Is that business name taken? How to actually check.

You have got a name. You typed it into Google, maybe checked whether the .com loads, saw nothing much, and decided it was free. Almost everybody does this, and it is the wrong test — not a rough version of the right one, a different question entirely.

Searching is not checking

A search engine indexes what is published. A register records what is claimed. Those are not the same set, and the gap between them is where people lose names they thought they had.

A domain can be registered for years and never show a website — it just sits there, invisible to a search, and entirely unavailable to you. A company can be registered with no site, no social account and no footprint at all. Somebody can hold a trade mark on a word and publish nothing whatsoever. In every one of those cases you will search, find nothing, and be wrong.

Finding nothing when you search proves one thing only: that nobody has published anything. It says nothing at all about who owns the name.

Three registers, and they do not talk to each other

This is the part that catches people. A name is not one thing you can check once. It sits in three separate systems, run by different organisations, that do not consult one another and can quite happily disagree.

You can hold all three, any two, or just one. The unpleasant version is the common one: you register the company, build the brand, and discover two years in that somebody had the trade mark the whole time. The register you skipped is the one that decides.

What “available” means on a domain

Do not use whether the site loads. A registered domain with nothing built on it looks exactly like a free one in a browser — a blank page, an error, a parking page full of adverts. All three mean taken.

The registries publish their own record of what is registered, and that record is the answer. Ask it and you get one of three honest results: the registry has a record, so the name is gone; the registry says it has never heard of it, so it is genuinely free; or the registry did not answer, in which case you know nothing yet and should not pretend otherwise. That third state is real and worth respecting — some registries simply will not talk to automated checks.

How to check properly, in about ten minutes

The first of those four is the slowest to do by hand and the easiest to automate, so we built a free name check that asks six registries at once — .com, .co.ke, .co.uk, .studio, .org and .io — and reports each as taken, free, or could not verify, rather than guessing at the ones that did not answer. It checks one handle, GitHub, and says plainly that it cannot check the rest. No email, nothing stored, and you can close the tab and never speak to us.

It does not check company registers or trade marks. Nothing that runs in a few seconds honestly can, and a tool that implied otherwise would be worse than no tool.

One honest caveat: none of this is legal advice, and for a name you intend to build a decade on, an hour with somebody who does trade marks for a living is money well spent. But most names die long before that — they die because the .co.ke went two weeks ago while somebody was still deciding. The ten-minute version is what stops that, and you can do it yourself this afternoon.