In 2025, the domain industry moved decisively from a fragmented ecosystem into a more integrated, capital-intensive market where infrastructure, identity, and AI are increasingly intertwined. Consolidation accelerated, regulation raised the bar for security and compliance, and new technologies began pushing domains beyond simple web addresses toward roles tied to trust and machine-readable identity.

This review captures the year’s key market signals and turning points shaping how domains are registered, valued, and used going into 2026.

Global Registration Dynamics and TLD Performance

Legacy TLDs still anchor the market. As of September 30, 2025, the combined base of .com and .net registrations stood at 171.9 million. While .com remains the undisputed king of commercial identity, accounting for over 159.4 million registered domains, its growth rate has plateaued relative to the broader market. Their ~75.3% renewal rate remains the benchmark, reflecting primarily active use or long-term holding.

By contrast, new gTLDs drove volume growth, rising 21% YoY on aggressive pricing and strong extensions like .xyz, .shop, and .online. But with only ~32.2% renewals, this segment reveals a “churn and burn” dynamic where millions of domains are registered for temporary campaigns, SEO experiments, or speculative plays, only to be abandoned after the first year.

The ccTLD market reached 144.8 million registrations in Q3 2025, expanding by 3.4% year-over-year. This sector is increasingly influenced by geopolitical factors.

• Digital Sovereignty: The robust performance of .de (Germany), .uk (United Kingdom), and .nl (Netherlands) reflects strong local economies where the ccTLD is preferred over .com for domestic commerce.
• Isolationist Growth: The growth of .ru (Russia) and .cn (China) is partially driven by internal internet governance policies that encourage or mandate the use of domestic namespaces to ensure compliance with local data laws and internet firewalls.
• The intrinsic meaning: ccTLDs like .ai (Anguilla) and .io (British Indian Ocean Territory) continued to transcend their geographic designation, functioning effectively as tech-driven TLDs. Their primary role highlights how TLDs can be reinterpreted as category-defining digital real estate when their letters align with a rapidly growing industry.

To explore the full dataset and what it signals for 2026, register for the Global Domain Report 2026 for a comprehensive overview of 2026 domain market data and trends.

The 2025 Domain Industry Chronicle

To understand how these forces reshaped the market in real time, the following chronology traces the defining events of 2025—linking regulatory milestones, corporate moves, and technological disruptions into a single narrative.

Q1 2025: The AI Pivot and Regulatory posturing

The year began with Google Registry targeting the creator economy. On January 7, 2025, Google announced the launch sequence for .channel, a namespace designed specifically for content creators and publishers on platforms like YouTube and Twitch.

Simultaneously, the marketing landscape for domains shifted back to the mainstream. On February 5, 2025, GoDaddy revealed its return to the Super Bowl advertising stage after eight years. The commercial, airing during the game and starring actor Walton Goggins, did not market domain registration only but promoted their AI-powered solution that generates logos, websites, and marketing plans starting from a simple domain search. This marked the domain industry’s definitive pivot: registrars are no longer selling digital real estate; they are now selling AI-generated business instant-start capabilities.

On the regulatory side, ICANN82 took place in Seattle in March 2025 with a strong focus on the New gTLD Program: Next Round. The ICANN Board cleared key issues around string similarity reviews, moving the Applicant Guidebook closer to completion. The community also worked on the Applicant Support Program (ASP), which aims to reduce application fees for underrepresented regions and is vital for the program’s overall acceptance.

Q2 2025: Record-Breaking Sales and Infrastructure Expansion

The domain aftermarket exploded in April 2025 with the sale of icon.com for $12,000,000. Brokered by a consortium including Andrew Miller and Hilco Digital, this transaction, reported on April 30, reaffirmed the value of “category-killer” dictionary .com domains even in a fragmented namespace. This sale served as a benchmark for corporate asset valuation throughout the rest of the year.

While the high end of the market celebrated, the infrastructure layer kept expanding. Team Internet Group (formerly CentralNic) strengthened its position in the backend registry space by taking over operation of the .co (Colombia) registry in June 2025, successfully migrating more than 3.3 million domains.

Meanwhile, the new TLD segment saw some new entries. On May 30, 2025, .free, .hot, and .spot entered General Availability, attempting to capture the specificity that generic .coms can no longer provide at an affordable entry price.

InterNetX, a brand of the IONOS Group, announced a partnership with D3 to begin tokenizing domains and bridging them to Solana via D3’s Doma Protocol. The goal is to make domains tradable on-chain while keeping them fully DNS-functional, effectively bringing mainstream domains onto Web3 rails without changing how they work on the internet. The announcement also points to deeper integration with the Web3 ecosystem, enabling “DomainFi” use cases such as marketplace trading, domain-backed lending, and fractional ownership. For the domain aftermarket, it signals that registrars are experimenting with new liquidity and financing layers on top of traditional domain inventory.

Q3 2025: More AI and Legal Battles

The third quarter was defined by massive consolidation. On September 12, 2025, CVC Capital Partners announced the acquisition of a majority stake in Namecheap, the world’s second-largest retail registrar, for $1.5 billion. This deal was a seismic shift in the competitive landscape. Namecheap, long the “independent” challenger to GoDaddy, now has the private equity backing to compete on enterprise services and potentially integrate with CVC’s other major holding, WebPros (cPanel/Plesk).

While Namecheap consolidated, Squarespace focused on product evolution. On September 30, 2025, the company unveiled “Refresh 2025,” a major platform update introducing Squarespace Beacon AI. This tool offers “AI Optimization” (AIO) for domains, guiding users through SEO and content strategies, further blurring the line between registrar and agency offering digital AI-powered services.

Legal disputes over AI and copyright also intensified. In September 2025, major rightsholders—including Warner Bros. Discovery and Encyclopedia Britannica—filed lawsuits against AI companies such as Midjourney and Perplexity, claiming their copyrighted works were used without permission to train AI models. The implications for the domain industry are profound: if content generated by AI on a domain is deemed uncopyrightable or infringing, the valuation of developed websites could plummet, impacting the value of a domain, a factor particularly important in the domain aftermarket.

Q4 2025: Fragility, Governance, and Future Tech

The final quarter began with a critical governance milestone. At the ICANN84 Annual General Meeting in Dublin (October 25-30, 2025), the ICANN Board formally adopted the Next Round Applicant Guidebook, clearing the path for the 2026 application window. This historic decision officially opened the door for the next great expansion of the internet’s namespace.

However, November brought a stark reminder of the internet’s vulnerability. On November 18, 2025, a massive outage struck Cloudflare, taking down a significant portion of the web, including major platforms like X and ChatGPT. The outage, caused by a deployment error in a bot management configuration file, lasted over four hours. It catalyzed an immediate industry-wide shift toward Multi-CDN strategies, as relying on a single provider for DNS and content delivery was proven to be a single point of failure for millions of domains.

In response to the growing role of AI, GoDaddy launched the Agent Name Service (ANS) on November 20, 2025. This protocol utilizes the DNS infrastructure to provide verified identities for AI agents, effectively creating a “phone book” for autonomous software. This represents a potential new utility layer for domains, expanding their purpose beyond human-readable web addresses to trust anchors in AI search.

In December 2025, Newfold Digital (Bluehost, Network Solutions, Register.com) raised $100 million from Clearlake and Siris. The funding was aimed at strengthening the balance sheet, not acquisitions. It buys time to streamline operations and integrate its many brands and platforms. The period also pointed to divestitures, including the reported sale of MarkMonitor to Com Laude, to refocus on its SME core.

The year ended with the release of the WIPO—ICA Final Report on the UDRP Review on December 2, 2025, which favored incremental, practical improvements rather than major reforms. It recommended steps like standardized registrar verification and stronger ICANN enforcement to ensure registrars properly “lock” domains during disputes and prevent stealth transfers. At the same time, it rejected a “loser pays” rule, helping brand owners avoid added financial risk when pursuing clear cases of cybersquatting. The report also declined to require mandatory mediation, limiting opportunities for bad-faith registrants to delay proceedings.

Building the Next Era of Domain Value

By the end of 2025, the domain industry will have evolved into a mature, regulated, and capital-intensive pillar of core internet infrastructure. Consolidation has accelerated, concentrating scale, pricing power, and influence in the hands of a few major players. At the same time, the source of value is shifting from memorable, human-first domain names to domains as verified identity—trust anchors for AI agents—and, increasingly, as tokenized real-world assets within the Web3 ecosystem.

Looking ahead to 2026, resilience and redundancy will move to the forefront, while the next new gTLD round is set to reshape strategy as brands and communities consider applying for their own trusted namespaces. The Global Domain Report 2026 will capture the data-driven facts and figures of the market in 2026—and explore what comes next.