What this generates, and what it does not
Enter a word and the generator returns available domain names built around it — prefixed, suffixed, and across a range of extensions — with a price attached to each. Every name returned is available at the moment you run it.
What it does not do is invent a brand for you. It is a mechanical expansion of a word you supply, which is exactly what you want when you have a concept and need to find the version of it that is still registrable. It is not a substitute for naming work.
Getting better output
- Give it the root, not the whole name. Enter orbit rather than orbitanalyticsgroup. Short roots produce far better expansions.
- Try two or three related words separately. Running the generator on three different concept words produces a broader and more useful shortlist than running it once and taking fifty results.
- Ignore the tempting long ones. A long available name is usually available because it is long. Length costs you every time someone has to say it, type it, or read it off a business card.
What makes a domain name work
The measurable qualities of a working domain name are unglamorous and largely mechanical. A name that satisfies them is not automatically a good brand, but a name that fails them will cost you money for as long as you use it.
- Length, within reason. The technical limit is sixty-three characters per label and nobody sensible approaches it. The practical constraint is that every additional syllable is another chance to be misheard and every additional character another chance to be mistyped. Shorter is better, but not at the cost of clarity: a clear three-word name beats an ambiguous one-word one.
- One obvious spelling. The test is bidirectional. Somebody who hears the name should be able to spell it, and somebody who reads it should be able to say it. Names that fail this test do so predictably: deliberate misspellings, dropped vowels, homophones, and words with two accepted spellings across English variants.
- Survival when read aloud. Say the whole domain in a sentence, then say a full email address on it, then leave it as a voicemail. Names that need a spelling every time are not cheap names; they are names with a recurring cost paid in every conversation.
- No accidental second reading. Two words run together sometimes produce a third word, or a letter run — the end of one word colliding with the start of the next — that looks like a typo. Read every shortlisted name as a single string, not as the two words you had in mind.
Why hyphens and numbers cause problems
Both look like a neat solution to an unavailable name, and both create a problem that lasts as long as the brand.
A hyphen has to be spoken every single time, and it will be forgotten. Whoever holds the unhyphenated version — which is generally registered, because that is why you reached for the hyphen — receives the traffic and the mail that people intended for you. Hyphenated names also read as the version somebody settled for. There are legitimate uses, mainly long compounds in languages that build words that way and established brands that already contain one, but a hyphen inserted purely to dodge an unavailable name rarely repays the cost. Note also that hyphens carry syntax rules: a label may not begin or end with one, and several registries prohibit a hyphen in the third and fourth positions because that pattern is reserved for encoded internationalised names.
A number introduces an ambiguity that never resolves. Any name containing a digit exists in two forms — the numeral and the word — and you will be asked which one you mean for the life of the domain. If you register a name with a digit, you effectively have to register the spelled-out version too, at which point the saving has gone. Numbers tied to a year or a version age badly in a way that is not obvious until three years later.
Checking a shortlist for trademark conflict
Registering a domain confers no trademark rights whatsoever. It is a contract for the use of a name in a registry database, and it does not entitle you to use that name commercially if somebody else already has rights in it. Names are taken away from registrants regularly, and the mechanism is not obscure.
The Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy is incorporated into the registration agreement of every generic top-level domain and has been adopted voluntarily by many country-code registries. A complainant must prove three things, and failing any one of them defeats the complaint: that the domain is identical or confusingly similar to a trademark in which they have rights; that the registrant has no rights or legitimate interests in the name; and that the domain was registered and is being used in bad faith. That third element is conjunctive, and it is the reason many strong-looking complaints fail — a name registered in good faith before the complainant's mark existed generally cannot satisfy it, however objectionable its current use.
Two features of the process matter for planning. The remedies available to a panel are transfer of the domain, cancellation of the registration, or denial of the complaint; monetary damages and legal costs are explicitly unavailable. And cases typically complete within about two months of filing, which is fast by the standards of any other dispute forum and fast enough that a launch can be derailed by one.
The checks worth running on a shortlist before you commit any spend are short.
- Search the exact string as a phrase and see what already exists under it — a company, a product, a person, or something you would rather not be adjacent to.
- Search the trademark register in every market you intend to operate in, not just your own. Rights are territorial, and a clear result at home says nothing about elsewhere.
- Check the app stores and the main social platforms for the same string. An unavailable handle everywhere is a strong hint that somebody is already established under the name.
- Look for unregistered use in your own sector. In several jurisdictions rights can arise from use rather than registration, and a competitor trading under the name for a decade has them whether or not anything is on a register.
None of that is legal advice, and a genuinely contested name deserves a professional clearance search. But most conflicts are visible in fifteen minutes to anybody who looks, and the cost of looking after the logo has been designed is very much higher than the cost of looking first.