The .ai extension started as the country code of Anguilla and became the default home for AI companies. That shift is visible in the recorded data. Our corpus counts 152 recorded .ai sales in 2021 and 2,070 in 2025. This page explains what moves .ai prices and how to use comps for an .ai name. For the numbers, scroll to the market data below, which is drawn directly from our database.
Who buys .ai names
Understanding the buyer is the fastest way to understand the price.
AI startups and product teams are the end users. They want a short name that says what their product does, often a single word followed by .ai. Many accept .ai because the .com of the same word is unavailable or priced out of reach, and some prefer .ai because it signals the category.
Investors buy at expired auctions and investor venues, hoping to resell to those startups. Platforms such as Dynadot, Namecheap, Park.io and Whois.ai carry a large share of .ai investor trading.
Established companies occasionally buy a premium .ai name for a new AI product line. These buyers produce the largest sales. In the recorded data, cloud.ai sold for 600,000 USD (GoDaddy, 2025-07-02) and law.ai for 350,000 USD (Sedo, 2025-08-16).
What drives .ai prices
Use as an AI product name
The strongest .ai names read naturally as a product: a verb, a role or a domain of work followed by .ai. Names for professions and tasks (law, health, finance, coding) attract buyers building assistants for those fields. Abstract words work too when they are short and brandable.
Length and word quality
As in every extension, shorter is scarcer. Single dictionary words and short technical terms lead. Two-word .ai names exist in large numbers and usually trade far lower, because supply is nearly unlimited.
Developer and technical terms
Technical vocabulary has a clear market in .ai, because developer tools companies are heavy buyers. Some recorded examples: stack.ai at 72,999 USD (Dynadot, 2024-06-03), workflow.ai at 35,000 USD (Park.io, 2023-01-07), server.ai at 29,400 USD (Namecheap, 2025-02-25) and kernel.ai at 14,599 USD (Dynadot, 2024-10-08). Smaller terms sell much lower, as webhook.ai did at 2,424 USD (Namecheap, 2025-10-08).
Timing
Because the .ai market grew so fast, older sales are weaker evidence. stack.ai sold for 4,449 USD (Whois.ai, 2021-07-06) before its 2024 sale. A 2021 .ai price is history, not a current comp. Weight sales from the last 12 to 18 months more heavily.
Renewal cost
.ai registrations and renewals cost noticeably more per year than a typical .com. That shapes investor behaviour. Holding a large .ai portfolio is expensive, so investors are more selective and more willing to sell at wholesale prices to reduce carrying costs.
Wholesale and retail in .ai
The gap between investor prices and end-user prices is often wide in .ai. The clearest recorded example is zip.ai, which sold for 1,610 USD (Park.io, 2021-08-10) and later for 200,000 USD (Afternic, 2025-03-27). That is an outlier, not a norm, but it shows why mixing venues produces nonsense.
Some .ai names trade repeatedly between investors, and the price does not always hold. quran.ai sold for 100,999 USD (Dynadot, 2024-09-02) and five weeks later for 37,001 USD (Dynadot, 2024-10-07). Others fell over a longer stretch, as arena.ai did from 65,098 USD (Whois.ai, 2022-09-06) to 16,202 USD (Dynadot, 2024-10-07). Investor enthusiasm in .ai can run ahead of end-user demand.
When pricing an .ai name, decide which number you need. If you are bidding at an expired auction, use investor venue comps. If you are setting a buy now price for a startup, use end-user marketplace comps, and expect a longer wait for the right buyer.
How to use comps for an .ai name
- Stay inside .ai. A .com sale of the same word tells you about the word, not about the .ai market.
- Match the term class. Compare AI terms with AI terms, developer terms with developer terms, brandables with brandables.
- Match length and structure. A four letter .ai and a two-word .ai are different assets.
- Prefer recent sales. The market looked very different in 2021 and 2022.
- Separate venues. Read DropCatch, Dynadot, Namecheap and Park.io prices as wholesale, and Afternic, Sedo and Atom.com prices as retail.
- Look past exact keywords. Names that share meaning are valid comps even if they share no letters. Our guide to domain comps explains how to weigh them.
Do not anchor on the top sales
The live list below includes six figure sales such as wisdom.ai at 750,000 USD (Grit Brokerage, 2025-10-13). These are useful for understanding the ceiling of the extension, and almost useless as comps for an ordinary .ai name. Most recorded .ai sales are in the low thousands. Look at the median in the data below before you look at the top.
How SoldComparables handles .ai names
SoldComparables recognises .ai as its own market. When you search an .ai name, comps from the same extension get a strong relevance boost, and each comp is labelled "Same .ai extension" where it applies. Term class matters too. A developer term like crons.ai is matched with other developer terms through meaning, using an embedding language model that has precomputed which words are close (so "cron" is near "scheduler", "task" and "job").
Each comp is scored from 0 to 100 with up to three plain reasons, and shows its venue tier, date and a link to the public report it came from. The estimate gives low, likely and high values, separate wholesale and retail figures, a confidence level, and a rationale that cites comps by name, price and date. If there are fewer than three good .ai comps, the report says so and widens the range.
For other extensions, see .com domain sales and .io domain sales. For a broad view of the market, browse recent domain sales.
Check your own .ai name on the domain appraisal tool, or see what each plan includes on the pricing page.