Generate names from the words that describe your business, then find out whether your category is one where keeping the keyword helps or holds you back. Tested against 28,213 real company domains.
Keyword-based domain generation works, but whether you should keep the keyword in the final name depends almost entirely on your category. Across 28,213 payment-verified company domains, home-services businesses average 14.1 characters and only 22.8% use a short name, because the keyword is the whole point. AI tools average 9.5 characters with 59.5% short, because the keyword is assumed. Generate from keywords either way. Decide whether to keep them based on where your category sits on the spectrum below.
Every keyword domain generator does the same thing: you hand it two or three words, it recombines them with prefixes, suffixes and synonyms, and hands back a few hundred permutations. That part is solved and it is free everywhere, including in our generator.
The part nobody answers is whether the keyword should survive into the name you actually register. Advice articles say "keep it short and brandable," which quietly tells every plumber in the country to name their company something abstract. So we checked what real companies do, split by what kind of business they are.
Three inputs produce better output than a single seed word:
Our generator takes the description directly rather than asking for isolated keywords, which is why it tends to keep the real nouns of a business instead of abstracting them away.
We measured 31 categories across the 28,213 owned domains in the Stripe Index. Ordering them by the share of companies using a short name produces a clean spectrum, from categories where names stay descriptive to categories where they get invented.
These six categories have the lowest share of short names in the dataset. They are mostly local, service and trust-led businesses, where the domain has to tell a stranger what you do before they click.
| Category | Companies | Avg length | Short names | .com |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| home-services-trades | 889 | 14.1 | 22.8% | 69.6% |
| photography-creative | 278 | 13.2 | 23.4% | 64% |
| salon-spa-beauty | 271 | 13 | 25.1% | 52.8% |
| courses-coaching | 979 | 13.1 | 25.4% | 62.7% |
| health-medical | 894 | 13.5 | 25.8% | 62.2% |
| travel-hospitality | 1,404 | 12.8 | 27.1% | 62.5% |
If you are here, a 13 to 15 character keyword domain is not a compromise. It is the norm, and the .com rate in these categories is the highest in the dataset, which means the descriptive names are still available often enough that real companies keep getting them.
The other end of the same spectrum. These categories have the highest share of short names and the lowest .com rates, because the good descriptive .coms went years ago and the convention shifted to invented words on alternative extensions.
| Category | Companies | Avg length | Short names | .com | .ai |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| crm | 336 | 9.5 | 59.5% | 46.4% | 6.8% |
| ai-tools | 866 | 9.6 | 55.2% | 43% | 19.3% |
| software-dev-agency | 550 | 10.4 | 50.2% | 54.9% | 1.6% |
| data-analytics | 259 | 10.3 | 50.2% | 54.1% | 6.9% |
| marketplace | 1,379 | 10.3 | 49.7% | 54.7% | 1.6% |
| invoicing-billing | 468 | 10.8 | 48.1% | 52.6% | 1.3% |
If you are here, use keywords as raw material for the generator and then let it abstract them. The brandable approach is the right one for this end of the market.
The single most common mistake in keyword naming is trimming a clear name into an unclear one to hit an imaginary character limit. The distribution does not support that limit.
| Length | Payment-verified companies | Venture-funded companies |
|---|---|---|
| 1-5 chars | 7.6% | 15.2% |
| 6-9 chars | 30.6% | 53.4% |
| 10-14 chars | 35.5% | 27.5% |
| 15-19 chars | 19.2% | 3.6% |
| 20+ chars | 7.1% | 0.3% |
Median owned domain: 11 characters. Median funded-company domain: 8. If a generator keeps steering you under nine characters, it is optimising you for the funded aesthetic in the right column, which is a much smaller and very differently financed group of companies.
Both are the usual escape hatch when the keyword name you want is gone, and both are rarer in practice than the escape-hatch framing suggests.
Treat either one showing up in your shortlist as a signal to generate again rather than as a solution.
A keyword name is more likely to collide with an existing company than an invented one, precisely because it is made of the obvious words. Run the shortlist through a name collision and trademark check before you buy anything, and confirm live availability with a generator that checks as it suggests.
Domains come from the BigIdeasDB Stripe Index (public Stripe directory) and Funded DB, aggregated on 2026-07-26. The payment-verified cohort is 28,213 owned domains from 30,322 companies; the funded cohort is 13,009. A name counts as "short" at nine characters or fewer, measured on the domain label only, excluding the extension. Platform subdomains such as vercel.app and lovable.app are excluded from every naming statistic and reported separately. Figures are read-only aggregates with no company-level rows.
Start with two or three words that describe what the business actually does, not what it aspires to be, then run them through a generator that expands and recombines them rather than one that invents abstract brand words. The free BigIdeasDB domain name generator takes a plain business description and works from the words in it. The important step comes after: check whether your category is one where keyword-led names are normal. In our dataset of 28,213 payment-verified company domains, home-services businesses average 14.1 characters and only 22.8% use a short name, because they keep the keyword. AI tools average 9.6 characters with 55.2% short, because they drop it.
Not directly. Google has treated exact-match domains as a weak-to-neutral signal for over a decade, so buying plumbinglondon.com will not rank you for plumbing in London on its own. What a keyword domain does do is tell a human what you sell before they click, which matters more for local and service businesses than for software. That is why the split in our data is by category rather than by quality: 69.6% of home-services companies run a .com with a long descriptive name, while CRM companies sit at 46.4% .com with an average of 9.5 characters.
Longer than most generators suggest. The median owned domain across 28,213 payment-verified companies is 11 characters and the average is 11.7. Only 7.6% use five characters or fewer. If you are in a keyword-led category, 12 to 15 characters is completely normal and 26.3% of real companies sit at 15 or more. The pressure to get under nine characters comes from the venture-funded cohort, where the median is 8 and 68.6% sit at nine or fewer. Those are different businesses with different distribution.
Usually no, but it is not disqualifying. Only 6.6% of payment-verified company domains use a hyphen, and among funded companies it drops to 2.5%. The exceptions are strongly regional: 36.2% of .de domains and 24.2% of .fr domains in our dataset use hyphens, where the convention is normal and readable. If you are naming an English-language business, treat a hyphen as a sign the name you want is taken and keep looking rather than as a solution.
Avoid them unless the number is the product. Only 3.3% of payment-verified domains contain a digit and only 1.7% of funded ones do. Digits create a spoken-word problem: every time someone says the domain aloud they have to specify whether it is the numeral or the word, which quietly taxes every referral you ever get.
BigIdeasDB Research. (2026). Domain Name Generator From Keywords. BigIdeasDB. Retrieved from https://bigideasdb.com/domain-name-generator-from-keywords