How to find an available domain name

Finding an available domain name is three moves, and most people only make the first: generate far more candidates than you think you need, check every one against the registry that runs its extension — not against a web search or a chat window — and treat any single “available” answer as provisional until a second source agrees. The volume matters because the per-name odds are worse than intuition suggests: when we checked 5,006 candidate names against ten registries on 5 August 2026 — 50,060 lookups in all — a single dictionary word on .com was unregistered just 14.1% of the time, and a short invented word only 9.3%. The verification matters because, as we’ll get to, even the registries’ own answers were wrong three times out of eleven in one of our studies.

What are the odds any given name is free?

Here is the measured answer, from our availability benchmark — the same 5,006 names checked against every one of ten TLDs, so the cells are directly comparable. Each figure is the share of names with no registration record on 5 August 2026:

Name shape	.com	.io	.dev	.tech
Single dictionary word	14.1%	63.9%	72.3%	85%
Invented five-letter word	9.3%	91.1%	93%	95.8%
Word + prefix/suffix (get-, try-, -hq)	83.8%	97.7%	99.4%	99%
Two dictionary words compounded	97.2%	100%	100%	100%

Two honest caveats before you use it. The wordlist is a 1934 public-domain dictionary that over-represents archaic vocabulary, so the dictionary and compound rows are an optimistic ceiling — common words are more taken than these figures suggest. And “available” throughout means “no registration record that day”, which is not quite the same as “registrable”, for reasons below.

The table’s one genuine surprise: .com is the only extension of the ten we measured where invented names are more registered than dictionary words. Demand there has moved past the dictionary and into coined strings — the exact space naming tools operate in. The practical reading is that the fastest route to an available name is changing the shape of the name, not just the extension: compounds and affixed forms are open even on .com, while short coinages are nearly as contested as real words.

And if your plan is to wait for a good name to lapse instead: we checked all 6,063 Y Combinator company domains and nine were available — none of them a .com, out of 3,714.

Where do you actually check?

Registration state lives in registries, reached through WHOIS or its structured successor RDAP — and every honest checking tool, from a registrar’s search box to Instant Domain Search, is a front-end to those lookups. What does not check availability is a web search or an unaided AI chat: search engines index content, not registration records, and roughly half of registered domains host no website at all, so absence from the web proves nothing. Why ChatGPT keeps suggesting taken domains unpacks that mechanism; the short version is that a name has only been checked when something queried a registry for that exact string at that exact moment.

For a handful of names, any registrar’s search or a free checker is fine. For a real naming session — dozens of candidates — check in one batch rather than one tab at a time; the bulk workflows cover the tools and the pitfalls.

Can you trust a single “available”? We measured it: no.

This is the part of the method almost nobody does, and it’s the part we can quantify. In our YC study we ended up needing three independent sources — registry RDAP, registry WHOIS, and the TLD zone itself — and the disagreements were instructive.

First, the plumbing can silently lie: the popular rdap.org redirector returned 404 — the “available” signal — for every .io and .co lookup we tried in July 2026, registered or not (github.io and google.co both 404 there), because both extensions are missing from the IANA bootstrap file most tools rely on. Any checker built that way reports registered domains as free, silently, for whole extensions.

Second — and this is the finding no other tool seems to publish — a clean answer from the registry’s own RDAP endpoint still isn’t proof. Across the 6,063 YC domains, registry-direct RDAP reported eleven names as available. When we corroborated with WHOIS, three of the eleven were wrong: scout.ml was registered, and afrostream.tv and blackoak.tv are held by Tuvalu’s registry as reserved names — no registration record exists, and nobody can register them. RDAP has no standard way to signal a reserved name; only WHOIS revealed either case.

The asymmetry to internalise: “taken” is safe to believe from one source; “available” is not. A registration record either exists or it doesn’t, so nothing gets wrongly reported as taken — every error runs the other way, on exactly the verdict you’re about to act on. The practical corroboration for a non-developer is the registrar’s checkout itself: if it accepts the name and shows a price, a second independent system just agreed.

Does available mean cheap?

No — and this catches people at the finish line. Registries flag certain names as premium, and the flag follows the name: in a real search we captured for a coffee-roasting blog on 11 August 2026, chafe.co was genuinely unregistered — at $1,160.78, sitting beside .dev names at $9.99. Same list, same “available” state, a hundred times the price, and premium names usually renew at the premium rate too. What is a premium domain explains how to spot the flag; the rule is to read the price and the renewal price before you celebrate.

The method, step by step

1. Generate volume, in the open shapes. Work the table above: compounds, affixed forms, and unusual extensions are where availability actually lives. Dozens of candidates minimum — how to name a startup covers producing them well.
2. Check the whole list against the registry in one pass, using a bulk tool or a generator that checks as it generates — not names one at a time, which is where attachment forms before verification happens.
3. Corroborate every “available” you care about. Second tool, or the registrar’s checkout. One source is a hypothesis.
4. Read the price and the renewal. An available premium name is a budget decision, not a lucky find.
5. Re-check live and register promptly. Availability is a snapshot, never a reservation. The pre-registration checklist is the five-minute pass before you pay — and if the name you wanted is taken after all, these are the options that actually work.

Where does a generator fit?

Steps 1–3 collapse into one if the generating tool checks the registry before showing you anything — that’s the honest pitch for generate-and-check tools as a category, and the field of them is worth comparison-shopping. Domain Yoga is our entry: one search returns around 250 suggestions, each checked live across 800+ TLDs and ranked by brandability (method published here), at $5 for a single search or $2 each in the fifty-pack, with credits that never expire. It won’t make the odds table above kinder — nothing can — but it means every name you’re weighing is one a registry said was open, which is the whole method in one pass.