Two thirds of top AI apps have their .com. Only 22 use it as their main site.

The short version

1. .com leads this group, with .ai close behind.22 of the 50 main sites are on .com and 18 on .ai.
2. A .com can serve a brand without being its main site.Of the 28 companies whose main site isn't a .com, 11 have a matching .com that forwards to them.
3. When the .com came later, it came years later.For the 9 companies where the archive places the handover after launch, the median interval from first archived site to first use of the .com was 2.2 years.
4. Most of the names were old.For the 28 matching .coms with a dated first use, the registry record was a median of 17.0 years old at that point.
5. Companies that launch on .ai mostly stay there.Of the 17 that launched on .ai, 15 still run on it and two moved to .com. Five of those that stayed forward a .com to their .ai.

.com leads this group, with .ai close behind.

The list is the revenue chart in the seventh edition of a16z's Top 100 Consumer AI Apps, published October 5, 2026. It ranks companies by observed spending on U.S. consumer cards in YipitData's panel during August 2026. That is not total company revenue, and a16z left Gemini out because its spending could not be separated from Google's other consumer products. These are companies that already succeeded, with no comparison group, so the data can describe what they did but can't show whether a domain choice helped them grow.

We use the brand on a16z's chart and that brand's own website, the one you reach when you look the name up. For OpenAI that is openai.com; ChatGPT's chatgpt.com comes up separately below. The exact-match .com is the brand name with spaces removed, plus .com: klingai.com for Kling AI, topazlabs.com for Topaz Labs. When a brand writes an extension into its name, as Otter.ai does, the stem is used, so the match is otter.com.

Of the 50 main sites, 22 are on .com, 18 on .ai and 5 on .io. The other five use .dev (Lovable), .app (Gamma), .im (Manus), .net (NovelAI) and .co (Hugging Face).

Rank tilts toward .com: 14 of the top 25 run on it, against 8 of the bottom 25. With 25 companies in each half, that gap is too small to treat as a rule.

A .com can serve a brand without being its main site.

A company's matching .com can be its main site, as canva.com is for Canva. It can forward visitors to the main site, as perplexity.com does to perplexity.ai. Or it can lead somewhere unrelated. Of the 50, 22 are in the first group, 11 in the second and 16 in the third. For Manus we couldn't tell.

A redirect shows where traffic goes, not who holds the registration. So we split the forwarding group by what else we found. For three of the 11, a purchase was reported or the company launched on the name. For three, the .com also uses exactly the same nameservers as the main site, which is suggestive but not proof. For the other five, the redirect is the only sign.

The pattern matters for anyone holding a name like these. Of the 28 companies whose main site isn't a .com, 11 (39%) have a .com that forwards to them. It isn't their main website, but it does a job. Companies rarely say which one, and this study doesn't measure it. Common reasons include people typing .com by habit, mail set up on the .com, and keeping the name out of other hands.

Product names complicate the picture for the largest companies. OpenAI runs on openai.com, but ChatGPT lives on chatgpt.com. Anthropic runs on anthropic.com, the Claude app on claude.ai, and claude.com, which Anthropic got in late 2024, hosts Claude's marketing and pricing. Cognition's Devin runs on devin.ai.

The forwarding runs the other way too. Twelve of the 22 companies on .com have an exact-match .ai that sends visitors to the .com, including Anthropic, Canva, Figma, Midjourney, Notion and Runway, and Topaz Labs forwards the shorter topaz.ai. Four of the twelve (anthropic.ai, figma.ai, midjourney.ai and replit.ai) answered only over plain HTTP in our check.

When the .com came later, it came about 2.2 years after launch.

Of the 33 matching .coms that serve or forward to their brand, we can place the handover after launch for 9. For each of those, the archive shows someone else's content on the .com after the company's first site went live, or a report names the earlier holder. We measured from the first archived capture of the launch site to the first evidence that the company used the .com: an archived capture, a dated report or a registry change.

The median interval is 2.2 years across these 9 companies. Suno was quickest, at about a year. Hugging Face and Runway took seven and a half and eight years. This is a small group, chosen because the handover can be dated, so it describes these companies rather than predicting when any startup will buy.

Two reported purchases came near funding announcements. Cognition bought cognition.ai soon after raising $21 million, and Lovable's purchase of lovable.com was reported the month it raised $400 million.

The other 24 matching .coms fall into other groups. Six companies used the .com from their first archived site: OpenAI, Anthropic, Canva, Figma, Midjourney and Descript. Six registered or re-registered it around launch: QuillBot, Sudowrite, Jumpspeak, Nous Research, Topaz Labs and Kling AI. For seven, the handover can't be placed before or after launch: Higgsfield, Genspark, HeyGen, Photoroom, FaceApp, ElevenLabs and n8n. Four have no dated first use: Replit, Speechify, NovelAI and Moises. Superhuman's .com came with its 2025 purchase of Superhuman Mail. Product names show the same lag: chatgpt.com pointed at OpenAI about ten months after ChatGPT launched, and claude.com reached Anthropic about 21 months after claude.ai opened.

Most of the names were registered long before the companies used them.

For the 28 matching .coms with a dated first use, we compared the registry record's creation date with that first use. The median gap is 17.0 years. That figure includes names companies registered themselves, which sit near zero, and names that were registered decades earlier.

Among the 9 acquired after launch, the median gap was 23.1 years. runway.com and cognition.com have 1995 records, and lovable.com a 1997 one.

A creation date describes the current registration record, not how a company got the name. Founders can register a name early, and a name that lapsed shows its newer date. Later observations of similarly old names also produce older ages, so treat these figures as descriptive. For 18 of the 28 names, archived pages or reports show someone else using the domain before the company did.

The earlier holders were a mix. Some were businesses, like the Italian lingerie brand that held lovable.com. Some ran unrelated sites: perplexity.com pointed at an alternate-reality game and huggingface.com was an emoji site until 2024. Others were investors, like Joshua Schoen, who sold cognition.com. The full list is in the evidence files below.

Companies that launch on .ai mostly stay there. Some buy the .com anyway.

Of the companies on the list, 17 launched on .ai, and 15 of them still run there. Only two, Suno and JustDone, moved their main site to .com. Five of those that stayed control the matching .com and forward it to the .ai: Higgsfield, Perplexity, OpenRouter, Genspark and Moises. For a successful .ai company, buying the .com as a redirect is more common in this group than moving onto it.

Most moves onto .com came from other extensions: Replit from repl.it, Photoroom from .app and Notion from .so. Cognition made a round trip, from cognition-labs.com to cognition.ai in 2024 and to cognition.com in 2026. Moves also ran toward .ai: Zeely went from zeely.app to zeely.ai in 2025, and Kling AI kept its name and moved from klingai.com to the shorter kling.ai in April 2026. Renames went both ways: Doublicat became Reface on reface.ai, and Movio became HeyGen on heygen.com.

For a domain investor holding the .com that matches a growing .ai company, the likelier buyer wants a redirect, not a new home. That buyer values the name for brand protection, typed traffic and email, and may value it differently from a company planning a full move.

Three .com acquisitions became public this summer.

cognition.ai began forwarding to cognition.com in June. The name likely changed hands in late May, and the broker Lumis announced the sale on July 29. runway.com was live by July 22, when the purchase was reported, and runwayml.com began forwarding to it that week. Lovable's purchase of lovable.com was reported on August 28. 2024 was busier still: Suno, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Notion, Genspark, Hugging Face and Higgsfield all made .com moves that year.

What they paid

Almost nothing is public. Cognition paid a reported $110,000 for cognition.ai in March 2024. A month earlier, Namecheap CEO Richard Kirkendall reported a $30,000 sale of devin.ai, now Cognition's product domain. Perplexity's broker listed perplexity.com at $250,000 before the July 2024 sale; the final price wasn't announced. Dharmesh Shah paid more than $15.5 million for chat.com in 2023 and sold it later that year without naming the buyer. OpenAI was revealed as the buyer in November 2024, and Shah said he took part of the price in OpenAI shares. Runway, Lovable and Cognition (for the .com) disclosed nothing.

Notion: control by 2019, homepage in 2024, full switch in 2026

These are three separate events. Archived captures show notion.com forwarding to notion.so by December 2019. Captures show the homepage on notion.com by December 2024. On June 3, 2026, co-founder Akshay Kothari posted that Notion was dropping .so for .com and that the effort began in 2018. According to dn.com's account of his post, the offer to the owner combined cash, Notion equity and a private meeting with the Grateful Dead, and the owner skipped the meeting and took more equity. Kothari named the broker as Bill Sweetman.

Disputes

Three names reached their companies after disputes. chatgpt.com was registered the day ChatGPT launched in November 2022, and Site Matrix, a Puerto Rico company, held it when OpenAI filed a complaint in March 2023; by September it pointed at OpenAI, and no decision was published. Site Matrix also held midjourney.ai, registered three days before Midjourney's open beta in July 2022. A Forum panel ordered it transferred to Midjourney on June 20, 2024, after Site Matrix agreed. And a WIPO panel ordered figma.ai transferred to Figma on April 21, 2026. Registered in 2020, it had been forwarding to magicpath.ai, a rival AI design tool run by the respondent.

16 companies show no sign of using their matching .com. Eight of those names lead to other businesses.

The eight lead to a Dutch hardware chain (gamma.com), a German fire-protection firm (minimax.com), a Spanish chemicals maker (synthesia.com), a roofing software vendor (topview.com), an environmental consultancy (fal.com), a Cisco page (jasper.com), Pantene's site (beautiful.com) and ClickMeeting (invideo.com). Four show a sale listing or sale inquiry page: plaud.com, evoto.com, zeely.com and reface.com. plaud.com is presented by a broker as a "Strategic-Grade" domain for "funded startups". Two show placeholders (meshy.com and otter.com), and two show other unrelated content (openart.com and fireflies.com). A page shows what a domain serves, not who registered it, so these are observations rather than ownership findings.

The same pattern shows up beyond .com. We checked about 640 domains built on these brand names across .com, .ai, .io, .app, .co, .so, .dev, .net and .im. Forty-one used Afternic's nameservers at the time of the check, which usually signals a for-sale listing; we did not verify each listing. They include anthropic.io, claude.co, chatgpt.net, suno.net, manus.io, moises.io and n8n.co, plus brand-plus-"ai" .coms like elevenlabsai.com, heygenai.com and otterai.com. The full scan is in the evidence files.