For decades, if you wanted a “proper” Australian commercial website, you thought .com.au. It was the default on business cards, invoices, and “what’s your website?” answers. Then .au direct arrived (from March 2022) — names like example.au instead of only example.com.au.
I’m a domain developer and publisher under Farming Domains. I hold, build, and sell Australian names. I’m not here to trash .com.au. I’m here to argue something that still surprises people: .au could become as popular as .com.au for new brands — and in many cases, more desirable.
Not overnight, and not because a registrar ad said so. Shorter Australian addresses are just easier to type, remember, and trust.
On the numbers: across the whole .au tree (.com.au, .net.au, and direct .au), Australia still has millions of registrations, and .com.au is still the heavyweight for commercial use. Direct .au is growing. It isn’t the default yet. Popularity and “which name I’d rather have” are different questions.
What “.au direct” actually is
When people say “.au domain” now, they often mean the second-level name: yourbrand.au. Before 2022, almost everything Australian sat one level deeper: yourbrand.com.au, yourbrand.net.au, and so on.
Both sit under Australia’s country-code namespace, administered through auDA policy. Both generally require an Australian connection (eligibility rules — check current auDA licensing rules and your registrar before you assume). The big public difference for a brand is the string people have to type and say out loud.
helensburgh.com.auvs a cleanhelensburgh.au(where available and eligible)privatellm.com.auvsprivatellm.auvibecoding.com.auvsvibecoding.au
On a phone keyboard, in a podcast, on a van livery, or in a spoken referral — every extra syllable costs you.
Why .com.au still feels “default”
Habit is powerful. Accountants, lawyers, tradies, and web hosts spent years treating .com.au as the proof you were a real Australian business. Searchers typed it without thinking. Email signatures locked it in. You don’t wipe that out with a launch-day press release.
.com.au also has a long track record in Google Australia, offline marketing, and “does this company look legit?” judgments. For many SMEs, that inertia is rational: if customers already know your .com.au, switching is a project, not a vibe.
So when I say .au could become as popular, I mean for new registrations, new brands, and clean rebrands — not that every .com.au will vanish. And when I say more desirable, I mean the name you’d rather put on the billboard if both were free and eligible.
Why .au can be more desirable (even when .com.au is still more common)
1. Shorter is easier
Names show up on ads, invoices, QR codes, and “just Google us.” A shorter Australian address is easier to spell, easier to remember, and less likely to get mangled when someone hears it over a café espresso machine.
The rest of the world already trained people on short country codes: .uk, .de, .io (not a country, but short). Direct .au finally lets Australia play that game without the extra .com syllable in the middle.
2. There’s still room for good names
Good .com.au names for plain English words were fought over for years. Direct .au opened a second map of the same country. Not every great name is free — priority and eligibility rules applied at launch, and premium words go fast — but what’s left looks different. That matters if you’re naming a brand or a site.
I see this in portfolio work all the time: sometimes the .com.au is held by someone else, parked, or overpriced. The .au is the clean path to a name that still says “Australia” without the six extra characters.
3. “Australian” without sounding like 2004 ecommerce
.com.au screams commercial history. That’s good for a plumbing company that wants traditional trust. It’s less exciting for a modern product, a content network, or a learning site that wants to feel current.
.au can signal the same Australian presence with a cleaner aesthetic. Same country. Less baggage. Think of it like moving from a long phone number to a short one that still has the country code in the culture, not in the digits.
4. Mobile and voice favour the short form
We live on phones. Autocomplete helps, but spoken marketing does not. “Dot ay you” is three syllables. “Dot com dot ay you” is five. Podcasts, radio, TikTok captions, and roadside signs all punish length.
If your growth channel is “tell a mate the URL,” shorter wins more often than brand consultants admit.
5. Portfolio strategy: hold both when it matters
Desirability is not always either/or. Serious operators often register both when the brand is important: .com.au for legacy expectations, .au for the forward-facing brand, with redirects so nobody lands on a confusing competitor.
That’s how popularity can shift without chaos. Customers learn the short form because marketing points there; the old form still resolves. Over time, the short form becomes the one people tattoo on the side of the ute.
What would make .au “as popular” in practice?
Not hype. Behaviour:
- New businesses defaulting to .au on first registration because registrars and accountants stop treating .com.au as the only “real” option.
- Big consumer brands putting .au on TV and packaging (habits change when the big end of town normalises them).
- Email and SaaS tooling treating
@brand.auas boringly normal in sign-up forms and SSL defaults. - Search and social continuing to treat Australian geo-signals as “Australian presence,” not “must be .com.au specifically.”
- Clean availability of usable names so founders aren’t forced back to awkward .com.au compromises.
auDA’s public numbers put the whole .au space in the millions. Direct .au is a real, growing slice — still smaller than the old commercial names, but not a novelty any more. Popularity moves slowly.
When I’d still pick .com.au first
I’m not saying .au is always the answer. Choose .com.au (or keep it) when:
- Your customers are older demographics who still type “.com.au” by reflex.
- Your industry trusts traditional cues (some professional services, government-adjacent work).
- You already own a strong .com.au with years of SEO and offline print.
- The matching .au is unavailable, in dispute, or fails eligibility for your use case.
It depends. A strong .com.au you already own beats a perfect .au you can’t get.
For founders and for domain people
If you’re naming a new Australian project: check .au early. Say it out loud. Type it on a phone with one thumb. If both .au and .com.au are free and eligible, I would often put the marketing weight on .au and keep .com.au as a defensive redirect — not the other way around.
If you invest in or develop names: treat direct .au as a real asset, not a side quest. Shorter Australian names will keep mattering as long as the rules keep the space reasonably local compared with open global endings.
Trust is partly “this is Australian.” .au and .com.au both carry that. One of them is just shorter.
Bottom line
.com.au earned its place over a long commercial history. .au direct is the cleaner Australian address now that people type on phones and say URLs out loud. It doesn’t need to “kill” .com.au to matter. It needs enough new brands, enough spoken marketing, and enough people registering both so the short form becomes what you expect on the side of the truck.
Could .au become as popular as .com.au? Yes — for new names and new brands, over time. Could it become more desirable? For many names I care about as a publisher and domain developer: it already is. Popularity follows later. Which name you’d rather own comes first.
If you’re browsing Australian names for a project or acquisition path, start at Farming Domains — and always verify current eligibility and pricing with auDA policy and your registrar. Rules and availability change; the value of a short, clear Australian brand name does not.
More about who I am and what I publish: About Ian Piggott.