GoDaddy, the largest domain registrar in the world, conducted a survey in March to find out what requirements Americans have for domain names, with almost 1,500 respondents. The survey results indicate that the criteria for a green flag domain name remain unchanged: it must be short, easy to pronounce, and free of spelling errors. A perfect domain name matches the name of the business that uses it.
According to Online Domain, 80 percent of respondents said they avoided visiting a website if it had an oddly spelled domain name. It is noteworthy that young people (born between the mid-1990s and the early 2010s), who are usually reproached for their love of deliberately distorting words, tend to avoid them more often, with this figure rising to 82 percent. When listing the green flag features of a domain name, respondents said that it should correspond to a real word and be spelled correctly (43 percent); be short (no more than two words, 40 percent); be easy to pronounce (38 percent); have a unique domain extension (such as .SHOP or .AI, 23 percent) or be humorous (for example, include a pun or internal rhyme, 19 percent).
According to the respondents, the red flags include misspellings (56 percent), a mismatch between the domain name and the company or brand name (55 percent), the use of hyphens in the domain (20 percent), numbers (20 percent) and the use of third-level domain names (20 percent).
It is also noteworthy that, although experts believe new search engines powered by artificial intelligence tools should change the attitude towards domain names and reduce their importance, nothing of the sort has happened so far. Fifty percent of respondents said they regularly typed the names of websites they want to visit into their browser's address bar.
