The strange story of ai.com, the domain that everyone dreams of and that (perhaps) Google took over

There is a new way to reach Gemini, the Google chatbot, whose official website is gemini.google.com. In fact, all you need to do is type the very simple domain in the address bar of your browser ai.com and you will be redirected to Gemini in an instant.

And what’s strange? – you will say. Google will have simply purchased the domain and decided to use it to promote Gemini. Kudos to Google for grabbing a domain for sure highly contested! The problem is that, if we look at the history of ai.com, things may not be so simple.

How do you see the history of a website? Simple: using the wayback machine. In fact, taking a look at the internet archive, we realize that ai.com dates back to the 90s of the last century, when it was registered by Advanced Instruments Corp. Servicesa company that was probably just looking for a simple but evocative domain.

Things remained stable for a few years, but by 2008 ai.com had become a news site themed precisely on artificial intelligence. Moving forward another 10 years, the domain was put up for sale by whoever owned it at the time. We don’t know who purchased it, but in 2020 it was permanently moved to an unknown domain, while from 2022 to today ai.com has always been a redirect towards other directions, and this is where things get done even stranger.

In July 2023, for example, ai.com linked to ChatGPT, but in November 2023 the redirect had already moved to Grok, the X chatbot. Then consider that in February 2024 the domain linked to a video by Marques Brownleeand a few days later he started to bet on Google Geminito which it still redirects today.

By doing a whois on ai.com it is easy to find that he is registered with Squarespace with a contact email from Google Domains, but this is not an absolute confirmation that Google owns the domain, nor has the company advertised it in any way.

There are two cases: either BigG really grabbed it, or whoever is behind it is continuing to “troll” the many interested in the world of artificial intelligence, and perhaps in some time the redirect will change again. In any case, just for precautionif you want to go to Gemini, go to the official website: better not to trust too much of a domain with such a troubled history, at least until proven otherwise.