In 2015, when Google established its holding company Alphabet, it chose abc.xyz as the corporate website address. Not alphabet.com. Not google.xyz. The choice of abc.xyz was the first major proof that a new gTLD could serve as the vessel for a giant’s brand identity.

.xyz was launched in 2014 by Daniel Negari’s XYZ.COM, marketing its universality as “the last three letters of the alphabet” — a domain unbounded by industry or purpose. Before Alphabet’s adoption, however, .xyz was largely obscure, with much of its registration volume attributed to SEO spam.

What Alphabet’s choice conferred was legitimacy. When one of the world’s largest technology companies used .xyz as its official address, it cracked the assumption that “anything other than .com is second-tier.” That said, abc.xyz remains a corporate facade — Google’s core services still reside under google.com.

This dynamic is telling. Even Alphabet has not fully escaped .com’s gravitational pull. Yet by establishing the precedent of using .com as “formal attire” and a new gTLD as “design statement,” abc.xyz stands as a turning-point specimen in the history of domains.