.si vs .ai: Don't Move a Working Domain

.si vs .ai is a country-code choice. .si belongs to Slovenia. .ai belongs to Anguilla. Google treats .ai as a generic ending and still treats .si as a signal for Slovenia. The letters in either ending are not a ranking bonus. If people already reach you on a working domain, leave that address in place.

The September 29, 2026 order tells the US executive branch to say Super Intelligence, or SI, instead of artificial intelligence. DNS stays where it is. Mailboxes stay where they are. Two hosts still mean two Search Console properties. EventDash records the page URL the visitor actually loaded. A new hostname is a different URL, and the old events stay on the old one.

We did not move eventda.sh. We already have to say that this site is not the eventdash.ai event planner. Similar letters are a weak identity. They are a poor reason to throw away an address that invoices, docs, and inboxes already use.

What .si and .ai actually are

Both endings are country-code top-level domains. IANA's delegation record for .si names the Academic and Research Network of Slovenia as the manager. Registration date on that record: 1 April 1992. The .ai record names the Government of Anguilla, registered 16 February 1995. Those dates are the DNS identity. A marketing reading of the letters does not rewrite the record.

Buyers already treat .ai as an artificial intelligence address. After the Super Intelligence order, some buyers try to read .si the same way. IANA does not. A company on .si has not become a superintelligent product because of the ending. A company on .ai has not become a working AI product because of the ending. We already deal with that mix-up: eventda.sh is this analytics product, and eventdash.ai is a different event planner. The letters are easy to mix up, which is why the public site says they are different.

Decide the job of the name before you compare prices. A primary address is the one on the invoice and in the product. A campaign name can redirect. An extra registration that never points at a page is a renewal someone will miss.

Read the checkout for the exact name. Years included, the renewal, the currency, and which inbox gets the expiry mail. A cheap first year can be the expensive name once the renewal arrives. The number that matters is that checkout, for that name, on the day you look.

Put the registrant on an account the company can open if one person is out. A domain that lives only in a founder inbox is a domain you lose on a bad week.

A registration rush is not a reason to switch

When a two-letter ending matches a term in the news, people buy names. A purchase count is names sold. It does not say how many of those names are businesses a customer can find, spell after hearing them, or remember next week. The IANA record for .si still names a Slovenian registry. A busy checkout does not edit that record.

If you already have a domain people use, write the question down and leave the DNS alone. Who is the site for? Would they expect a Slovenian company? Would they expect an AI company? Can they type the address after hearing it once? Ask a few people who resemble the buyer, and write down where they stumble. Four conversations will not survive a slide that says "market research." They will catch a name that only makes sense in your own Slack.

A product that may outgrow one category has a longer problem. .ai tells a stranger this is an AI company. If the product becomes something else, the address keeps the old promise. .si has the same trap if you bought it to mean Super Intelligence. The buyer may think of Slovenia first. If the term fades, the country is what the address still says.

Google treats the ending as geography

Google's page on managing multi-regional and multilingual sites calls a country-code domain a strong signal that the site is meant for that country. The same page lists country-code endings it treats as generic, because users and site owners often see them that way. .ai is on the list, along with .io and .tv. .si is not. The page says the list may change. It also says the page was last updated 10 December 2025.

Generic treatment in Search does not turn .ai into a generic TLD in the DNS. IANA still lists it as a country-code domain, managed by Anguilla. A country signal does not make a .si site impossible to crawl outside Slovenia. Writing the page in English does not wipe the signal out by itself.

The letters are a different question from the country. Google's 2015 note on new top-level domains says keywords in a TLD do not give an advantage or a disadvantage in search. That note warns that parts of it may be stale, and it points at the international page for current handling. Use the international page for which endings are generic. Use the 2015 note for the keyword sentence. For .si vs .ai, that sentence means the letters "ai" and "si" are not a boost and not a penalty.

Google does not publish a percentage of traffic tied to .si. Two sites that also differ in their pages, links, and speed will not tell you what the ending did.

If you serve more than one country, the ending is one signal among others. hreflang, the language on the page, and where you actually sell still do work. The international page is the longer version. The ending is not the whole plan.

A second domain is not a site move

Registering another name can be a redirect. The visitor hits the extra host and lands on the site you already run. You did not publish a second copy, and you did not ask Google to forget the old URLs.

A move is the other project. Google's site move guide covers changing the URLs of pages you already have, including a domain change. Map each old URL to the new one. Redirect with a permanent response, 301 or 308, straight to the final URL. Avoid a chain. Expect rankings to fluctuate while Google recrawls. For a medium-sized site, the guide says it can take a few weeks or longer before the new URLs replace the old ones in results. The same guide says a permanent redirect, such as a 301, does not cause a loss in PageRank. Rankings can still wobble for weeks while that credit is passed along.

Verify the old site and the new site as separate Search Console properties. The guide says to verify each property on its own, including www and the bare host if you use both. Email sits outside that project. The 2015 TLD note says people expect an email address to keep working longer than a search index takes to catch up. A website redirect does not move the mailbox. OAuth return URLs and payment return URLs registered on the old host stay on that host too. List those with the person who owns them before you announce anything.

If you only want to hold a name that matches a headline, write down the redirect and who renews it. Skip the migration. The wording on the pages you already have is a separate choice: whether to replace AI with SI.

A new hostname splits Search Console and events

A correct redirect can still split the numbers you use to run the company.

EventDash stores the page URL on the event. After a move, new events show the new host. Older events stay on the old URL. A goal marked with data-ed-goal fires on the page that loaded, so the history follows the host the visitor actually saw. A redirect-only extra name does not split that history. The visitor lands on the original host, and the page URL stays there.

If you turned on a domain allowlist, add the new host. Otherwise ingest rejects the event and the new site looks empty for a boring reason. The SEO tab joins a Search Console property that matches the app domain you set. Google's move guide wants the old property and the new property verified separately. Change the app domain and you are looking at a different property, not a continuation of last month's chart. How clicks join to signups on the property you did connect is Search Console analytics.

Read both hosts until the old URLs have stopped getting visits you still care about. A week of zeros on the new host can be the allowlist, a redirect loop, or a property that does not match the app domain. Zeros on the new host do not pick a winner between .si and .ai.

The sentence people repeat about the product is a different edit. Brand positioning is that page. Setup for the SEO tab is in the Search Console docs, with the short version for SEO teams. Pricing is the plan split. Start free if the tracker is not on the site yet.

Sources

• Delegation record for .si (IANA)
• Delegation record for .ai (IANA)
• Managing multi-regional and multilingual sites (Google Search Central)
• Google's handling of new top level domains (Google Search Central Blog, 21 July 2015)
• How to move a site (Google Search Central)

Related

• Replace AI with SI only where readers ask
• Search Console analytics: clicks vs signups
• How brand positioning affects AI search visibility
• Search Console docs
• EventDash for SEO