Industry News Digest: July 2025
- by Ilona K.
Table of contents
Welcome to our monthly Industry News Digest. Explore new online trends and domain industry news to stay up-to-date. Here’s a summary for July 2025.
‘IT’ Appeared in Afternic’s Report 11 Times a Year
Afternic has released a list of the top 20 keywords for April. Anyone planning to register a domain name can check them out to see what trends are currently relevant.
Here on the current list, IT-related keywords are still at the top, occupying high positions. ‘AI’ has been consistently at the top for months. Other IT related keywords such as ‘IT’ (which is in top 5), ‘solutions’, and ‘hub’ also made it to the list.
Earlier in July, domain industry specialist Andrew Alleman summarized Afternic’s keyword rankings for the past 12 months. IT related keywords made it into almost every Afternic top 20 over the past year. So the ‘IT’ keyword has appeared 11 times a year in Afternic’s top.
| Keyword | Months Ranked |
| ai | 12 |
| my | 12 |
| home | 12 |
| bet | 12 |
| group | 12 |
| pro | 12 |
| health | 11 |
| it | 11 |
| real | 9 |
| new | 9 |
| solutions | 9 |
| tech | 9 |
| shop | 8 |
| club | 8 |
| us | 8 |
| services | 7 |
| life | 7 |
| law | 5 |
| house | 5 |
| coin | 5 |
| auto | 5 |
| your | 5 |
| capital | 5 |
| estate | 4 |
| best | 4 |
| homes | 3 |
| global | 3 |
Why should you care? Keywords are invaluable tools for selecting a domain name, enhancing SEO, and building brand recognition. Afternic’s insights can help you discern which keywords continue to engage users. Neglecting these trends could mean missing out on lucrative opportunities in rapidly expanding fields such as AI and IT.
Source: Domain Name Wire
ICANN Sets Annual Variable Fee for Registrars
ICANN-accredited registrars voted to set their annual payments to ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). In October, ICANN announced higher fees for registries and registrars, requiring registrars – accounting for two-thirds of total fees – to approve. The annual variable fee increased from $3.42 million to $3.8 million.
ICANN offered a 10% discount, which remained until now, as an incentive for registrars to adopt the 2009 Registrar Accreditation Agreement.
Other fees increased without a vote, including a quarterly fixed fee for registries rising by $200 to $6,450 and a per-domain transaction fee increasing to $0.258 from $0.25. Registrars also saw a $0.02 increase in their transaction fee, now at $0.20.
Why should you care? The increase in the annual variable fee may impact the price of domains for end users. If you were planning to purchase a domain name, now is the time to do so. No one knows when the prices will go up. However, if you don’t hurry, there’s a chance the price might go up, and then you’ll have to pay more.
Source: Domain Name Wire
Meta Fights Copycat Content
Meta has announced that it will take more action to combat accounts that post unoriginal content on Facebook, including text, photos, and videos.
This year, the company has already removed about 10 million profiles that did not post their own posts, but copied them from other sources.
In addition, Facebook will limit the distribution of copies of videos so that the original author gets the views they are entitled to. To do this, Meta is testing a system that looks for links to duplicate videos and directs viewers to the original content.
Meta says that it won’t penalize users for interacting with other people’s content, such as creating a reaction video, joining a trend, or adding their own comments. Instead, the company pays special attention to reposts of other people’s content, both from spam accounts and from accounts that allegedly belong to the authors of the original content.
In the future, links to the original content may appear when trying to post someone else’s message.
Why should you care? This Meta initiative directly impacts your digital strategy and reputation. Meta’s new rules potentially protect the value of original content that is useful and engaging for the audience.
Source: TechCrunch
Google: AI Boosts User Engagement with Search
Google AI Overviews reached 2 billion monthly users, while AI Mode (an optional Google search interface that generates concise, conversational summaries to user queries) gained more than 100 million active users in the US and India, and was launched in the UK in July 2025.
Google processes more than 980 trillion tokens (units of data that AI models use during training and generation) per month, double the amount last year. This indicates the rapid adoption of AI in products like Search, Workspace, and Cloud.
Google also noted an increase in visual and multimodal search using tools like Google Lens and Circle to Search, especially among younger users.
Why should you care? AI features encourage further questions and open up new possibilities for search. Search marketers should take into account the growing popularity of natural language queries, multimodal search, and conversational interfaces. For example, traditional keyword targeting needs to be adapted, and the website content should be optimized for AI discovery: concise answers for snippets, infographics for Lens, structured data for commercial queries.
Source: Search Engine Journal
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