Check domain name registration, and everything around it
21 answers in five groups, covering how the lookup works, where the names come from, what the estimate means, what a plan costs and what happens to what you type.
Anything missing goes to [email protected] and comes back from a person.
Five groups.
The mechanics of a lookup are explained at length in how it works.
The check
Put the name into the console on the homepage. It queries the registry that holds the authoritative record through RDAP, the structured successor to WHOIS, and returns one of three answers: there is no registration record, there is one, or the lookup did not complete. Nothing is inferred from a cached list.
Somebody holds it under an agreement with a registrar, renewed yearly. Registration is a lease rather than a purchase, and it lapses if nobody renews it, at which point the name eventually returns to circulation.
Yes, and the console stamps the clock time of the registry's last answer for exactly that reason. A name that is free when the row renders can be registered by somebody else an hour later.
Because the registry did not answer in time, usually because it throttled the query. We show that as itself. Rounding a failed lookup down to available would be the single most damaging thing this product could do.
Currently .com, .io, .co and .net. We only offer extensions whose registries answer us directly, because a check we cannot perform is worse than no check at all. The list grows as coverage is confirmed.
Yes, on Studio and above, up to five hundred names in one run, with a verdict and a timestamp on every row. That is what the bulk domain name checker is for.
The names
A language model reads your brief and writes candidates, server side. It never sees a registry and never asserts availability; that answer comes from the RDAP query that follows. The worked example that runs when a page loads uses a local generator instead, because a page view should not spend a generation.
Because that filter is the product. You can switch it off and the taken names stay in the list, struck through, which is worth doing once just to see how much of a typical shortlist is already gone.
They are yours to use. Generating a name creates no trademark right in it, here or anywhere else, so run a trademark search before you commit to one commercially.
Yes. Put it in the brief and it is checked along with the names generated around it. The near neighbours of a taken name are free far more often than people expect.
Generation is not deterministic. A second run is a second opinion rather than a repeat, which is useful, but it means a name you want should go on a shortlist rather than be relied on to reappear.
Value estimates
It reads length, extension and how pronounceable the name is, and returns a range. It is labelled as an estimate on every row because that is exactly what it is: decision support for telling one class of name from another.
No. We are not making a market in names and we will not buy a name from you at the figure shown. Any tool that presents an automated appraisal as a price is overselling what the maths can do.
Different tools weight different signals and some are trained on recorded sales, which are the deals that closed rather than all the deals. Wide disagreement is normal and is itself information: it means the name is hard to price.
Plans and billing
No. The console runs free on this site, without an account, against the real registry. Beyond that every plan is paid, from $39 a month, because each result is a live registry query with a real cost behind it.
One run of the console: eight candidates and a lookup on each. Re-running the same brief in another style is a second generation, because it is a second set of names and a second set of queries.
At any time, from the account. Your shortlists stay readable and exportable after you cancel.
No. Registration is paid to a registrar at the standard yearly fee for the extension. What you pay us for is finding the name and knowing that it is free.
Your data
It goes to our server and from there to the model. It is not sold, not published, and not used to train anything, which also means one customer's brief cannot turn up in another customer's shortlist.
The email address you sign up with, your briefs and shortlists, and the ordinary technical records needed to run and secure the service. The full account is in the privacy policy.
Yes. Write to [email protected] and the account, its briefs and its shortlists are deleted. On the Enterprise plan the retention window and the deletion commitment are written into the agreement.
Longer answers
Where a question needed a page rather than a paragraph, it got one.
The protocol behind the check, who answers it, and the four things a verdict does not mean.
Checking names you already have, one at a time or five hundred at a time.
What an automated estimate reads, and the three things it cannot see.
The four plans, what each includes, and why there is no free tier.
The fastest answer is the console itself.
Write one line about the business and watch the verdicts land. No account, no card, and the lookups are the same ones a plan runs.
No card to create the account. Your brief stays yours.