.prompt
Is .prompt a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
.prompt is not contested. One application for it is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list, as of 8 October 2026. It is Prompt Domains. Identity Digital named .prompt as a backup string for three of its applications: .gaming, .drone and .dao. ICANN deactivated those backups, because another applicant applied for the same string or named it as a backup. EchoStar named .prompt as a backup string for its .token application. ICANN deactivated it, because another applicant applied for the same string or named it as a backup.
Who is applying, and what they run today
One of the two already run TLDs, 54K names between them. Prompt Domains runs none.
Will names sell?
A niche address for AI prompt tools and agent projects; catchy in that scene, but most serious AI ventures will still pick .ai or .com first.
Last round the AI scored the 2012 strings blind to their fate. Strings it scored 60 or more hold a median 27,168 names today; those under 30, a median of 30. .prompt’s closest 2012 strings hold .bot 23K, .app 1.48M and .dev 713K.
The nearest 2012 strings, and how many names each holds today
The closest 2012 string, .bot, held 23,099 names, June 2026. .app held 1,478,674; .dev held 712,600. Chosen by AI from every string in the 2012 round, without being told what happened to any of them.
Same bet: an ordinary English word that a nascent machine-intelligence practice had just repurposed into its core artifact noun, sold to tooling startups and builders on the wager that the practice institutionalizes and its working vocabulary becomes an identity layer.
Same shape of bet — the everyday word for the unit of output a technical craft produces, open to anyone who makes one — but it launched with a decade-old, mass-market noun behind it, where .prompt is betting the noun stays load-bearing at all.
Same buyer and same wager on tribe vocabulary — the builder's own shorthand as their primary identity — though it names the practitioner rather than the artifact the practitioner produces.
builders of prompt libraries, prompt marketplaces, and agent tooling, plus AI-adjacent creators and educators who want a term-of-art address for a side project or product surface
What a .prompt domain is
.prompt is not a TLD yet. It is a string on our record of the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, in our AI & tech category. One application for it is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list.
Is the .prompt domain extension real yet?
.prompt is not yet a domain extension you can register: nothing resolves under it, and no registrar sells names in it. It is a string applicants have put forward in the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, the process that decides whether it becomes one.
When can you buy a .prompt domain?
You can’t yet. A .prompt name can only be registered once the string is delegated (added to the DNS root) and its registry opens. Last round's closest parallel to .prompt was .bot, delegated on 5 December 2015.
Is .prompt a real TLD?
Not yet. .prompt is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because .prompt is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list of applied-for strings. Every entry on this page links to its source.
The source’s 5 linesHide the lines
AM2619T-T27484 · Acid Medal, LLC · replacement string of .dao · Deactivated AM2619T-T43322 · Acid Medal, LLC · replacement string of .drone · Deactivated AM2619T-T51241 · Acid Medal, LLC · replacement string of .gaming · Deactivated EDCL2689T-T95368 · ECHO Domain Co L.L.C. · replacement string of .token · Deactivated PI2677T-T54890 · .Prompt Inc. · primary
“Cyril Frémont, CEO at web.best and .Best, has publicly revealed 10 proposed top-level domain applications for ICANN's 2026 new gTLD round.”DNForum
- Band chosen: 30-49, usable but limited. The string is a genuine term of art in the AI economy, and right-of-dot constructions like agent.prompt (the applicant's announced example) read naturally, so registrations at volume are plausible on the AI wave over the next 5 years. It is not in the 50-69 band because there is no evidence yet of sustained demand or primary-identity use for this exact string, and the category already has a de facto standard: by analogy, .ai became the AI category's primary-identity default, and projects that outgrow a novelty domain tend to migrate to .ai or .com, leaving narrow-term TLDs as secondary or campaign addresses. It is above the 10-29 band because the underlying market (prompt tooling, agent infrastructure, AI content commerce) is large and growing, the word is short and universally understood inside that market, and hack-style strings (by analogy with .new and .ing) show at least steady novelty and product-surface demand rather than one-off event demand. Applicant context, stated neutrally from the verified facts: the applicant operates .best (IANA-delegated 2014, run as a live namespace since 2018 per the operator) with CentralNic as technical backend, which suggests routine operational capacity; adoption still depends on the string, not the operator. My main market uncertainty: whether 'prompt' remains the salient unit of AI interaction over 5 years; agentic and multimodal interfaces may abstract prompts away, which would date the string the way earlier tech-fad terms dated, collapsing it toward vanity use.