I’m Mostapha. I buy and sell names from Morocco. The old title sold “SEO and branding.” An extension does not rank you. It tells a stranger which country or club you belong to. The official menu is IANA’s root database. Wikipedia’s ccTLD page is enough for the local kind. A new gTLD as a personality is still a bet: not a replacement for a good name.
Paste the full hostname: Domain Value Checker. The TLD line is one factor. How we score. FAQ. Weak letters on a fashionable ending are still leftovers.
.com when the buyer is anyone
Default for a name you hope to resell or take global. Record sales live almost entirely here: what they actually show. If the .com is the name and you can afford it, stop shopping suffixes to “save money.” You are buying a different, thinner market.
ccTLD when the buyer is there
A shop that will never leave that country. Then the ending is the product. .ae when a UAE company would print it: when .ae is the right buy. Same test for .ma, .de, .fr. I do not collect ccTLDs as a theme. Naming a real business: startup naming / a name that can still work after you grow.
.io / .ai / .xyz can be a club signal. They do not mint demand. Users still type .com. Owning only the fashion ending is how you fund someone else’s .com later. Generator brandables on new suffixes: not automatically worth buying.
What not to use as a reason
“Better for SEO.” Google cares that you have a real site and a real audience; the TLD is not a ranking cheat. “Cheaper than .com so better ROI.” That is leftover logic: why books fail. Extra endings of the same string are extra names: two names, one business.
History and marks still apply on every TLD: snapshots, UDRP.
Decision
- Who types the name? Global → prefer .com. Local and proud of it → that ccTLD.
- Checker on the full host. Weak → no suffix will rescue it.
- One public name, not five endings at five prices: one ask. Before you buy.
Keep the Google row. SEO-and-branding was the old pairing. The extension is just which door the buyer already uses.