Half a second between hitting enter and seeing a page, and so much happens in that tiny gap.

Your browser checks its cache, then asks a resolver to find the domain. The resolver works up the chain: root servers, TLD servers, then the domain's authoritative nameserver, which hands back the IP address.
With the address in hand, your browser opens a connection, runs the TLS handshake, and requests the page. The server sends it back, and the browser renders it.

Imagine owning just two letters and letting the world use them. That's the story of Tuvalu. Its country-code domain is .tv. Broadcasters, video platforms, streamers, and media companies all wanted its address ending. As a result, this small Pacific nation found itself connected to one of the internet's most recognizable domain extensions.

Not a bad outcome for two letters.

Spent four days in Seville this June at the
ICANN86 Policy Forum, where our team joined discussions about the future of the domain industry. Andalusian heat outside, heated DNS debates inside.

Two topics came up again and again: how AI is changing DNS abuse. The new risks it brings, and whether it can also help address them. And the upcoming new round of top-level domains, which will allow brands and communities to launch their own extensions for the first time in years.

Great to be part of the conversations shaping what's next!

Your favicon (that tiny icon next to a site's name in your browser tab), is the smallest piece of branding you'll ever own, and the only one people see when they've got 42 tabs open. Teams spend months on a logo and zero seconds on the 16 pixels that actually help someone find your tab again.

What's a favicon you'd recognize anywhere?

Here's a quick brand test. Think of a name. Now imagine saying it to someone over a bad phone connection. If they can spell the domain correctly on the first try, that's a good sign.

People have been trained to do the same thing for decades: hear a name, type a domain.

What's a brand name you've heard once and never had to look up how to spell?

Dubai just turned its own name into a verb. The UAE government launched "Dubai it" as a phrase meaning to make something extraordinary happen at record speed.

Basically "Google it," but the brand is ambition. It works because the name got big enough that people started using it as shorthand without thinking. Sheikh Hamdan recently spotlighted the idea himself.

Every brand that gets there starts in the same place: a name people remember, and a domain that makes it findable. What brand would you say has truly earned verb status?

Search engines and AI can read your website, but they don't always understand what they're looking at. Structured data helps by labeling the important parts for them. You're telling them: this is the price, this is the FAQ, the stuff they'd otherwise have to guess.

Rotten Tomatoes saw a 25% higher click-through rate after adding it. It's not complicated. It just gives machines clearer signals about your page.

And here's the part about structured data most people still miss: it's not just a Google thing anymore.

AI agents now browse and shortlist products for real people, and they lean on structured data to figure out what you offer. Clean labels, you make the list. Messy ones, you get scrolled past.

One mistake trips people up constantly though: the labels have to match the page. Say ""in stock"" in your markup while the page says sold out, and you'll get flagged. You've basically lied to a robot, and robots keep receipts.

AI can draft the markup, but give it a vague prompt and it'll confidently invent fields that were never there. Tiny robot enthusiasm still needs adult supervision.

Have you set this up on your own site, or is it still on the someday list?

What happens to domain names when people discover businesses through AI assistants and platforms instead of clicking through search results?

In our interview, Simone Catania, Global Content & Communications Manager at InterNetX, explains how this shift is changing the role of domains — from web addresses into trust and identity signals for users, platforms, and AI systems. Read ↩️

The EU AI Act may apply far beyond companies building AI models.

This article explains the risk categories, key 2026 requirements, and what businesses should review now. Read ↩️

Google’s Search team rolled out its June 2026 spam update, aimed at low-quality auto-generated pages Google’s been targeting for years.

Every one of these updates rewards the same thing: content made for actual humans. Google won’t share the technical details, but it points to SpamBrain, its AI system for sniffing out spam, doing most of the work.

Build for readers and these updates start feeling like a tailwind instead.

More in our June digest: Read ↩️

A missed domain renewal can disrupt your website, email, and other business systems.

This article explains how auto-renew works and what to check when choosing a registrar. Read ↩️

AI makes content easier to produce and brands harder to control.

In his new Forbes Business Council article, our CEO Andrey Insarov explains how clearer guidelines, shared prompts, and stronger ownership can keep marketing consistent. Read ↩️

New SparkToro data: 68% of US Google searches now end without a single click. People get the answer right on the page and never visit anyone.

Google is answering more inside its own interface now. AI overviews show on over 20% of searches and cut click-throughs by around 60% when they appear. For years the whole job was earning the click. Now two-thirds of the time there's no click left to earn.

If you're not in the answer, you don't exist. Where does that leave everyone still chasing the click?

More in our June digest: Read ↩️

For years a hyphen in a domain carried a whiff of spam. It's how throwaway sites and knock-offs often looked, so the clean version became the one everyone chased.

Google's John Mueller, a Search Advocate at Google, keeps setting the record straight: hyphens don't help your rankings and they don't hurt them. Search engines don't favour clean domains or punish hyphenated ones. What actually moves rankings is the quality of the site, not one dash sitting in the address.

So if the name you love is only free with a hyphen, that's a fair trade, as long as it still reads clean and people can remember it. That poor dash has been carrying decades of undeserved shame.

India just handed part of its domain security to AI. NIXI, the body that runs the country's .in space, launched a platform that reads new registrations as they happen and flags the fingerprints of phishing and fraud before the bad ones settle in.

The same AI wave that helps criminals spin up fake domains faster is now aimed back at catching them. An arms race where both sides raid the same toolbox.

When does a business need a second domain?

This article covers three practical uses: launching a separate project, entering a new market, and protecting a brand. Read ↩️

More content does not mean more attention.

Our CEO Andrey Insarov’s latest Forbes Business Council article looks at why brands need human judgment for buyers and clear, discoverable information for AI systems. Read ↩️

In 2015 a man bought Google.сom for twelve dollars. Checkout actually went through, and for about a minute the world's biggest domain sat in his account as purchased.

Then Google cancelled the transaction. They offered him a reward for reporting it, around $6,000, then doubled it when he said he'd give the money to charity.

Picture the receipt: "Google.сom, $12.00," filed between a phone bill and a parking ticket. Is this the best-paid minute in internet history, or can you top it?

Looking back at this year's Prime Day: Check Point researchers counted nearly 7,000 (!!) Amazon-themed domains registered in the months before the sale opened on June 23. Around one in eleven were flagged as malicious or suspicious.

Big sales bring phishing crews out in force. A ticking countdown turns careful people into fast clickers.

The address bar is worth a look before you click: an extra word tacked on, or a letter swapped to look almost right. It won't catch everything, subdomains and lookalike characters can slip past, but it's a cheap first check.

How is your website performing in AI assistants?

Here are five free ways to track visibility, citations, traffic, and crawler access. Read ↩️

The SEO question used to be where you rank. Now it's also whether you show up in the answer. Plenty of searches end without a click, so being named in an AI reply can matter alongside sitting high on the page.

How those answers get assembled is its own puzzle, and plenty of signals feed into it.