advice co.uk or .uk

Co.uk is best .Well established and widely used
I doubt most average people are even aware of .uk

thanks @Axc .

Definitely the .co.uk as many of the .uk registrations point to the related .co.uk website. Because people in the UK automatically think ".co.uk", your .uk website is likely to lose traffic to the .co.uk site (if it exists).

Regards...jmcc

@Axc and @jmcc are spot-on the money. The most widely used domain in the UK is co.uk. I think .uk actually makes more sense simply because it's shorter but at the same time something never looks right about .uk domains. It might be because .uk domain has only been around since 2014 and was originally only available to register if you owned the co.uk, org.uk or me.uk domain. Very few people registered .uk domains until Nominet removed the owner 'right of registration' five years later in 2019.

Another problem with .uk is that .co.uk tells me that a website is likely to be a for-profit UK business, while .org.uk tells me that a website is likely to be a non-profit charity. But .uk doesn't really say anything other than it's likely to be a UK website, it doesn't provide that level of information that co.uk does, it doesn't really add anything to the mix.

Can I post links yet? I don't know but you can read about the history of .uk domain on Nominet's The UK Domain web site theukdomain . uk / do-i-have-uk-rights. There's also a website named Domain Sales History that lists .uk domain sales domainsaleshistory . uk / sales

The ".co.uk"...most popularly used

As the above said, the ".uk" is shorter, and actually cleaner to use, in my view. But that isn't the way it is, UK companies will opt for ".co.uk"

I like the short one, which is easy to remember，but most companies now use long tail.

What I've found with web usage surveys on .UK is that most of the active .uk registrations are actually redirecting to the equivalent .co.uk website. In effect, the .uk subdomain has become a brand protection registration. While there is some use of the .uk, it is massively overwhelmed by the numbers of active .co.uk websites. The ideal sales package would be the .co.uk and the .uk rather than simply a .uk domain name. Think of it as selling a brand rather than selling a domain name. The one thing that businesses hate is a compromised brand. While the .COM is still a major part of the UK market, there's an psychological effect with end users where if someone mentions the left of the dot name (no .co.uk etc), the end user will automatically assume that it is a .co.uk domain name.This also happens in other ccTLD dominant markets where the local ccTLD is the main TLD.

Regards...jmcc

If .uk had been available BEFORE the others (especially org.uk, co.uk) then it would most likely now be the accepted and most popular UK domain. However it's the fact that co.uk and org.uk came FIRST and the British public got used to them, plus the fast that both co.uk (business) and org.uk (charity) are describers, that uk is not used as the primary UK domain. If I ran a major UK business and owned .com, co.uk and .uk I would either use .com for an international site, or redirect to co.uk (if my business only traded in Great Britain). For all scenarios the .uk would redirect to co.uk, and only for BRAND protection, in line @jmcc's research.

While we're on this interesting subject, and there's a captive audience, I own several ME.UK domains. They are all one words very short and massive monthly Google searches. All would be worth a million plus if in .com. But to all intents and purposes they are useless because nobody will buy me.uk domains and it's hard to build on me.uk because almost nobody uses them and so causes a trust issue. Should I let them to EXPIRE?