Things to know before you buy a .si domain (2026)

Updated October 2026 · 18 min read

A .si domain is Slovenia's country code domain, open to anyone in the world, for roughly $12 to $18 a year at the registrars that sell it at a normal price. Since the US government started calling AI "super intelligence", or SI, in September 2026, the ending has been read as SI and registered by the tens of thousands a day. It is a cheap, short second address for an AI product. It is a poor primary address for one, because Google reads .si as "this site is for Slovenia" and there is no setting to change that. Buy one if a good name is free, point it at your main site with a permanent redirect, and run the eight checks below before you pay.

We registered clerion.si for Clerion, our web analytics product, on the day of the executive order, and everything here is what we checked, what we paid attention to, and how we set it up. The background to the rename is in What is SI?.

The short version

• What it is: Slovenia's domain since 1992, now also read as SI. No residency or company needed.
• What it costs: $12 to $18 a year at Hostinger, Porkbun, OVH or Dynadot. One-year minimum. A tenth of .ai.
• The catch: Google treats .si as a Slovenian domain and .ai as a generic one. Host your real site elsewhere.
• The right use: a permanent redirect from yourname.si to yourname.com, path for path.
• The risk: 30 days after a missed renewal the name is deleted and anyone can take it. Turn auto-renew on.
• The time it takes: about ten minutes to buy, another ten to redirect.

The rest of this page is the detail behind each line, with the sources.

What .si actually is

.si was delegated on 1 April 1992 as the country code top-level domain for Slovenia and is run by ARNES, the Academic and Research Network of Slovenia, the public body that also runs the country's research network. ARNES does not sell domains itself. It accredits registrars, about 90 of them, listed on its registrar page, and the big international registrars resell through those channels.

There are no registration restrictions. You do not need to live in Slovenia, have a company there or hold a trademark. Names are registered directly at the second level, so you get yourname.si, not yourname.co.si.

Before September 2026 it had two audiences. Slovenian businesses, and people building domain hacks, because si means "you are" in Slovene and several other Slavic languages. Pepsi runs pep.si and the Jitsi video project runs jit.si, both listed on the Wikipedia entry for .si. In June 2026 the registry held 186,159 names, which for a country of two million people is a healthy, ordinary ccTLD.

The third audience arrived in a week.

Why everyone wants one now

On 22 September 2026 President Trump told the UN General Assembly that the word "artificial" made the technology "sound fake" and that it should be called super intelligence, with Reuters and Axios reporting it the same day. On 29 September he signed the executive order that makes SI the federal term, which What is SI? covers in full, including who signed what and what the order does not cover.

The registry's public counter tells the rest. On 1 October 2026 register.si showed 239,691 domains, 46,066 of them registered in the previous month and 13,239 in the previous 24 hours. For scale, a normal month before the speech was about 3,500 registrations, per a dpa report carried by The Star, which also quoted the registry saying that "despite the greatly increased number of requests to all Registry systems, all services are operating smoothly." Venture investor Adam Cochran, quoted by The Register, counted more than 10,000 AI-related .si names registered in the three months before the order, some already relisted for millions of dollars.

So the good generic words are gone. Brand names mostly are not, which is the case for buying yours now rather than later. The registry itself, in the same dpa report, advised brands without a .si to register soon.

Who should buy one, and who should not

Who can register, and the rules that apply

Source for the rules: the registry's general terms, in force since 15 November 2024, and OVH's .si page for the registrar-side details.

What it costs

Prices below were read from each registrar's own .si page on 1 October 2026, in the currency it quotes. Every registrar discounts year one; the number to plan on is the renewal.

Two lessons from that table. First, the same name costs between $12 and $24 a year depending on where you buy it, so compare before you check out. Second, a registrar that treats .si as a corporate ccTLD with a corporate price is not wrong, just not for you.

.si next to .ai

The comparison most buyers are making is with .ai, Anguilla's domain, which the AI industry adopted a decade ago.

The .ai figures are from the Wikipedia entry for .ai, which also records that the domain earned Anguilla about $32 million in 2023, more than a tenth of the territory's GDP. .si is a tenth of the price with a one-year minimum, and that is most of its appeal. The last row is most of its limitation.

The catch: Google treats .si as Slovenian

This is the thing to understand before deciding what the domain is for. Google's guidance on multi-regional sites says a country code domain provides "a strong signal to both users and search engines that your site is explicitly intended for a certain country". Google keeps a short list of country codes it treats as generic instead, because the world uses them that way: .ai, .io, .co, .me, .tv and a few others. Google added .ai to that list in 2021. .si is not on it, and there is no Search Console setting that overrides the domain's country.

What that looks like in practice. Say you build recall.si, an AI note-taking tool, and host the whole product there. Someone in Texas searches "AI note taking app". Google's index contains your page, but the page carries a Slovenia signal, so it competes with a handicap against recall.ai and recall.com, which carry none. Someone in Ljubljana running the same search sees you do rather well. If Ljubljana is your market, that is the right outcome. If Texas is, you have paid $12 to make your site harder to find.

The list may change. If enough of the world uses .si the way it uses .ai, Google may add it, as it did for .ai. Nobody should buy on that assumption, and the redirect setup below makes the question irrelevant, because the main domain is the one Google indexes.

How to buy one, step by step

1. Check the name is free. Type it into the search box on register.si or into any registrar. A name that shows as taken may be in quarantine; if it was registered in the last month, it is not coming back.
2. Pick a registrar. Any of the first four in the price table. If you already hold your .com somewhere that sells .si at a normal price, buy it there, so one renewal reminder covers both.
3. Decide who the registrant is. The company, if the domain is a company asset and you can live with the name and address being public. You personally, if you want only an email address shown. Either way, use details you will still be reading in five years.
4. Choose the term and switch auto-renew on. Multi-year registrations are allowed and cheap. One year with auto-renew on is also fine. One year with auto-renew off is how brands lose names.
5. Leave the DNS at the registrar for now. Nothing needs hosting. The next section wires it up.
6. Note the renewal date somewhere outside the registrar. Calendar, password manager, anywhere you will see it.

Registration itself is immediate; the name resolves within minutes once DNS is set.

How to redirect it to your main site

The goal is one site in Google's eyes with an extra way in. That means a permanent (301 or 308) redirect, path for path, over HTTPS, from every address on the .si domain to the matching address on your main domain. Google's own page on redirects explains why permanent is the signal you want. Pick the method that matches where your main site lives.

Cloudflare. Add the .si domain as a zone, point its nameservers at Cloudflare, create a proxied A record (any address, 192.0.2.1 works) so the zone answers, then add a single redirect: when hostname is yourname.si or www.yourname.si, redirect to https://yourname.com${path} with status 301 and "preserve query string" on. Cloudflare issues the certificate, so HTTPS works from the first minute.

Vercel. Add the .si domain to the same project as your main site, then in the domain's settings choose Redirect to your main domain with a 308. Vercel's deploying and redirecting page shows the setting. Paths carry over.

Netlify. Add the domain to the site, then put one line in your _redirects file:

https://yourname.si/* https://yourname.com/:splat 301!

Netlify's redirects reference covers the syntax.

Your own server (nginx).

server {
  listen 443 ssl;
  server_name yourname.si www.yourname.si;
  return 301 https://yourname.com$request_uri;
}

You will need a certificate for the .si name as well, which Let's Encrypt issues for free.

The registrar's own URL forwarding. Hostinger, Porkbun and most others include it. It works, with two things to check: set it to permanent rather than temporary, and confirm it answers on https://, because some forwarders only listen on plain http:// and a visitor who types the secure address gets an error.

Test it. From a terminal:

curl -I https://yourname.si/pricing

You want a 301 or 308 and a location: header that reads https://yourname.com/pricing. If you see 302 or 307, change the method to permanent. If the request hangs or fails on HTTPS, the certificate is missing.

Do not host a copy of your site on the .si name, and do not let it answer with its own content. Keep the canonical tag on your main domain. Two copies of the same pages split your search signals; one redirect adds a door without adding a house.

Tell the machines the door exists

A redirect handles browsers. Assistants and search engines also need to know that yourname.si is you and not a stranger, which matters more every month as people ask ChatGPT and Perplexity about products by name.

• Add the .si address to the sameAs list of your Organization schema, where your social profiles already sit.
• Name it in your llms.txt, in the first paragraph, which is the part most often quoted.
• Say it once on your "what is" page. Ours, What is Clerion?, does this in one line and one FAQ entry.
• If you publish a context file for assistants, add it there too. The AI crawler checker will tell you whether those files are reachable in the first place.

Measure who uses it

A redirect from a typed-in address arrives at your site as direct traffic, indistinguishable from a bookmark. If you want to know how many people use the .si door, make the redirect land with a campaign tag: redirect yourname.si to https://yourname.com/?utm_source=yourname.si&utm_medium=redirect, keep the canonical tag pointing at the clean URL, and the visits show up as a campaign in any analytics tool that reads UTM parameters. Clerion lists campaign traffic next to search, social, direct and referrals from AI assistants, which is the channel the rename is really about, and analytics for an AI startup explains why that channel comes first.

Path-for-path redirects and a campaign tag do not mix well, since the tag only makes sense on the homepage. Pick one: path-for-path if the .si address will appear in links, the tagged homepage if it will appear in print, on slides and in conversation.

Eight things to check before you buy

1. The renewal price, not the first-year price. Registrars discount year one and charge the full rate from year two. Hostinger's listing is $11.99 for the first year and $16.99 after; Porkbun's sale price is the same both years. Decide on the second number.
2. Whether the .com or .ai of the same name is yours. If someone else owns yourname.ai, a .si does not solve that and may send your visitors to them. Own the main one first.
3. What the name means in Slovene. si is "you are", so a name like ti.si reads as a sentence. That is a domain hack to Slovenians and a puzzle to everyone else. Harmless, but check it, and check that the word before the dot is not something unfortunate in a language about two million people speak.
4. Whether a trademark holder could take it. The registry's dispute procedure exists for exactly this. Registering a competitor's name, or a famous product's, buys a letter rather than an asset.
5. What WHOIS will show. A company's name and address are public; an individual's email is. If that matters, pick the registrant accordingly or use a registrar that adds a privacy proxy.
6. That auto-renew is on. Thirty days after expiry the name is deleted and anyone can take it. At this volume of speculation, a lapsed brand.si will not stay free for an afternoon.
7. That you are not buying to resell. Names "relisted for millions" are asking prices. The buyers for generic SI names are other speculators, and the only certain revenue in that market goes to the registry.
8. Where it will point. Decide before you buy. A redirect costs nothing to run. A second site costs you search signals for the rest of its life.

Mistakes we have seen already

• Hosting the product on the .si and redirecting the .com to it. Backwards. The domain Google indexes should be the generic one.
• A temporary redirect. 302 and 307 tell Google the move is not final, so it keeps indexing the .si address. Use 301 or 308.
• Forwarding that only works on http. Half of your visitors type or are sent the https address. Test both.
• Registering the brand's .si but not the obvious misspelling. If people will hear the name before they see it, the misspelling is the one a squatter buys.
• Letting it lapse after the news cycle. The renewal is $17. The name, once lost, is not for sale at any price you will like.

Frequently asked questions

What does .si mean?

.si is the country code domain for Slovenia, run by ARNES since 1992. Since September 2026 it is also read as SI, for super intelligence, the term the US government now uses in place of AI.

Is .si a good domain?

As a second address, yes: short, inexpensive, open to anyone, with good names still free. As a primary address for a business outside Slovenia, no, because Google treats .si as a Slovenian domain and there is no way to change that.

Should I choose a .si domain or a .ai domain?

For your main site, .ai, .io or .com, because Google treats those as generic. .ai costs $140 to $200 a year with a two-year minimum, so if the budget is the problem, .io or .com first and .si as the extra door. Buy .si as well if your name is free; at $12 to $18 a year it is cheap insurance against someone else holding it.

Who can register a .si domain?

Anyone. There is no residency, company or trademark requirement. The registry works through about 90 accredited registrars, and most large international registrars sell it.

How much does a .si domain cost?

Between $12 and $24 a year depending on the registrar, with first-year discounts common. Hostinger renews at $16.99, Porkbun at $17.72 on sale, OVH at £12.69, Dynadot at about $12.39. Registration is for one to five years.

How do I register a .si domain?

Search the name on register.si or any registrar, buy it at a registrar that sells it at a normal price, register it to the company or to yourself depending on what you want public, turn auto-renew on, and set a permanent redirect to your main site. Ten minutes for each half.

Does Google treat .si as a Slovenian site?

Yes. .si is not on Google's list of country codes treated as generic, so a site hosted on it is geotargeted to Slovenia. A redirect to your main domain avoids the problem because the main domain is what Google indexes.

Can I keep my name private on a .si domain?

If you register as an individual, the registry's public WHOIS shows only your email address. If you register as a company, the company name and address are published. Some registrars, Porkbun and Hostinger among them, add a privacy proxy on their side.

Can I use a .si domain for email?

Yes. It is an ordinary domain: add MX records at whichever DNS provider hosts it and point them at your mail provider. Most registrars also include simple email forwarding, so hello@yourname.si can forward to your existing inbox without any mail setup.

Can I transfer a .si domain to another registrar?

Yes. Ask the current registrar for the authorisation code, which expires after 16 days, and start the transfer at the new one. It completes in a few days to a week. Auto-renew usually does not carry over, so switch it on again afterwards.

What happens if I forget to renew?

The domain goes into a 30-day quarantine, during which it can still be renewed. After that it is deleted and anyone can register it. Turn auto-renew on.

Will Google ever treat .si as a generic domain?

Possibly. Google added .ai to its generic list in 2021 once the world used it that way, and the same could happen to .si if the SI reading sticks. There is no announcement, and a redirect to your main domain works either way.