AI.com's $85 million Super Bowl ad campaign falls foul as traffic crashes servers — the campaign allegedly cost $15 million for the ads, $70 million for the domain name

AI.com bought its way onto the biggest advertising stage in the world on Sunday night, running a fourth-quarter Super Bowl ad spot that told tens of millions of sports fans worldwide to head to the site and create a handle. Hyped-up viewers arrived in droves, and then the site crashed.

Within minutes of the ad airing, users across social platforms reported that AI.com was either unreachable or stuck in failed sign-up loops, turning what was meant to be the site’s big launch moment into an unexpected stress test that failed right before the eyes of millions. The company soon restored its service, but first impressions count.

Taking to X.com, co-founder and CEO Kris Marszalek, best known as the CEO of Crypto.com, said that the company had “prepared for scale, but not for THIS,” later attributing the disruption to external factors outside the company’s control. Marszalek later wrote that the website was “hitting Google rate limits (which are at their absolute global maximum).”

That excuse might sound like your typical tech bro attempt to pass the buck to somebody else, but there’s some plausibility to his claim given how AI.com’s onboarding works. At launch, the site funnels new users through a single “continue with Google” authentication option. Once millions of users suddenly arrived and began attempting to create their AI agents, Google may have begun throttling requests, effectively making the site unusable.

For a company that reportedly spent $70 million to secure the AI.com domain — a level of investment that suggests it’s a business that wants to establish itself as a foundational platform — it’s arguably inexcusable for its first mass-market test to expose a launch stack that had zero redundancy or meaningful margin for error. When the single point of failure gave way in the form of throttled Google authentication requests, it was lights out.

AI.com is selling itself as a way to create personal AI agents that can execute tasks across apps and operate with verifying levels of access depending on subscription tier. That’s an ambitious promise, and that ultimately falls flat when the company behind it can’t even get the basics like user authentication squared away right out of the gate.

According to Adweek, AI accounted for 23% of ads shown during this year’s Super Bowl — a grim statistic for those of us who are fed up with the force-feeding.

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