Generate and confirm registrability in one step, then use the fallback order that 28,213 real companies actually landed on when the .com was gone.
Use a generator that queries live availability as it suggests, not one that hands you a list to check by hand. The yield is low enough that manual checking loses you good candidates to fatigue. And calibrate your expectations: only 54.6% of 28,213 payment-verified companies run a .com. Not getting the .com is the ordinary outcome, not a failure.
"Available" is doing a lot of work in most tools. There are four distinct results and they call for different decisions.
| State | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Unregistered | Nobody owns it. Register at list price today. | Buy it, same day. |
| Premium / reserved | Unregistered but the registry has priced it above list, often hundreds to five figures. | Usually skip. An alternative extension costs less and carries the same name. |
| Registered and parked | Owned, no real site, frequently listed on an aftermarket. | Negotiable but slow and rarely worth it pre-revenue. |
| Registered and live | A real company is using it. This is the expensive case. | Stop. Change the name, not the extension. |
The last row is the one that costs real money, and no domain checker catches it, because it is not a registry question. A domain can be unregistered while the name itself belongs to a live competitor. That needs a separate collision check.
When the .com is gone, most advice tells you to pick .io or .ai. The actual distribution across 28,213 owned domains in the Stripe Index says otherwise.
| Extension | Companies | Share | Median label length | Use a hyphen |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| .com | 15,417 | 54.6% | 12 | 6.3% |
| .org | 1,053 | 3.7% | 12 | 5.2% |
| .co.uk | 1,050 | 3.7% | 13 | 7.4% |
| .com.au | 720 | 2.6% | 12 | 1.8% |
| .ai | 695 | 2.5% | 8 | 1.7% |
| .io | 549 | 1.9% | 8 | 2.2% |
| .fr | 495 | 1.8% | 11 | 24.2% |
| .net | 478 | 1.7% | 11 | 4.2% |
| .co | 473 | 1.7% | 10 | 3% |
| .app | 458 | 1.6% | 8 | 1.7% |
| .ca | 425 | 1.5% | 11 | 3.3% |
| .de | 318 | 1.1% | 11 | 36.2% |
The single most under-used fallback in naming advice. In our data .co.uk (3.7%), .com.au (2.6%), .fr (1.8%), .ca (1.5%) and .de (1.1%) are each held by more companies than most startup extensions, and together they far outweigh .ai and .io combined.
If your customers are in one country, the country extension reads as more credible to them than .io does, and it is dramatically more likely to still be available. One caveat the data makes visible: hyphens are conventional in some of these markets, at 36.2% for .de and 24.2% for .fr, against just 6.6% overall. Local norms differ from the English-language default.
Rarely before revenue. A premium name is unregistered but priced above list by the registry, typically because it is short or a dictionary word. The test is whether the name is doing work you would otherwise pay for.
If you are generating from your own category words, the keyword guide covers which categories should keep them. If you are inventing a word, the brandable guide covers why so much of that output comes back taken.
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; the funded cohort is 13,009. Suffix means everything after the first dot, so a name on foo.com.au counts as com.au. Platform subdomains are excluded from all naming statistics. The extension table shows the 12 suffixes with meaningful share; the long tail is omitted. Availability states and pricing behaviour describe registry and registrar conventions at publication and are not drawn from the dataset. Figures are read-only aggregates with no company-level rows.
Yes, and it is the only kind worth using. The BigIdeasDB domain name generator is free with no account. Instant Domain Search checks live across 800+ extensions and shows registrar prices on every result. Domainr is strongest if you want the extension to be part of the word. The thing to avoid is any generator that produces a beautiful list and leaves you to check each name by hand, because the yield after checking is low enough that you will lose the good candidates to fatigue.
Because generating and checking are separate systems, and many tools only do the first. Language models produce names that look right without any knowledge of the registry, so the output skews toward exactly the patterns everyone else has already registered. If a tool is not querying live availability as it generates, assume a large share of what it shows you is gone.
That is a premium or reserved name. Nobody owns it, but the registry has priced it above the normal list rate because it is short, a dictionary word, or otherwise desirable. It is a legitimate purchase, not a scam, and it is almost never the right call before revenue. Our data shows only 54.6% of payment-verified companies are on a .com at all, so taking the same name on an alternative extension puts you with roughly half the market instead of spending four figures.
Follow what real companies landed on. After .com at 54.6%, the most common owned extensions among payment-verified companies are .org at 3.7%, .co.uk at 3.7%, .com.au at 2.6%, .ai at 2.5% and .io at 1.9%. If you are local, the country extension outranks every startup extension and reads as more credible to local buyers. If you are a tech product, .ai and .io are the conventional fallbacks and both carry meaningfully higher renewal costs.
No. Buying the .com, .net, .org, .io and .co of a name you have not launched yet is a recurring cost for a risk that mostly does not materialise at small scale. Register the one you will use. Add defensive registrations when you have a brand worth defending, which is a problem you will be glad to have.
BigIdeasDB Research. (2026). Domain Name Generator With Availability Checker. BigIdeasDB. Retrieved from https://bigideasdb.com/domain-name-generator-with-availability-checker