THE .CAT HELPS YOU BECOME MORE VISIBLE

Web positioning is the place your website occupies when someone searches for information related to what you do. For example, if you run a cake shop in Vic and someone searches for “panellets cake shop in Vic”, your positioning determines whether you appear among the first results or end up on a third page that hardly anyone looks at.

Until recently, all of this happened on traditional search engines such as Google or Bing. Now there are also artificial intelligence assistants, chatbots (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, and so on), and the AI summaries that Google itself shows at the very top of its results. All of them answer directly, instead of simply giving you a list of links.

That is why you will hear about two acronyms:

• SEO (Search Engine Optimization): the work involved in ranking well on search engines.
• GEO or AEO (Generative / Answer Engine Optimization): the work involved in getting AI systems to take you into account and cite you in their answers.

Keeping an eye on how your website performs in both areas matters for your positioning.

Whether you want to improve your positioning on traditional search engines (SEO) or in chatbot answers (GEO), you need to work on the same aspects of your website. The ones we could call basic are:

• The content: make sure it is your own, useful and clear, and that it genuinely answers what people are looking for.
• Making the website readable: it should load quickly, look good on a mobile and let search engines reach it without obstacles.
• The project's basic information: name, activity, location and contact details, clearly visible.
• Your presence beyond your website: other trustworthy sites talking about you and linking to you.

You should also be clear that there are aspects you cannot influence, because they do not depend directly on your website's content or technology, such as:

• The algorithm: no search engine or AI assistant explains exactly how it decides.
• The competition: there may be other similar services or websites also working to reach the top spot, so look them up and use their strategies to improve your own.
• Time: good positioning is a matter of time and strategy. Reaching first place is not impossible, but you will have to work at it steadily, especially bearing in mind that nobody has the secret formula behind the algorithm.

Registering a domain is the first step to existing on the internet. Positioning is what makes people find you.

Yes. An independent study led by Fernando Macià, a recognised voice in SEO and director of the consultancy Human Level, concluded that websites with a .cat domain get better visibility in search results than the equivalent ones with other extensions.

You can consult the complete study with all the data and the methodology.

During 2026 we are running a new edition of the study, broader and updated. Some of the new features:

• It includes 11 international geoTLDs, to validate the results beyond the Catalan case.
• It includes evidence on the behaviour of .cat in search engines based on artificial intelligence, one of the new ways through which people find information on the Internet.
• The study has the support of the ICANN Grants.

The results will be published during the first quarter of 2027. You will be able to download the study when it is ready from this same page.

No. Search engines have no trouble with domains that use characters specific to Catalan (à, ç, è, é, í, ï, l·l, ò, ó, ú, ü).

What is more, Google considers using an internationalized domain name (IDN) to be a valid option, and its systems treat the encoded version of the domain as equivalent to the accented version.

When you register a .cat domain with characters specific to Catalan, we automatically give you the same domain without the special characters, free of charge.

In other words, if you register “fundació.cat”, you also get “fundacio.cat”.

In this case you need to do two things to make sure they position better:

• Choose which of the two will be your main domain: the one you will use on your business cards, on social media and in your email addresses.
• Set the other one up to redirect to the main one. Your registrar can do this for you or will explain how to do it from the control panel.

That way search engines concentrate all the value on a single address, while people will still find you however they type your website's domain.