Is .io Going Away? And Should Your Startup Pick .ai Instead?

Short answer, no, .io is not going away on any date anyone can name. ICANN's policy retires a country domain when its code leaves the ISO list of countries, and even then it starts a five-year phase-out that can be extended. As of 3 October 2026 the UK law needed to hand over the Chagos Islands has not passed. Should you pick .ai instead? Only if you are building an AI product and the .com is gone. .ai has its own risks, and most funded startups still sit on .com.

Here is what we checked, with the source for each claim, and what we would do if we were choosing today.

What ICANN says would happen to .io

The worry comes from where .io lives. It is the country code for the British Indian Ocean Territory, which is the Chagos Archipelago, and the UK and Mauritius signed a treaty on 22 May 2025 to transfer it. ICANN, the body that runs the domain system, published its position in a November 2024 post. If sovereignty changes, it is "likely to trigger an evaluation" by the committee that maintains the ISO 3166-1 list. If .io is then removed from that list, ICANN's retirement policy applies, and the policy is slow by design.

IANA's retirement rules say the domain is removed after five years by default. The operator can ask for up to five more years, with a retirement plan, within 12 months of the notice. For a sense of pace, ICANN's technical arm only wrote to the operator of .su in February 2025, which left the ISO list in 1992, and retirement is planned for 2030.

Where the treaty stands

We checked the UK Parliament's own tracker for the Diego Garcia Military Base and British Indian Ocean Territory Bill on 3 October 2026. It is not an Act. It has not been withdrawn or defeated either, and its last update was 30 April 2026, at the stage where the Lords consider the Commons amendments. In other words, the deal is neither done nor dead. News reports describe US objections and a stalled bill, but we could not confirm those at the source, so we are leaving them out.

What this means for you. A .io domain registered today works today. Even in the worst case you would be looking at a notice, then five years or more. That is a risk to monitor, not a reason to panic.

What .ai risks instead

.ai has no sovereignty question hanging over it, but it has a dependency. IANA lists the Government of Anguilla as the sponsoring organisation. Anguilla Focus reports that .ai earned the island EC$230 million, about US$85.3 million, in 2025, from the Ministry of Finance's monthly figures. In September 2025 the technology minister said .ai was expected to bring in nearly half of the government's revenue. The government announced in January 2026 that the namespace had passed one million domains.

Our read is that this cuts both ways. A government with that much riding on the domain has every reason to keep it running. It also gives the registry pricing power, and the table below shows it has raised the price.

What each one costs

These are wholesale prices, what the registry charges registrars. Registrars set their own prices on top, so what you pay at checkout can differ.

What Google does with them

Nothing special. Google's documentation lists both .ai and .io among the country domains it treats as generic, because users and site owners see them as less country-specific. That means neither one ties your site to Anguilla or the Chagos Islands in search. It says nothing about whether either ranks better or worse than a .com, so we would not claim that either way.

What funded startups actually pick

Two datasets, measuring different things, so we are not blending them.

1. Smartbranding's August 2026 funding report covers 502 funding deals, pre-seed to Series E. 319 used .com (64%), 63 used .ai (13%) and 27 used .io (5%). It is one month of deals, and the page does not say where the data comes from, so read it as a snapshot, not a verdict on what works.
2. Identity Digital's analysis of more than 4,000 Y Combinator and Techstars startups found 28% chose .ai in the first half of 2025, up 7 points from 2024. Identity Digital runs the .ai and .io registries, so weigh it as a vendor's claim.

The two can sit side by side because the samples differ, an accelerator cohort in one and a month of funding deals in the other. Neither source lets us say why .ai is more common in one than the other.

The .com is often a later purchase

Plenty of companies start on a workaround and buy the .com once they can. Close started in 2013 on close.io because close.com was taken, and bought it in 2019 after more than five years of follow-ups, without publishing the price. Their reason was that they had outgrown .io and wanted to signal they were here to stay. Buffer and Dropbox did the same with a prefix or suffix. Buffer spent 624 days moving from bufferapp.com to buffer.com, and Dropbox bought dropbox.com in 2009 after starting on getdropbox.com. Those two were not country domains, but the plan is the same, start with what you can get and upgrade later. If you go that way, our guide to what to do when the .com is taken covers the other options.

What we would do

This is our view, not a finding.

1. If the .com is free, take it. It is the default people type, and the data above shows most funded companies still use it.
2. If it is not and you build AI, .ai is fine. Budget for the renewal, and expect the price to move again.
3. If you are a developer tool, .io is still a normal choice. Watch the bill in Parliament, not the headlines.
4. Do not make a country domain your only address. Whichever you pick, try to own a .com variant, or have a plan to buy one, before you print anything.
5. Check the handles before you commit. A domain that works but a name that is taken on every social platform is only half a win. Our guide to checking usernames across platforms shows how, and our Namecheckr alternatives roundup and Nymly vs KnowEm comparison cover the tools.

For the wider comparison of extensions, including .co and .app, read the domain availability guide. If the name itself is the problem, see why single-word names are eating tech.

Questions people ask about .io and .ai

Check a name on .com, .ai and .io at once

We built Nymly so you do not have to check these one at a time. Describe your business in the chat, and it replies with names and shows which extensions and handles are free beside each one.