Which TLD Should You Use?

What the picker is actually weighing

Four inputs, because four things genuinely change the answer and almost everything else people argue about does not. What you are building decides whether the extension has to do positioning work or just stay out of the way. Whether the renewal price matters matters because the first-year price and the renewal price are set separately by the registry, and the second one is the one you pay for the rest of the site's life. Who reads it decides how much unfamiliarity you can afford: a developer audience parses io and dev without blinking, and a general audience quietly does not. How long the name must last is the country-code question — a national registry operates under one government's policy, and there is precedent for a live domain being pulled.

What it deliberately ignores

Search rankings, because a generic extension is not a ranking factor. The only search effect an extension has is indirect, through whether a human trusts the link enough to click it — which is the audience question, already asked. It also ignores price, because there is no honest way to print one: wholesale prices get revised, registrars set their own margin on top, and the spread between sellers for the same extension can be enormous. So the picker never quotes a number, and the cost question is handled by a separate calculator that asks you for the two figures on your own checkout page.

Every reason the tool gives you carries the document it came from, listed in full at the bottom of the page. Where practitioners disagree — and on extension reputation they do — both sides are in the sources rather than only the one that suits the argument.