A friend asked me recently why my portfolio sits at widiginanjar.com instead of something like balieseo.com. Fair question. A domain that matches what people actually type into Google sounds like it should win by default.
For a while, it did. Google used to treat a domain name as a strong signal on its own. If someone searched "cheap car insurance" and a domain called cheapcarinsurancequotes.com existed, that domain could rank near the top almost automatically, regardless of whether the site behind it was actually any good. People noticed, and started buying up keyword-matching domains purely to exploit that shortcut, often slapping thin, low-effort content behind them. In 2012, Google specifically changed its algorithm to stop rewarding that trick. A domain matching the search term stopped being an automatic advantage.
It didn't disappear entirely, though. A 2025 study of 500 search results found these domains still show up disproportionately in the top 3 spots, and need less accumulated authority to get there than an ordinary domain would. But the same study found something more telling: 70% of them only ever rank for that one exact phrase. They don't spread to anything related.
That's the part that actually mattered for my decision. A domain called "Bali SEO" locks in one identity: SEO, in Bali, forever. My work doesn't sit still inside that box. I do SEO, but also growth marketing, content strategy, and a research role that has nothing to do with search rankings at all. A keyword domain would have been accurate the week I bought it and increasingly wrong every year after.
There's a second reason this matters more now than it used to. Search Engine Land's 2025 analysis put it plainly: search, especially the AI-driven kind, is shifting toward rewarding brand recognition over keyword matching. An AI system deciding whether to cite a source isn't scanning the domain for the right words. It's checking whether it recognizes the name as a real, consistent entity it's seen before, across more than one place. A name is the thing that gets recognized. A keyword is just the thing that gets found, and increasingly, that's the smaller job.
None of this makes exact-match domains useless. If you run one narrow, local service and have no plans to grow past it, a matching domain can still be a legitimate shortcut. It just wasn't the shortcut that fit what I'm actually building.
Thinking through domain strategy for your own site? Happy to talk it through.
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