Buy your .mobi domain today

This is where .mobi earns its place most easily, and it is the pattern most current owners describe. A short .mobi address works well as a redirect for print, packaging, QR codes, radio and out-of-home advertising, where people type what they see or hear on the nearest phone.

Used that way it complements a main .com rather than competing with it. Point it at your main site or at a dedicated mobile landing page, and measure it separately so you know which offline campaigns actually drove visits.

As a primary brand address it invites the dated question every time someone reads it aloud, which is why most owners keep it in a supporting role rather than putting it on the front of the business.

Anyone can register a .mobi domain today, with no verification, no content rules and no eligibility test of any kind. Individuals and companies register on the same terms.

That is a genuine change from its early years, when the sponsored model imposed real obligations and the registry could remove a non-compliant name from the zone file. Nothing of that survives.

Standard rules still apply, meaning registry-reserved names, the acceptable use policy and the usual trademark dispute procedures.

No, a .mobi site is no longer required to be mobile-friendly. When the extension launched in 2006 it was sponsored, and registrants were contractually bound to a published style guide with registry monitoring and the threat of removal from the zone file for non-compliance.

That regime ended in 2017, when .mobi moved to a standard unsponsored agreement on the same terms as any modern extension. There is now no audit, no style guide and no content obligation of any kind.

Expect to meet stale information about this. Several registrar and reseller help pages still publish the old mandatory rules verbatim, which is why the question keeps coming up nearly a decade after the change.

Yes, you can run business email on a .mobi domain, such as hello@yourbrand.mobi. The short address is quick to type on a phone keyboard, which suits a business whose customers mostly get in touch from mobile.

Consistency between the site and the inbox helps customers recognize your messages, and it matters more when the extension is unfamiliar, because a mismatch gives a cautious recipient a reason to hesitate.

Publish SPF, DKIM and DMARC records before sending. Older extensions do not automatically carry good sender reputation, and authentication is what actually determines where your mail lands.

Yes, domain privacy keeps your personal details out of public registration records such as WHOIS, where applicable.

Keep the underlying registration details accurate while they are hidden. Renewal notices, transfer approvals and any dispute correspondence go to the registered contact, and a stale address there is the most common reason a business loses a domain by accident.

Worth a note on .mobi specifically: because many names date from 2006 to 2013, plenty of records still carry contact details from a business that has since moved or changed hands. If you take over an existing .mobi name, update them first.

No, .mobi has changed hands twice. It was launched by mTLD, trading as dotMobi, a venture backed by Google, Microsoft, Nokia, Samsung, Vodafone and several other telecoms and handset firms.

Afilias acquired the registry in 2010, and Afilias later rebranded as Identity Digital, which operates the extension today alongside a large portfolio of others.

This is worth checking against whatever else you read. A surprising number of registrar pages still name dotMobi or Afilias as the current operator, which is a decent signal that the rest of their .mobi information is equally old.

No, a .mobi domain gives you no ranking advantage on phones or anywhere else. Google indexes mobile-first regardless of extension, so a responsive .com competes on identical terms.

Some registrar pages still imply otherwise, usually by describing the extension as telling search engines your site is mobile-friendly. That was never quite true and has been clearly false since mobile-first indexing became universal.

What the extension does do is signal to a person, not a crawler. Someone seeing the address on a poster or hearing it on the radio understands it is meant for a phone, and that is a marketing benefit rather than a technical one.

Yes, first-year pricing on .mobi is promotional and renewal reverts to the standard rate, which is several times higher. The gap is wider on .mobi than on many extensions of comparable age.

That shapes how you should use it. For a short campaign or a print redirect you will retire, the promotional year is genuinely cheap and the renewal never arrives. For a name you intend to hold for years, the renewal is the number that matters.

Check the renewal figure rather than the headline before registering, and decide at that point which of those two things you are doing.

To some buyers, yes, and it is fair to say so plainly. The extension was built for an era when a phone needed its own stripped-down site at a separate address, and responsive design removed that need almost entirely.

The numbers reflect it. Registrations peaked above a million in 2013 and have fallen substantially since, though the extension still supports a large body of live sites and works exactly as any other does technically.

The useful way to read this: .mobi signals a deliberate mobile focus to some people and reads as a period piece to others, and which group your customers fall into depends on their age and their industry. If your audience is on phones and does not think about domain history, the signal lands. If they are in tech, expect some to notice the vintage.