How Domain Yoga ranks brandability

When you run a search, Domain Yoga returns around 250 names and gives each one a brandability score and a relevance score. The two are deliberately separate. Relevance measures how well a name fits the project you described. Brandability measures the quality of the name on its own — whether it would make a strong brand for any business, independent of your prompt. This page explains what goes into that brandability score.

Shorter is stronger

The best brand names are short. Four to nine characters is the sweet spot; a name can earn a bit more length if it's especially evocative, but every extra character is a small tax on memorability, on typing it correctly, and on fitting it into a logo. Long, descriptive strings score lower.

The radio test

A great name survives being spoken aloud. If someone hears your domain once — on a podcast, in a hallway, in a demo — they should be able to spell it without asking. Names that pass this test tend to be one to three syllables and pronounceable in an obvious way. Clever spellings that need explaining fail it.

Clean phonetics and spelling

Brandability rewards names that are easy to say and unambiguous to write: no hyphens (they don't survive the radio test and read as spammy), no gratuitous digits, and no awkward letter collisions where the boundary between words produces something unintended. Double letters that complicate spelling are penalised unless they're part of a familiar pattern.

Distinctive beats descriptive

A generic, descriptive phrase — the kind that literally states what you do — is easy to think of and hard to own. Distinctive names win: invented words, wordplay, and evocative coinages are more memorable and far easier to trademark and rank for. The score favours names that feel like a brand, not a category.

The TLD is part of the name

The extension isn't an afterthought — it's read as part of the whole. A complementary TLD can lift a name (a tech product on .io, .ai, .dev, or .app; a clean .com or .co), while a spam-coded extension drags the whole name down regardless of how good the root is. Domain Yoga scores the name and its extension together.

Availability decides the order

A high score only matters if you can actually register the name. Every candidate is checked live for availability across 800+ extensions, and available domains float to the top of your results — so the names you see first are both high-scoring and yours to claim.

How the names are generated

To give every search range, the AI is asked to mix approaches within a single batch — invented coinages, wordplay, real-word brandables, and metaphors — rather than return 25 variations on one idea. That diversity is deliberate: it's how a single search surfaces directions you wouldn't have thought to ask for.

The availability benchmark

Separately from search results, Domain Yoga publishes an open dataset measuring whether candidate domain names are registered or available, checked directly against registry RDAP services and repeated over time against a frozen corpus of names.

It is documented where it lives rather than here — the corpus and how it is built, the measurement method, the known bias, the licence and how to cite it are all on /data/availability, alongside the data itself.