How Fast Do Available .coms Get Taken? We Re-Checked 783 of Them
Updated 2026-07-21
The short version
- We took 783 brandable .coms that our system had previously verified as available and re-checked every one against the live registry on 2026-07-21: 38 (4.9 percent) had since been registered.
- Decay scales with time: about 1.3 percent of names verified free within the last two weeks were gone, versus 6.6 percent of names last verified 31 to 60 days ago.
- Rough rule from the data: leave a good available name unregistered for one to two months and there is about a 1-in-15 chance someone else takes it.
- The casualties were exactly the kind of names people hesitate over: petalsilk, kindlewell, draftpace, duskwise, bloomwhisper.
- At roughly $10, registering a finalist the day you find it is the cheapest insurance in branding. Availability is a perishable fact, not a durable one.
Every availability checker tells you whether a domain is free right now. None of them tells you how long that stays true. Because DomainGenius stores every name it verifies along with the timestamp and registry verdict, we could do something we have not seen published anywhere: go back to hundreds of names we knew were available weeks ago, ask the registry again, and measure the decay directly. This is that experiment, with the disappeared names listed by name.
The experiment
Our name pool held 783 brandable .coms whose most recent registry verdict was "available," each stamped with when we last verified it. On 2026-07-21 we re-checked every one against the live .com registry via RDAP. No sampling, no estimates: the same names, asked again at the authoritative source. The result: 745 were still available, and 38 had been registered by someone in the interim, an overall decay of 4.9 percent. Bucketed by how long ago we had last verified each name: Verified free 8 to 14 days ago: 1.3 percent now taken (1 of 76) Verified free 15 to 30 days ago: 2.1 percent now taken (2 of 96) Verified free 31 to 60 days ago: 6.6 percent now taken (32 of 486) The relationship is what you would expect but nobody measures: availability decays with time, at very roughly 3 to 4 percent per month for brandable-quality names.
The names that disappeared
Data feels abstract until you see the casualties. Among the 38 names registered out from under the pool: petalsilk, kindlewell, draftpace, duskwise, dewmuse, bloomwhisper, capsulewise, tailsong, journeykin, gleamist, luminveil, and needleworth. Each of these was confirmed free by the registry a few weeks earlier; each now has an owner. Notice what these names have in common: they are good. Warm compounds and clean coinages in exactly the styles our other studies show are the last remaining sources of available .coms. That is not a coincidence, and it is the uncomfortable part of the finding: the better a free name is, the more likely someone else's brainstorm, or someone else's generator, converges on it. The names nobody else will ever want do not decay. The ones you are excited about do.
What this means for how you should name
The practical conclusion is almost embarrassingly simple: register the finalist the day you find it. A .com costs roughly ten dollars for the first year. Against a 1-in-15 chance that a month of deliberation loses the name entirely, plus the aftermarket markup if the new owner is an investor, it is the cheapest insurance in branding. Buy the domain before the logo, before the business plan, before you tell anyone the name out loud. It also changes how to run a naming process. Do not build a shortlist over three weekends and then check availability at the end; check at the moment of shortlisting, and re-check at the moment of decision, because a verdict from last month is a rumor, not a fact. This is why our generator verifies at search time and why the available-names page re-verifies its samples: an availability claim has a shelf life, and honest tooling treats it that way.
Methodology
The cohort was every name in our pool whose most recent verdict was "available": 783 names, each with a first-party verification timestamp. All were re-checked against the authoritative .com registry via RDAP on 2026-07-21 (with a conservative DNS fallback), and each name's new verdict was written back to the pool, so this experiment also refreshed the live dataset our other pages draw from. Caveats: cohort sizes differ per age bucket (76 to 486 names), so the per-bucket rates are directional; the 61-plus-day bucket (2.4 percent of 125) likely under-measures decay because many of its names sit in less-searched niches. And these are brandable, generator-quality names; forgettable strings would decay far slower. The measurement script ships in our repository and the run is repeatable, which also means this number can be tracked over time, and we intend to.
Frequently asked questions
How quickly do available domain names get taken?
In our longitudinal re-check of 783 previously-available brandable .coms, 4.9 percent had been registered by the time we re-verified, including 6.6 percent of names last confirmed free 31 to 60 days earlier. As a rule of thumb, a good available .com decays at very roughly 3 to 4 percent per month.
Should I buy a domain as soon as I find it available?
Yes, if it is a genuine finalist. A first-year .com costs about ten dollars, and our data puts the cost of a month of hesitation at roughly a 1-in-15 chance of losing the name, before considering aftermarket markup if an investor takes it. Register first, deliberate after.
Why do good available domains disappear faster than bad ones?
Because naming converges. The styles that still have available .coms (warm compounds, clean coinages) are the same styles every founder and every naming tool is steered toward, so independent brainstorms keep landing on the same strings. The disappeared names in our data (petalsilk, kindlewell, draftpace) are exactly the kind multiple people find.
Can a domain checker result be out of date?
Any availability result is a snapshot that starts aging immediately. Registrar search pages can additionally lag by hours. Our data shows measurable decay within two weeks, so treat any verdict older than a day as needing a re-check, and re-verify at the moment you decide.
How was this measured?
Our system stores every generated name with its registry verdict and timestamp. We took all 783 names whose last verdict was available, re-queried the authoritative .com registry via RDAP for each on 2026-07-21, and compared verdicts by verification age. The script is in our repository and the experiment is repeatable.
By the DomainGenius team. This is a first-party longitudinal experiment: the same 783 names our system verified as available were re-verified against the live .com registry on 2026-07-21, using our stored verdict timestamps.
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