Does a GTLD extension 'count' as part of the target keyword?

[ecommercebc]

Hopefully someone can shed some light on this for me. Reading about GTLDs, I came across this quote from TSO Host:

'What we don’t know is whether an extension can double up as a keyword, which is picked up by Google and treated identically to the rest of a domain name. I.e. - would ‘bristolguitars.music’ have more ranking potential than ‘bristolguitars.com’ as ‘music’ is a relevant search word?' Source: https://www.tsohost.com/blog/how-do-new-gtlds-affect-seo

Does anyone know if a GTLD extension does double up as a keyword? For example, if Nike buys 'Nike.shoes', does this double as the keyword 'Nike shoes', or is Google and other search engines just looking at the domain name _before _the GTLD extension? I'm looking at .photography for examples (not my niche) and seeing folks are having mixed results ranking for 'Keyword + Photography', so would be keen to hear your thoughts.

[ecommercebc]

That's super helpful, thank you. My GTLD would be a brand term, perhaps the closest description would be 'B.bc' (if that existed) or The.times (again, if that existed). In these examples, would the URL be interpreted as BBC and thetimes or just 'B' and 'the'?

[Highland]

Any keyword that's in the URL will be highlighted in Google's search. And Google seems to consider a given URL as one logical unit.

Does it help? Yes. Is it something I would go out of my way to obtain? Probably not (especially since these vanity TLDs are often more expensive). I would say you'd be just as fine with a .com as you would .shoes. Remember, exact match domains (i.e. www.tennisshoes.com) were a huge SEO thing for a while and have not been so in quite some time. I would say your URL structure after the domain name is more important than the TLD itself.