Every word on this site, in plain English
Buying a domain comes with a vocabulary nobody teaches you. Here is the whole of it, defined once, in the same words the rest of the site uses.
Domain terms
The words the domain trade uses. They are the same everywhere, not ours.
- TLD
- The ending of a domain name, like .com, .ai or .io. Short for top-level domain.
- TLD coverage
- How many of the other endings for the same word are already taken. Wide coverage means people want the word, and that the name is harder to replace with a cheaper ending.
- TLD fit
- How well the ending suits the word itself, like a technology word on .ai. A good fit gives a future buyer a cleaner story.
- One-word domain
- A domain built around a single meaningful word before the ending, like atlas.com. There is only ever one of each, which is what makes them scarce.
- Registrar
- The company you buy and renew a domain through, such as Namecheap or GoDaddy. It does not own the name, it only registers it for you.
- Marketplace
- A site where owners list domains for sale and buyers make offers, such as Sedo or Afternic.
- Aftermarket
- Names that are already registered and offered for sale by their owner, rather than free to register at the standard fee.
- Escrow
- A neutral third party that holds the buyer’s money and the domain until both sides have done their part, then completes the swap. It is how large domain sales avoid either side going first.
- Premium domain
- A name the registry or the seller prices above the standard fee, usually because the word is short or in demand. The higher price often applies to every renewal too, not just the first year.
- Expiring domain
- A registered name whose owner has not renewed it. It goes through a grace period, then usually an auction, and only becomes free to register again if nobody takes it.
- Ask price
- The price the current seller is asking today. It is where a negotiation starts, not what the name finally sells for.
- Renewal
- The 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.
- Estimated value
- A model’s estimate of what a name could sell for. It is an estimate and nothing more: never an offer, and never a price anyone has actually paid.
- ROI
- Return on investment. Here it is the room between the estimated value and the price, written as a percentage of the price, so names at very different prices can be compared.
- Liquidity
- How easily a name could be sold again, and how long that would take. A name many businesses might want moves faster than one with a single plausible buyer.
- Brandability
- How well a word works as a brand: easy to say, easy to spell from hearing it once, easy to remember, and free of awkward meanings.
- Search volume
- How many times a month people search for the word. It measures interest in the idea behind the name, not demand for the domain itself.
- CPC
- Cost per click: what advertisers pay for one click on this keyword. A high figure means businesses are already spending money to reach people who type the word.
- WHOIS
- The public record of who registered a domain and when. Most owner contact detail is hidden by privacy rules, but the dates are not.
- RDAP
- The modern replacement for WHOIS. Registries answer it with the same registration facts in a form built for machines to read.
- DNS
- The system that turns a domain name into the address of the machine serving the site. Its records also show whether a name runs a real site, an email service, or nothing at all.
- Backlinks
- Links pointing at a site from other sites. Search engines read them as votes, so a name that once earned many of them arrives with a head start.
- Domain rating
- A 0 to 100 score from an SEO data provider, estimating how strong a site’s incoming links are next to every other site it measures.
- Topical authority
- How strongly search engines associate a site with one subject, built up from everything it has published about that subject over the years.
- Spam score
- A provider’s estimate of how likely a site is to be treated as spam, based on patterns it shares with sites that were already penalised.
- Trademark
- A registered right over a name inside one line of business. Owning a domain gives you no trademark, and a domain can collide with somebody else’s.
- USPTO
- The United States Patent and Trademark Office, the public register searched to spot obvious trademark conflicts early. Searching it is a first check, never legal clearance.
Unique Domains features
What each part of the product is, and what it is for.
- Screener
- The main screen for finding one-word domains: the whole catalog in one searchable table, with the evidence behind every row.
- Radar
- A saved search. It keeps what you are looking for, your filters and your alert settings, so you keep watching a market instead of rebuilding the same search.
- Signals
- What your Radars bring back: a new matching name, a price move, a status change, an expiry window closing.
- Watchlist
- A tracker for names you want to come back to, with your own tags and notes on each one.
- Portfolio
- The workspace for the names you already own or manage, with what each one costs to hold and what it is worth.
- Projects
- A container for one naming job: the brief, its own Radar, and the shortlist that comes out of it.
- Appraise
- A value estimate for one name or a whole list, run through the appraisal sources you pick and plotted on one shared axis.
- Analyse
- The full decision report on one domain: the summary, what it really costs, the trademark check, reputation, past use, and where to buy it.
- Credits
- The balance you spend on the priced actions, such as appraising a name or running a full analysis. Browsing and searching never use it.
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