New sales and prospecting .ai domains grew 12x between 2021 and 2025

Every AI sales startup needs a name, and a lot of them now end in .ai. To measure how fast this corner of the market is filling up, Hollerly counted .ai domains with sales and prospecting words in the name (sales, leads, prospect, outreach, outbound, cold call or cold email, SDR and BDR) and grouped them by the year they were first registered.

The count only includes domains that host a site visible in search results. Domains that were bought and never used are mostly left out.

Key findings

• 409 new .ai domains with sales or prospecting terms in the name were registered in 2025 and later appeared in search, up from 33 in 2021.
• That is 12.4 times as many as in 2021, and 42% more than the 288 registered in 2024.
• The biggest jump came in 2023, when the yearly count went from 39 to 182.
• Domains with "leads" in the name rose from 6 in 2021 to 156 in 2025.
• Only 10 of the 2025 domains used "SDR" or "BDR" in the name, so most AI sales products are not branding themselves around the job title.
• Sales-themed names made up 3.5 of every 1,000 new .ai domains in 2025, close to the 4.1 per 1,000 seen in 2021.

Steady growth since 2023

The count was flat in 2021 and 2022, then rose more than fourfold in 2023, the first full year after general-purpose chat assistants went mainstream. It kept climbing in 2024 (288) and 2025 (409).

Which words founders pick

"Sales" is the most common term, with 197 of the 2025 domains. "Leads" grew fastest: it appeared in 6 new domains in 2021 and 156 in 2025. Names built on outreach or outbound went from 3 in 2021 to 26 in 2025, and prospecting names from none in 2021 to 20 in 2025.

SDR and BDR names are still rare. Across the five years, 19 domains used either term, with 10 of them registered in 2025. Founders appear to prefer outcome words such as leads and sales over the name of the role an AI agent might fill.

Growing in step with AI overall

The share of new .ai domains that carry a sales term has stayed in a narrow band: between 3.5 and 4.4 per 1,000 each year from 2021 to 2025. In other words, sales tools are growing about as fast as the .ai namespace as a whole. The rise is real, but it reflects a broad wave of AI company formation rather than sales tools pulling away from other categories.

For buyers, the practical takeaway is that the number of AI sales products to evaluate is still rising year over year. For founders, it means name collisions are getting more common: the short, obvious .ai names in this space were mostly taken by 2024.

Hollerly's AI SDR software researches leads, writes LinkedIn and email outreach and drafts replies, with a person approving every campaign.

About the data

• Data: Whois registration records (creation dates) for .ai domains that host a site visible in search results, as of October 2, 2026.
• Sample: 1,317 .ai domains whose names contain sales and prospecting terms. Names that match a term but are not about sales are excluded (for example "drive" and "dream" names that contain "sdr" or "bdr", "pipeline" and "meetings" names, and phrases such as "without boundaries"). That leaves 1,188 domains, of which 951 were created between 2021 and 2025.
• Categories: each domain is counted once, using the first matching term in this order: SDR or BDR, outreach or outbound or cold call or cold email, prospect, leads, sales.
• Baseline: the total number of .ai domains visible in search that were created in each calendar year.
• Limitations: domain names miss companies with generic or non-.ai names, so this is a lower bound on new AI sales products and a proxy for company formation, not a census. Only domains that host a site visible in search are counted, so recent registrations are undercounted. For that reason the 2026 year-to-date figure (174 domains from January to September) is in the data file but not compared with earlier years. Some matched names may belong to non-AI businesses that chose a .ai domain.

Sources

• Whois registration records for .ai domains visible in search results, October 2026