Artificial intelligence is already having a modest impact on how I run my business. Unlike quite a few colleagues who have been ringing the register because of AI-related domain names, I don’t have many AI or .AI domain names in my portfolio.

I have been using AI to help with a variety of tasks related to my business. For the most part, I am using Chat.com and Grok. Occasionally, if I want more suggestions or am running into issues, I will use Claude from Perplexity. I am open to trying others though.

Here are some of the ways I use AI for my business:

National Retail Federation owns the https://t.co/DKU1Llpkla domain name. It was registered October 31, 2024. pic.twitter.com/KtC1ILazt1

— Elliot Silver (@DInvesting) April 2, 2025

The National Retail Federation (NRF) registered TrumpTariffTax.com at CSC in October of 2024. Shortly thereafter, the trade organization issued a press release highlighting the potential costs of tariffs that, at the time, had been discussed by US President Donald Trump.

The first quarter of the year came to an end yesterday. All in all, the domain aftermarket seems pretty strong from my perspective. I had a solid Q1, recording multiple sales at Afternic, Sedo, Atom.com, and privately. Included in this is four new Lease to Own deals – three via Afternic and one via Atom.

Compared to Q1 of 2024, I had a substantially higher volume of sales. In fact, I sold nearly 3x the total number of domain names in Q1 2024 vs Q1 2025. Notably, just one of these sales was outbound, so it’s not like I was priming the pump to induce a greater number of sales. I am not going to share the largest sale price, but the smallest was $997 (I had a few of those).

I hand registered around 40 domain names this month. This is abnormally high, but I had a couple of recent sales in the category and figured I would use some of the income from those sales to try and generate additional sales.

I registered these domain names in two groups – one of about 30 domain names followed by 10 additional domain names. I thought I set up nameservers and sales listings correctly, but I realized I must have forgotten to create the correct listings for the last 10 domain names. The nameservers were set correctly, but they did not resolve as expected since I apparently did not create their sale listings as I thought.

I received an email from Atom.com notifying me that one of my domain names has been added to its new Sapphire Marketplace, which was announced earlier today:

✨ Introducing: Atom’s Sapphire Marketplace ✨

💎 The ultimate destination for the best non-.com domains!

🔥 Featuring premium single-English-word gems across 100+ TLDs.

🚀 Explore now: https://t.co/X0JB0y2LGB pic.twitter.com/LKH6YmetAK

— Atom.com (@atomHQ) January 16, 2025

When I attempted to login to my account on Atom.com, I saw an alarming message on my Chrome browser with a warning:

Throughout the last several years, the size of my portfolio has ballooned. For many years, I kept somewhere in the ballpark of 400 – 500 domain names in my portfolio. It has now grown to more than 2,000 domain names and counting.

With a larger portfolio, I pay more attention to domain name renewals. When I seek out domain names, there are many things I observe to try and buy commercially viable assets. I look at things like the number of businesses with that could upgrade to this domain name, the size and growth of the industry related to the domain name, the generic nature of the domain name, how the domain name sounds to me, and quite a few other factors that have become second nature to me.