Why the .com you want is already taken

Registered before your company existed

A domain name is registered once, and then whoever holds it renews it each year. Nothing frees the name while the renewalRenewalThe yearly fee that keeps a domain yours. You pay it for as long as you hold the name, and on some endings it costs far more than the first year did.Read the definition is paid. So the question is not whether your word is good. The question is who first typed it into a registrar, the company that sells names. For a single English word on .com, that was usually someone in the 1990s.

Tesla.com is the plain example. The name was registered in 1992, well before the car company existed, as Andrew Allemann reported on Domain Name Wire on 18 February 2016. One person had held it since at least 2002. In 2005 that holder defended the name in a dispute brought by a different company named Tesla, and kept it.

The scale explains the odds. When .com passed 150 million registered names on 16 September 2020, Allemann marked the day. In 2000, .com, .net and .org together held 10 million names, and people already said then that all the good names were taken. Another 140 million .com names were registered since then.

Registration has not slowed. Verisign, the company that runs .com, reported 13.1 million new .com and .net registrations in the third quarter of 2026, a record. In that quarter, .com rose from 166.6 million to 169.8 million names (Domain Name Wire, 22 October 2026). Names are not scarce. What is scarce is the exact word on .com.

Held, not used

Open a taken .com and you usually find one of three things: a page of ads (the trade calls it a parked page), a page with a price, or no site at all. The holder earns a little from the ads, or waits for a buyer. Holding names is a business of its own.

Kevin Murphy saw the same when tracing the .com of nineteen words new to the Oxford dictionary (Domain Incite, 19 August 2010). Some of those names were in use, while plenty sat parked or marked for sale.

Held names have a price. On 1 November 2026, the sales we track over three years included 348 sales of one-word .com names at a median of $3,025, against 32,001 sales of .com names of any other shape at a median of $819. One-word names are about one .com sale in a hundred. The twelve-month count of .com sales we track is 28,214, at a median of $810.

Two cautions apply here. First, a parked page is not evidence that an investor holds the name. Many registrars put their own page of ads on a fresh registration, so a company that registered its name last week shows the same ads. Second, Taken means registered, and nothing more. The drawer's Status and timing section names the registrar and the stage the name is in.

What is still open on .com

Verisign's own suggestion tool, NameStudio, shows what is left. Kevin Murphy tried it on premium words (Domain Incite, 20 November 2017). For 'vodka', the top open .com it offered was dogvodka.com. For 'attorney', it was funattorney.com. For 'insurance', the tool offered nothing at all. The tool also suggested prefixes such as 'my' and suffixes such as 'online'.

The odds have been measured. DomainsBot studied its own search traffic, and OnlineDomain reported the results on 2 September 2021. An exact two-word .com was open less than 13% of the time, and a three-word .com less than 40%. A query needed at least 20 characters to reach even odds of finding its .com open. About 75% of searchers typed two or three words and tended not to add more.

Verisign's own line is more hopeful, and Domain Name Wire tested it on 19 September 2014. Verisign said that 7 of 10 .com names looked up were available, and that 99% of six-character combinations were open. But that figure counted digits and hyphens, like d3-r9.com. Allemann agreed with the main point, having often found that about 75% of names bought on new endings were free on .com.

Both sides are right, each about different names. The exact dictionary word on .com is gone. The two-word .com, the prefixed .com and the invented .com stay open in large numbers. The saying 'All the good names are taken' is false. Your word is still taken.

Where the exact word went

Founders adjusted long ago. On 1 November 2026 we read the public Y Combinator directory of 6,361 companies, and counted those whose exact name is their .com. In the Summer 2005 batch, that was every company. In the Fall 2025 batch it was 23%, and over the 2025 and 2026 batches it was 25%. Of those recent companies, 47% are on .com at all and 29% are on .ai.

The word itself did not go away. In the same 2025 and 2026 batches, 62% of companies use their exact name as their address, on some ending. Only 25% have it on .com. The gap between the two is 37% of recent startups, and these are companies that hold their word on another ending.

The other place the word went is a price list. A held .com is offered at the holder's own price, far above the registration fee. The next two lessons take that apart. They cover what the three prices you are quoted mean, and when to build on a short word now and buy the .com later.

The sales we track show what a word sells for. For one word, crypto, the count of sales on every ending over twelve months is 4, at a median of $1,188. That median is what buyers paid for the word somewhere. A holder's asking price for the .com can sit far above it.

Read your word on one screen

Browse answers the question on one screen. It shows your word's open and listed names across the endings we track, each with its status today, its price and who sells it. A missing ending may be held or outside the catalog. Our rule is that the status is a registrar's answer that the scanner confirmed and stored, never a guess from a suggestion list.

Never read a suggestion tool's list as availability. The list names what the tool believed was open before you typed, and a stored status ages too. The answer that counts is the registrar's answer at the moment of purchase. In the availability checker, Check now asks for that answer.

1. 1Type your word in Browse. Its open and listed names appear, mixed with names of related words. Each one carries its status: Available, Premium (a name the company that runs the ending prices itself above the standard fee) or For sale. A missing ending may be held or outside the catalog.
2. 2Open the row of the ending you want. Status and timing names the registrar and the stage the name is in. Price and cost shows the price today when the name is for sale.
3. 3Run the full analysis, counted once against your month, then read Other endings. It shows the same word on its other endings, each with its state and first-year price, among the endings with a sale in the last twelve months. Count the ones that read Registered. A long list means demand.
4. 4Type the full name, word and ending, into the availability checker on the website, which allows one live check a day with no account. The checker asks a registrar about that one name and, for a free name, shows its first year and five-year costCost to holdWhat a name costs over five years: the first year plus four renewals.Read the definition.

Before you give up on the word

• Type the word in Browse and write down the status, price and seller of each open or listed name.
• Look up the taken .com in the website's free WHOIS, and note the registrar and the status.
• Run the full analysis and count the endings that read Registered in Other endings. A long list means demand.
• Visit the taken .com in a browser and note what it shows: a site, ads, a price or nothing.
• When the holder shows an asking price, write it beside the registration fee of the word on your second-choice ending.
• Check the full name you would register in the availability checker, never in a suggestion tool.
• Decide whether you need the exact word on .com now, or the word on another ending now and the .com later.