Check up to 200 domains at once

Who actually needs to check 200 domains at once

Bulk checking is not a power-user novelty. It is the normal way of working for several groups of people, and checking names one at a time is the thing that wastes their time.

• Brand protection. Registering the obvious typo and extension variants of your primary domain is standard defensive practice. Working out which of those variants are still free means checking dozens of names.
• Rebrands and launches. A naming exercise produces a shortlist, and the shortlist has to be filtered by what is actually registrable before anyone falls in love with a name.
• Portfolio owners and investors. Evaluating a list of candidate acquisitions, or checking which names in a dropping list are worth pursuing, is inherently a list operation.
• Agencies. Checking client name candidates across the extensions the client cares about, in one pass, before the presentation.

How to build a good list

Paste one domain per line, or separate them with commas — both work. Include the extension on each name. If you want to test one name across many extensions rather than many names, use the extension sweep instead, which is built for that shape of question.

A practical approach for brand protection is to generate the list systematically rather than by hand: your exact name across the extensions that matter to your market, then common misspellings, then hyphenated and non-hyphenated variants, then singular and plural. That produces a list of sixty to a hundred names for a typical brand, comfortably inside the two-hundred-name limit per request.

Reading the results

The table shows availability, registration price, and renewal price for every name. Sort or filter to available names only, and export the whole table as CSV if you want to work through it in a spreadsheet or circulate it internally.

One caution on defensive registration: it is easy to run this tool, see forty available variants, and register all of them. Before you do, price the renewals. Forty domains at even a modest renewal price is a recurring annual cost that tends to outlive the person who authorised it. Defensive registration is worthwhile, but it should be a deliberate, priced decision about which specific threats you are defending against.

When almost everything comes back taken

A sheet that is ninety per cent red is not a failure of the tool and usually not bad luck. Short names, dictionary words and obvious compounds in established extensions were registered years ago. What the result actually tells you is that your naming method is generating the same candidates everyone else generates, which is a signal to change the method rather than to keep checking.

A heavily taken result set still carries useful information, and it is worth reading rather than discarding.

• Separate taken-and-used from taken-and-parked. Run a registration data lookup and a DNS lookup on the handful that matter. A name with no nameservers, or nameservers belonging to a parking service, is held rather than operated, and a holder is someone you can at least make an offer to. A name resolving to a live business in your sector is not available at any realistic price and should come off the list.
• Triage the defensive variants by live risk. A typo variant of your brand that resolves to advertising, a competitor, or a phishing page is an active problem. The same variant sitting registered with no DNS at all is dormant and can wait. Spending the budget in that order is more effective than registering alphabetically down the list.
• Look at what is free. The pattern in the available names often points at the direction your naming should take — a second word that nobody has paired with your first, or an extension where the whole namespace is still open.

The wrong response to a mostly-taken sheet is to register the one obscure option that survived. A name is only worth having in a form your audience will accept without an explanation. It is nearly always better to change the name than to accept a version of it that you will be spelling out on the phone for the next decade.

Checking is not reserving

An availability result is a reading of the registry at one moment. It places no hold of any kind, reserves nothing, and confers no priority. Registries change state continuously, and a name that was free when the sheet was generated can be gone before the sheet is circulated — particularly for names that several people are likely to want at the same time, which is precisely the category good shortlists are made of.

Two practical consequences follow. First, treat a bulk export as a snapshot with a timestamp rather than as a standing inventory; re-run it before acting on anything more than a few days old. Second, if a name genuinely matters, register it rather than adding it to a document for the next meeting. The cost of registering a name you later abandon is one term. The cost of losing it is whatever the aftermarket decides, if it is obtainable at all.

The persistent belief that searching a name causes somebody to register it is largely folklore. Our checks query the registry and are not published or shared. The ordinary explanation for a name disappearing between Monday and Friday is far simpler: somebody else wanted it too, and they acted first.

What to do with the CSV

The export is designed to be worked, not filed. A workflow that holds up in practice looks like this.

• Sort by renewal price, not registration price. The first-year figure is a promotion; the renewal figure is what the list costs you every year from now on. Sum the renewal column for everything you are minded to register — that total is the recurring commitment you are asking the business to carry, and seeing it before you buy changes decisions.
• Add a decision column. Three values are enough: register, monitor, ignore. Anything marked monitor should go on an actual watch list with a review date, not into the same spreadsheet you will never open again.
• Add an owner and a date. Defensive portfolios are abandoned when the person who created them leaves. A named owner and the date the sheet was generated are the two fields that make it possible to audit the list in two years.
• Keep the taken rows. They are the record of what you checked and what you found, which is exactly what you will want if a dispute, an acquisition, or a rebrand brings you back to the same names later.

If you are running this regularly — quarterly brand sweeps, for instance — keep the dated exports rather than overwriting them. The interesting information is usually in the change between two sheets: a variant that moved from available to registered, or a name that dropped and became available, is worth more attention than the ninety rows that did not move at all.