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Slovenia’s .si domain rush

Slovenia’s .si domain rush

Why Slovenian .si domains are suddenly in high demand

Until a few weeks ago, Slovenia’s national domain, .si, mostly interested Slovenians, roughly 2.1 million people. Then Donald Trump decided that the word “artificial” makes machine intelligence sound fake. On September 22, at the UN General Assembly, he announced that the United States would adopt the phrase “super intelligence,” shortened to SI. On September 29 he signed an executive order telling federal agencies to use “Super Intelligence” and “SI” in official documents, websites and communications.

The Slovenian registry felt it right away. According to Register.si figures reported by AGI, more than 3,700 new .si domains were registered in 24 hours, against just over 3,500 in the entire previous month. Active domains have passed 200,000 (Euronews puts the figure above 220,000). Registry spokesperson Klara Herman described a strong but steady rise in requests, and Register.si itself urged companies and trademark holders to act quickly.

Netcraft, a cybersecurity firm, noticed registrations climbing as early as September 19, when Trump posted a poll on Truth Social. Some names, such as donaldjtrump.si, showed up for resale almost immediately.

The .ai precedent and the appeal of country codes

We have seen this script before. Anguilla, a Caribbean island of about 16,000 people, watched demand for its .ai extension explode after ChatGPT launched. Government budget documents cited by AGI show registrations bringing in about $85 million in 2025, and they are expected to account for almost 40% of non-tax revenue in 2026. Earlier still came Tuvalu’s .tv, a favorite of video platforms, and Montenegro’s .me, which became the go-to ending for personal websites.

I understand the pull. A domain that reads like a word or an industry acronym is a small marketing coup, it costs little, and it solves the problem of a .com that is already taken. The catch is that a country extension is no neutral sticker. It comes with a nation, that nation’s rules and its reputation, and when it comes to search positioning I consider it a gamble.

How Google treats a country domain like .si

For Google, a ccTLD, the top-level domain of a country, is a strong signal: it tells users and search engines that a site is explicitly meant for that nation. Google Search Central says so plainly in its guidance on multi-regional sites.

There is an exception, though. Google keeps a list of about twenty “vanity” extensions it treats as generic, with no link to their country of origin: .io, .co, .me and .tv are on it, and so, since 2023, is .ai. When .ai joined, Google’s Gary Illyes remarked that targeting Anguilla had just become a little harder.

Neither .si nor .ly is on that list. Today a .si site is read as aimed at Slovenia, and a .ly site at Libya. On top of that, the old International Targeting report in Search Console, which let site owners correct the target country by hand, has been retired. Hreflang, language, local addresses and links still count, yet the domain signal keeps its weight. Google might add .si one day, as it did with .ai, but nobody can promise it, and building a strategy on a maybe hardly seems wise. Search is already shifting under our feet, as I wrote in Google shifts, clicks drop, so adding another variable feels unnecessary.

Trust and recall: what studies say about domain extensions

Then there is how people perceive a domain. In a GrowthBadger experiment with 1,500 participants, shown a made-up domain with different extensions, .com earned the highest trust score (3.5 out of 5) and 44% of people recalled it correctly, compared with 33% for .co. Among those who remembered the right name but the wrong ending, 57 typed .com, almost four times the runner-up.

ICANN’s 2015 survey of more than 6,000 users points the same way: established and country domains enjoy trust levels around 90%, while new extensions stop at 49%. Audiences drift back to .com out of habit, and a .si meant as “super intelligence” may well be typed as something else entirely.

The .ly case: when the country behind the domain becomes a problem

I have seen the consequences firsthand. One of my clients, whose company name ends in “ly,” could not get the .com and settled on the Libyan .ly, which looked tailor-made. A clever move on paper that brought him trouble instead, because Libya is a country under sanctions.

Since February 26, 2011, with Resolution 1970, the UN Security Council has subjected Libya to an arms embargo, asset freezes and travel bans, and referred the situation to the International Criminal Court over violence against civilians. Over the years the European Union has added people and entities to its own list for human rights abuses and breaches of the embargo, and the United States runs an active sanctions program, updated as recently as September 30. This is no blanket embargo, so a .ly domain is not illegal, but the word “Libya” trips alarms in the screening systems of banks, platforms and vendors.

The registry’s rules matter too. NIC.LY’s regulations ban names contrary to Libyan law or Islamic morality and reserve the right to suspend or delete a domain at any time, including on the order of a Libyan court. This is not hypothetical: in 2010 the authorities shut down vb.ly, a URL shortener with adult content, and in 2011, during the war, the service Letter.ly lost its domain because its local registrar had gone dark, and ended up moving to letterly.net. Depending on a foreign jurisdiction is a theme I also explored in Bern steps away from Microsoft.

What to weigh before buying a country domain

The .si extension carries none of the geopolitical baggage of .ly, and Slovenia is an EU member. The lesson still stands. Before falling for an acronym, it pays to ask whether Google treats that extension as generic or national, what conditions the registry imposes, what happens if the country changes its rules or ends up under sanctions, and whether your audience will remember it or instinctively go back to .com.

Personally, I would rather have a .com with a slightly less elegant name, or a local domain if the market is right there, than an exotic extension that hinges on the mood of an American president. The super intelligence craze may last as long as the “Gulf of America,” while the domain, along with its effects on search rankings, stays.

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Chiara Bonifazi