AI.com’s Super Bowl moment brings a traffic wave and suspicion

AI.com’s Super Bowl ad was only thirty seconds long, but it seems to have accomplished the goal. Two glowing orbs drifted across a black screen, touched, merged, and turned into the ai.com logo. Words appeared: AGI is coming soon. Get your handle now. Then a few examples flashed — ai.com/elon, ai.com/sam, ai.com/mark. And it pushed viewers to go claim a username.

A lot of viewers did exactly that. Within minutes, the site started slowing down or outright crashing for people. Kris Marszalek, the CEO of ai.com (and the person who runs Crypto.com), jumped on X and posted, “Insane traffic levels. We prepared for scale, but not for THIS 🔥🔥🔥.” He later explained they had hit Google’s global rate limits and asked people to try again in a minute or two.

Crypto.com spent big on arena naming rights back in the day. Now, according to a Financial Times report, he paid $70 million (all in crypto) for the ai.com domain. That’s the highest price ever publicly disclosed for a domain name. The deal happened last year, with the seller staying anonymous.

When people finally got through, the site let them reserve a personal handle like @yourname and promised a powerful AI assistant you could delegate real work to while staying in control. That’s the main offer right now.

But a lot of visitors came away confused. There’s almost no explanation of what the AI can actually do today, how it works, or when more features are coming. Worse, the signup flow asks for credit card details pretty early, even just to reserve a handle. Naturally, many people felt that was odd, with some going as far as to call it a scam.

On X, Peter Yang wrote, “This website has 0 info about the product which makes me think its owners just bought a fancy domain name and there’s actually no product.” Another user, JR Farr, posted: “>$8m for a SuperBowl ad >lets go sign up >what?”

Over on Reddit’s r/BetterOffline, someone posted that they saw the ad, rushed to the site, and found it down. The thread filled up fast with others saying the same thing and calling the credit-card ask suspicious.

Plenty of other AI companies ran Super Bowl ads too, from OpenAI to Anthropic. But ai.com stood out for the mystery and the immediate backlash. The traffic surge was real, and so was the skepticism. Since we know almost nothing about the service, it’ll be an interesting wait for more details to surface.

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