital identity of a business or individual in the AI ​​world.

In the AI ​​era, the significance of a good domain name is no longer just about ease of memorization for users, but about facilitating AI understanding, recognition, and recommendation.

For businesses, a domain name represents brand sovereignty; for entrepreneurs, it's a long-term asset independent of the platform; for content creators, it's a crucial foundation for building personal data assets.

Platform accounts belong to the platform, but domain names truly belong to oneself.

When your content exists only within a platform, it's merely part of the platform's ecosystem; when your content has its own website and domain name, it has the opportunity to become a data asset discovered, cited, and disseminated by AI.

Twenty years ago, a good domain name was like a house number in the internet world; twenty years later, a good domain name is becoming an information coordinate in the AI ​​world.

As search evolves with AI, dialogue replaces the search box, the open web regains its value, and domain names enter a new cycle.

This time, domain names are being revalued not because humans need to type them in, but because AI needs to find them.