ICANN’s 2026 round of new top-level domains now has a shape. On Reveal Day, October 7, the organization published 1,615 applications from 481 applicants, out of 1,663 submitted before the window shut on August 12. The two-week window to swap a primary string for a backup closed on October 21. On November 17, String Confirmation Day, ICANN publishes the final list and the updated contention sets. After that come the comment and objection periods, and only then the long road to launch.
Strip out the duplicates and the round covers 986 unique strings. That’s fewer than the 2012 round, which ended up adding more than 1,200 new extensions to the root. The interesting part is where applicants are crowding.
Where the fights are
Of those 986 strings, 263 drew two or more applicants. Those contention sets hold 891 applications, 55% of the round. Most are small: 114 strings have exactly two bidders. The big ones read like a list of this year’s tech vocabulary.
.agent leads with 13 applicants. .bit has 11. .api, .brand and .hub have 10 each, .pop and .robot nine, and .max, .official, .pod and .zen eight. Seven apiece went for .agi, .vibe, .ask, .connect, .firm, .key, .lab, .mind and .therapy. OpenAI is one of the seven on .agi, and it filed 15 applications in all. Several AI brands applied for their own names, .openai, .gemini, .claude and .copilot among them, each with a single applicant.
The rules on settling these sets have changed since 2012. Back then most contested strings were resolved in private auctions where losers walked away paid; only 16 went to ICANN’s own auction. This time private deals with side payments are banned. Contention gets settled through community priority evaluation, permitted agreements between applicants or, as a last resort, an ICANN-run auction. Expect fewer quick exits and more money going to ICANN.
Who filed the most
The portfolio players dominate. Link Freedom Group filed 158 applications, XYZ.COM 139, Registry Services, LLC 77, Intercap Registry 71, Radix 46 and ShortDot 40. Google’s Charleston Road Registry filed 39, Oinkadot 25 and Meta Registry Holdings 18. Identity Digital said on Reveal Day it had applied for 216 extensions across 13 categories, AI, commerce and finance among them.
ICANN’s own breakdown says 333 of the applications are brand TLDs. Those will never sell a name to the public; they exist so a company controls its own string. Another 16 are community applications, 15 are self-identified geographic names and 21 are internationalized names in non-Latin scripts. North American applicants filed 864, Europe 506, Asia-Pacific 218, Africa 16, Latin America and the Caribbean 11.
What it means for people who own names now
Nothing in this round can be registered yet. The earliest industry guess for first launches is the second quarter of 2028, and ICANN hasn’t committed to a date. Anyone holding .com or .org names has at least a year and a half before a single new extension competes for a buyer, and probably longer for the contested ones.
The contention list is useful in another way. It’s a map of the words that registries with real money behind them think businesses will pay for. Agent, API, robot, AGI, lab, mind. Those same words are already the most sought-after second-level names in .com and .ai, and dozens of registries just paid application fees betting the demand lasts. That’s a signal for the exact-match names, not a threat to them. The last round showed that a new extension tends to send buyers looking for the matching .com once they’ve grown, not away from it.
For a sense of how category names in this space read in practice, see ModelAggregator.com and PromptLayering.com on this site, and the registration numbers in the Q3 2026 domain count.
November 17 is the next date to watch.