Changelog

Start typing the mark text and choose exact, prefix, fuzzy, or phonetic matching. Exact matches help inspect a specific name; broader matching can surface related spellings or sounds. Narrow the results by owner or international class when a common word returns many records.

Status gives the first piece of context. Live records show current registrations, pending records show applications still in the process, and dead records include abandoned, cancelled, or expired filings. A dead record does not by itself mean the name is safe to use; other registrations or unregistered rights may still matter.

International classes organize the goods and services a filing covers. The same word can appear in records from different owners and classes. Use the class filter to focus your research, then read the actual goods and services rather than treating a class number as a clearance decision.

Open a result to inspect its serial and registration numbers, filing and registration dates, first use in commerce, owners, and international classes. The detail view also shows goods and services and record flags, with a link to the official USPTO record for confirmation.

The index refreshes daily from the USPTO Trademark Case Files dataset. It covers the text of US federal wordmarks, including live registrations, pending applications, and dead records. It does not provide a full search across logos, state registrations, common-law rights, or every potentially similar mark.

Use the results to identify names that need closer examination while your shortlist is still flexible. A search result does not establish that a name is safe to use or replace legal advice. Confirm important findings in the official record and consult a trademark attorney before you act.

For twenty years, Instant Domain Search has been a tool you use, not a place you sign into. Today that changes, a little. You can now create a free account so saved domains follow you to every device.

We know an account doesn’t sound revolutionary. Half the internet asks you to sign up before it shows you anything. That’s exactly why we took our time with this one. We didn’t want a login bolted onto the side of the search. We wanted accounts built the way we’d want them as users: private, secure, intentional, and free. And we wanted the foundation to be right, because accounts quietly unlock some of the most exciting projects on our roadmap.

What an account gets you today

Your saved domains, on every device. Until now, your saved domains lived in your browser. Clear your cache or switch machines and your shortlist stayed behind. Sign in once and your list syncs live across every device you use. Save a name on your laptop, and it’s waiting on your phone.

No more save limit. Without an account, you can keep up to 30 domains saved on a device. With a free account, save as many as you like.

10× bigger bulk searches. Bulk search caps at 500 domains per run for anonymous visitors. With a free account, that jumps to 5,000.

First in line for what’s next. Everything we’re building on top of accounts (more below) will reach account holders first.

Private and intentional, from day one

People search for names here that they’d rather nobody else see. A brand you haven’t trademarked yet. A product you haven’t announced. An idea you had ten seconds ago. We’ve spent two decades earning trust as a tool that asks nothing of you, and we want to maintain that trust as we introduce new layers to our tools. So here’s how accounts are built:

• Your searches stay yours. An account syncs what you choose to save, nothing else. Searching never requires an account, and your searches aren’t tied to your identity.
• Cloud sync is a choice. There’s a device-only mode in your account settings. Flip it on and your saved domains never touch our servers, even while you’re signed in. And the first time you sign in, we ask before merging anything you’d already saved locally. Nothing uploads without your say-so.
• We never see your password. You sign in with Google, GitHub, or a one-time code we email you, so there’s no password to create, store, or leak.
• Your list is yours to take. Export your saved domains to CSV any time, from /saved-domains.

The honest reason we’re excited

Here’s a reality of running a free public tool in 2026 that doesn’t get talked about much: a huge share of our traffic isn’t human. Meta’s AI crawlers alone hit our site about 20,000 times a day. Add the other AI labs, the scrapers, and the bots running entire dictionaries through our checkers, and the picture is clear: every feature we put on a public page, we’re also handing to every bot on the internet.

For instant search, that’s fine. We’ve spent years making availability checks fast and cheap enough to serve at that scale, and we’re proud that the tool is open to everyone with no login in sight.

But the things our users keep asking us for cost real money on every single lookup: deeper, authoritative availability verification, domain valuations, keyword search volume, social handle checks, trademark signals. Put those on a public page and bots would drain them within hours, and we’d effectively be paying to enrich someone else’s crawler instead of your domain research.

An account solves this in the simplest possible way: it tells us there’s a human on the other end. And that means we can start giving humans things we could never give the bots.

What accounts unlock next

This is the part we’ve been waiting for. With accounts in place, here’s what’s on the roadmap:

• More accurate checks. Deeper verification for signed-in users, straight from the registries. It’s the kind of per-lookup accuracy we can’t expose on a public page.
• Domain enrichments. Valuations, search volume, social handles, and trademark signals layered onto your saved domains and searches.
• Lists. Build, organize, and share collections of domains for your projects, your clients, or your portfolio.
• Credits and a Pro tier. For advanced domain investors who need serious depth and volume, we’ll offer credits for premium data and, eventually, a Pro account.
• An API. Accounts open the door to a self-serve Instant Domain Search API. It’s coming.

And to be unmistakably clear about one thing: Instant Domain Search is free, and it always will be. The search you use today is not going behind a login. Accounts are free. Saved domains are free. What we’ll charge for, someday, is the advanced layer: the premium data and volume that professional domain investors need. The tool itself stays open to everyone, the way it’s been for twenty years.

Create your account

Click Sign in at the top of the page. It takes about thirty seconds.

We’d love to hear what you’d want your account to do. Tell us: hello@instant.ai.

More and more, the first place an idea gets described out loud is an AI assistant. “Help me name my company.” “Draft a landing page for this.” “Give me ten brand ideas.” And then, every time, the same record scratch: you leave the chat, open a browser, and start pasting names into a domain search to see what’s actually available.

The Instant Domain Search MCP closes that gap. It’s a free connector that plugs real-time domain data straight into Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor. This means that the assistant brainstorming names can check whether they’re available, compare pricing, and suggest registrable alternatives without you ever switching tabs.

What your assistant can do with it

Once connected, your AI assistant gains three domain tools it can call on its own, mid-conversation:

• Search domains — give it a name or a fragment and it checks availability across many extensions at once, the same domain search you’d run in the browser.
• Generate variations — when your first choice is taken, it produces pronounceable, brand-coherent alternatives (prefixes, suffixes, and semantic twists, similar to our domain generator) and only suggests names that are actually registrable.
• Check availability — hand it a single name or a whole list (like a bulk search) and get a definitive, registry-verified yes/no, plus pricing and a link to register.

In other words, your assistant stops guessing whether acme.ai is free and starts knowing.

See it in action

Why it’s different from asking an AI to “suggest domains”

Ask a raw LLM for available domains and it will happily suggest names that were registered years ago, as it has no live data. The MCP fixes that at the source:

• Real, registry-level data. Results come from authoritative registries (VeriSign, PIR, and others) — the same infrastructure behind Instant Domain Search — not a stale guess. Here’s how that data pipeline works.
• Fast. Sub-10ms responses, so checking dozens of names mid-chat doesn’t slow the conversation down. (More on how we keep it that fast.)
• Private. Queries go direct to registries and bypass retail registrars, so the names you explore don’t land in a sales database — or quietly turn “premium” the next day.

It’s also, as far as we know, the only domain search tool with a dedicated MCP surface.

Set it up in under two minutes

The MCP works with Claude (Web & Desktop), ChatGPT, and Cursor. It’s free, needs no account, and requires no API key. Simply point your assistant at the server endpoint:

https://mcp.instantdomainsearch.com/mcp

We’ve written a short guide for each platform. Pick yours and you’ll be running in a couple of minutes:

• Claude Web
• Claude Desktop
• ChatGPT
• Cursor

(Full walkthrough: instantdomainsearch.com/mcp/setup.)

Why we built it

Naming is one of the first concrete steps in turning an idea into something real, and increasingly, that idea takes shape inside an AI assistant. It never made sense that you’d have to leave the conversation to find out whether the name is even available. The MCP keeps your whole loop of idea, name, availability, and registration link all in one place.

It’s also where we think search is heading. As more research and building happens through AI assistants, the tools those assistants can reach matter as much as the websites people visit. A domain search your AI can call directly is our bet on that future.

Try it

Connect the domain search MCP to your assistant and ask it to find you a name. When you’ve got a winner, open it in Check domain availability for the full report, or run a domain search to compare every extension.

You know the feeling. There’s a word that means exactly what you want — the precise one — but it’s stuck just out of reach. Or you’re naming a company and you need a word that captures a feeling: something that sounds fast, or calm, or rare. A normal dictionary is no help, because you don’t know the word yet. You only know what it means.

That’s what a reverse dictionary is for. A regular dictionary goes word → meaning. A reverse dictionary goes the other way: meaning → word. Describe the concept, and it finds the words that fit.

We built one, and wired it straight into domain search. It’s live at Reverse Dictionary.

Meaning in, words out

Type a concept using a few words and you’ll get a ranked grid of related English words, streaming in as you type. Start broad: mountain, fast, big house.

Here’s the fun part. Search a word like “instant” and you don’t just get the obvious synonyms, you’ll see words like jiffy and trice. Right away these might not click, but then you realize: a jiffy is an instant, and something done in a trice happens instantly. That little “oh, nice” moment is the whole point. It nudges you toward names you’d never reach from a synonym list.

Each result carries its part of speech and a short definition, so you can tell swift the adjective from swift the bird at a glance. Want only nouns for a brand name, or only verbs for an action-driven product? Filter the grid to nouns, verbs, adjectives, or adverbs.

How it works

So why does it surface jiffy for instant? Instead of matching synonyms, the reverse dictionary scans the definitions of every word in the dictionary and surfaces the ones whose meaning is associated with your concept, ranked by how strongly they relate. Working from meanings rather than a synonym list is exactly what turns up those adjacent, evocative words. It’s built on a structured lexical database (WordNet) and the same fast Rust search service behind the rest of Instant Domain Search. This means results stream in as you type, the way a domain search does.

It’s the latest in a line of language tooling we’ve built and written about: a blazing-fast word segmenter in Rust, real-time translation with word vectors, and the embedding models that keep our search under 10ms. Reverse Dictionary sits on top of that foundation.

From a word to a domain, in one click

This is where it stops being a vocabulary toy and becomes a naming tool. Click any word in the results and, right there in the grid, you’ll see:

• TLD competitiveness — how many extensions for that word are already registered versus still open.
• Available extensions — the open TLDs you can register right now (.com, .io, .ai, .co, and more), color-coded by status and price.
• Generator alternatives — domain generator-style suggestions built around the word, with exact-match extensions pinned to the top.

So the path runs concept → the right word → an available domain, without ever leaving the page. When something looks promising, open it in Check domain availability for the full report — ownership, pricing across registrars, and alternatives.

Why this helps with naming

The best one-word domains went years ago — but the language is enormous, and most of it never gets considered, simply because you don’t think of it. A reverse dictionary widens the net.

It’s the creative complement to our domain generator. The generator takes your keyword and takes the direct route to available prefixes, suffixes, and TLDs around it. The reverse dictionary is the indirect route, for when you only have the idea: describe the value your business delivers (say your product helps people grow) and you’ll surface words that tell that story without the obvious, already-taken match.

• Evocative brand names — describe the feeling you want (“calm,” “speed,” “trust”) and surface words you’d never have brainstormed.
• Unexpected angles — adjacent and associated words often make better brands than the obvious noun.
• One-word availability — pair it with our one-word dictionary domain lists and the domain generator to find names that are both meaningful and open.

For the bigger picture on turning a word into a brand, see how to choose a domain name and how to name your business.

Try it

Reverse Dictionary is live and free at instantdomainsearch.com/words — no account needed. You’ll also find it under the Tools menu in the nav bar.

Describe what you mean. We’ll find the word — and the domain name search to go with it.

Most “available domain name” lists you find online are stale before you finish reading them. Someone’s blog post from 2022, recommending names that got registered six hours after it went live. We built Instant Domain Lists so that doesn’t happen here.

Every list is regenerated against live registry data. The names on the page are the names you can actually register today, not what was open the last time someone manually checked.

What’s on /lists today

Ten hand-curated lists, organized into four categories at /lists:

• Available 4-Letter Domains — short, pronounceable four-character names checked against .com, .io, .dev, .app, .co, .net, .org, .xyz, and more. Often under $25/year.
• Brandable Two-Word Domains — adjective-plus-noun and verb-plus-noun combinations that read like real brands. Think DropBox, MailChimp, BlueApron.
• Single-Word Dictionary Domains — actual English words still available across popular TLDs. The most valuable category of domain. Hunting for a specific meaning instead? The reverse dictionary finds words from a description, each with live availability.
• AI & Tech Startup Domains — names built from the AI, ML, dev, and SaaS vocabulary. For the next Claude, Cursor, or Perplexity.
• Pronounceable Brandable Domains — invented words that follow natural speech patterns. The Spotify / Roku / Hulu shape.
• Verb & Action Domains — names built around action verbs like Launch, Build, Sprint, and Soar. The Stripe / Shopify / Lyft shape.
• Health & Wellness Domains — calming, natural-sounding names for clinics, studios, coaches, and supplement brands. Think PureCalm, GlowHeal, NourishLeaf.
• Fintech & Banking Domains — trustworthy, modern names for neobanks, payment apps, lending, and investing startups. Think RampPeak, FinFund, AltoSilver.
• Travel & Hospitality Domains — evocative names for hotels, resorts, tour operators, vacation rentals, and travel startups. Think SereneCape, CharmingCoast, GildedVilla.
• Food & Restaurant Domains — mouthwatering names for restaurants, cafes, bakeries, food trucks, catering, and specialty food brands. Think SmokyTavern, RusticTable, CharredFeast.

Filter the hub by category to narrow in (Brandable, Short, Dictionary, Tech & AI), and each list cross-links to two related lists at the bottom so you can keep digging.

Live data, not a stale snapshot

Here’s what actually makes these different from the lists in someone’s listicle.

Every domain on every list is checked against live registry data. We pull availability directly from registries — VeriSign, Identity Digital, Public Interest Registry, and 380+ others we partner with — instead of going through retail registrar APIs that throttle, cache, or serve stale results. Each list page shows you the totals upfront: how many domains are in it, how many are available right now, and the percentage that’s still open.

That counter moves. Domains expire, get registered, change hands. The next time the list rebuilds, the page reflects reality.

The data behind each list is also published openly: every list page documents its methodology. How the names were generated, what filters were applied, which TLDs are checked. The aim is that the list is good not just because the names are good, but because you can see exactly how we got to them.

Open any list in bulk

Lists work best when they connect to action. Every list has a “Check all” button that loads the entire list into bulk domain search. From there you can:

• Filter by TLD to narrow to .com, .io, .ai, or whatever extension fits.
• Filter by price to find the cheap-to-register names or the premium ones.
• Sort by length, status, or pricing.
• Export the filtered set to CSV.
• Bookmark individual names into the new Saved Domains sidebar so you can come back to your shortlist.

A “list” on most sites is a dead end. On Instant it’s the start of your research — a curated input you can slice, save, and act on without ever leaving the tool.

Why the data underneath matters

Most “available domains” lists fall apart for the same reason: the data behind them is slow or inaccurate, so they get stale fast and nobody trusts them.

This works on Instant because the underlying search stack is built for fresh data at scale:

• Direct registry partnerships across 380+ TLDs. Availability comes straight from registries, not through retail registrar APIs that rate-limit aggregators. (How direct registry partnerships work.)
• Sub-25 ms aftermarket lookups. Aftermarket pricing on each list is fed by a Wikipedia-trained embedding model that ranks names by semantic similarity in under 25 milliseconds.
• Smart partner routing across seven registrars. Click any domain and we route you to a registrar that actually supports the TLD, with real-time price comparison across all seven of our partners (Namecheap, GoDaddy, Porkbun, Hostinger, Dynadot, Spaceship, Network Solutions).
• 800+ TLDs supported. Lists span the full extension landscape we cover, not just the popular .coms.

That’s why the counts on every list are honest. We’re checking the same way we check when you type a name into the search box.

What’s next

Right now /lists is curated by us. The next chapter is letting you curate too — save your own list of bookmarked names, share it with a link, watch the availability tick down as registrations come in. We’ll have more on that soon.

In the meantime, every weekly drop on social goes here first. If a new list shows up at /lists, it’s the freshest source.

Try it

Browse /lists, pick a list that fits what you’re naming, click into it, and use the “Check all” button to open the full set in bulk domain search. Bookmark the ones worth a second look.

A list you’d want us to build? hello@instant.ai.

We just shipped filters on Instant Domain Search — narrow your results to available, premium, aftermarket, or taken with a single click. It’s been our most-requested feature for years. Getting it onto a tool that has to stay instant turned into one of the more interesting design problems we’ve worked on.

Why filters were hard

On most search tools, filters are a server thing. Click a filter, fire a new query, swap in a fresh page of results. That works because most of those tools already make you wait a moment for results to begin with — another half-second on top of that doesn’t feel any worse.

It doesn’t work on a tool whose results land faster than your keystrokes. The first version we tried sent a server query on every filter toggle and the page flashed every single time. Type a letter, flash. Toggle a filter, flash. Type another letter, flash again. The whole point of Instant is that you stay in flow, and we’d just shipped a feature that broke it.

So we kept punting on filters for years, even though they were the single feature people asked for most.

How we built them

The trick was to stop treating filters as a server concern.

When you search a name on Instant Domain Search, one streaming query delivers every relevant result into the page at the speed of your typing. We pull availability directly from registries (we have partnerships with 380+ of them) instead of going through retail registrar APIs that throttle and cache. Aftermarket matches come from a Wikipedia-trained embedding model that returns results in under 25 ms. Registrar pricing is fetched in parallel from all seven of our partners. The whole stack is built to get the entire result set in front of you faster than you can finish typing.

Once the data’s already there, filters don’t need a server. They just need to re-rank what’s on the page.

So that’s what they do now. Toggle “Available” and the matches jump to the top while non-matching results fade back. Toggle “Aftermarket” and the secondary-market names move up. There’s no round-trip, no flash, no waiting. The page reorganizes in batches as new results stream in, so even mid-query the experience stays smooth.

The result: filters that feel like part of the same instant experience as everything else, instead of a slow extra step bolted on top.

Why most tools can’t do this

Local-first filtering only works if the underlying search is fast enough to deliver the full result set in real time. Most domain search tools paginate or query-on-toggle because their data isn’t streaming in fast enough to filter against — they’re waiting on registrar APIs, hopping between retail partners, or running keyword matches that need the server to do the heavy lifting.

Instant doesn’t have that bottleneck:

• Direct registry data. We pull availability from VeriSign, Identity Digital, Public Interest Registry, and 380+ other registries we partner with directly. No retail registrar APIs in the search path. (More on how we make it fast.)
• Sub-25 ms aftermarket. Our aftermarket model ranks names by semantic similarity, not keyword match — so “supercoolapp” surfaces names like “rocketlabs” and “stellartools,” not just literal substring matches.
• Parallel registrar pricing. Real-time price comparison across all seven of our partners (Namecheap, GoDaddy, Porkbun, Hostinger, Dynadot, Spaceship, Network Solutions), surfaced inline.
• 800+ TLD coverage. Filters work across every extension we support, not just the popular .coms.

Because the data is all there in milliseconds, filtering it in the browser becomes the obvious move. That’s the only reason this works.

What you can filter

Four status filters, available across domain search, the domain generator, our extension pages, and the aftermarket tab:

• Available — domains you can register today at standard pricing.
• Premium — registry-priced premium names with the price surfaced upfront.
• Aftermarket — names listed on dan.com, Sedo, Atom, BrandBucket, Afternic, and the other marketplaces we work with.
• Taken — already registered, so you can quickly see what’s been claimed and what’s still open in the same view.

Toggle any combination. The counts update live as more results stream in.

We also added dropdown filters where they make sense: pick a TLD on the domain generator to brainstorm against a specific extension, or filter by TLD and price on bulk domain search when you’re slicing through thousands of names at once.

Try it

Search a domain and use the filter chips above the results. Toggle one on, type a few more letters, and watch the matches stay pinned to the top.

Filters you’d want to see next? hello@instant.ai.

We rebuilt Saved Domains as a sidebar that lives next to your search. Bookmark anything worth a second look, click into the full picture for any saved name without leaving the page, and keep a working shortlist as you go.

Why we built it

Picking a domain isn’t one search. It’s twenty. You find a name that could work, chase it through availability, registrar prices, alternate TLDs, the aftermarket — and by the time you’ve actually looked into it, you’ve lost track of the other three you liked.

The old saved-domains dropdown was fine for stashing a name. It wasn’t built for the way people actually narrow down a list. So we rebuilt it as a sidebar that stays open alongside whatever you’re doing. Search, bookmark, click into details, jump back. No page refreshes, no losing your place.

What’s new

Bookmark from anywhere. Every result on Instant Domain Search and Check has a bookmark icon. One click saves it to your sidebar.

Full domain details, in-place. Click any saved domain and the sidebar expands into a details view that adapts to whatever the domain is. You only see what’s relevant for its status:

• Available — real-time pricing from our seven registrar partners (Namecheap, GoDaddy, Porkbun, Hostinger, Dynadot, Spaceship, Network Solutions), TLD competitiveness across 800+ extensions, and a list of alternative TLDs you can register right now.
• Premium — the same registrar comparison, with each partner’s premium price surfaced upfront so there are no surprises at checkout.
• Aftermarket — live listings from dan.com, Atom, Sedo, BrandBucket, Afternic, and the other marketplaces we work with, plus suggested alternative names if you’d rather skip the secondary market.
• Taken — live OpenGraph data pulled from the site so you can see what’s actually on the page without leaving, full WHOIS (registrant, registration date, expiration), and a curated list of similar names you might be able to register instead.

Persistent across devices. Sign in once and your saved domains follow you between sessions and devices. Prefer to keep things local? An opt-out toggle keeps everything on your browser only — saved domains never have to touch our servers if you don’t want them to.

A dedicated page for the long list. When your shortlist outgrows the sidebar, /saved-domains gives you the same data in a sortable table, grouped by status, with one-click CSV export.

Why this works as well as it does

A sidebar is only useful if the data behind it shows up fast. Click a saved name and you should know everything about it before you’ve finished thinking about why you saved it.

That’s why this took us a while to ship. Most domain tools route their availability through retail registrar APIs, which means the moment you click into a name you’re waiting on a third-party server. Instant pulls availability directly from registries — VeriSign, Identity Digital, Public Interest Registry, and 380+ others we have direct partnerships with — so checks come back in milliseconds. Aftermarket listings come from a Wikipedia-trained embedding model that ranks names by semantic similarity in under 25ms. Registrar pricing is fetched in parallel from all seven partners and shown side-by-side, with smart partner routing hiding any registrar that doesn’t actually support the TLD you’re looking at.

In other words: the sidebar isn’t a new data layer. It’s the same fast pipeline our search runs on, surfaced where you need it without taking you away from what you were doing.

It’s also where we’ll keep adding more. Today it surfaces saved domains and check data. Soon it’ll handle generator suggestions, bulk results, and more of the tools we ship — all in one place, none of them a context switch.

Try it

Search a domain and click the bookmark icon on any result. Open the sidebar and click into a saved name to see the full details view. Or jump to /saved-domains for the full table.

What would you want to see in the sidebar next? hello@instant.ai.

We built Check Domain Availability — a new tool for investigating individual domains. Type in any domain and get the full picture: availability, ownership, registrar pricing, TLD competitiveness, aftermarket listings, and alternatives. All on one page, all loading instantly.

What you get

Type a domain into Check and you’ll see:

• Availability status — whether the domain is available, taken, or listed on an aftermarket marketplace.
• TLD competitiveness — a breakdown of how many extensions are available vs. taken for that name across 800+ TLDs. If acme.com is taken, you can instantly see that acme.design, acme.ai, or acme.dev might still be open.
• Available extensions — up to 12 alternative TLDs you can register right now, with links to check each one individually.
• Site preview — if the domain is already registered, we pull the live OpenGraph data so you can see what’s currently on the site without leaving the page.
• Registrar pricing — direct links to register through Namecheap, GoDaddy, Porkbun, Hostinger, Dynadot, and others.
• Aftermarket listings — if the domain is taken, we show marketplace listings from dan.com, Sedo, BrandBucket, and others with prices where available.
• Alternative names — AI-generated domain suggestions based on your search, with links to explore further in our domain generator.

Everything loads in parallel. No waiting for one section to finish before the next appears.

Search history

Every domain you check gets saved to a sidebar that persists across your session. You can build up a shortlist of domains you’re comparing, remove ones you’ve ruled out, and jump between them without re-searching. It holds up to 50 domains.

This is useful when you’re narrowing down options — checking a handful of names back to back to compare what’s available, what’s taken, and what the aftermarket looks like for each.

How it’s different from domain search

The distinction matters for how you use each tool:

Domain name search answers: “What’s out there for this keyword?” You get instant results across every extension, generator suggestions, and aftermarket listings — all streaming in as you type. It’s the fastest way to discover domains.

Check domain availability answers: “What’s the full picture for this specific domain?” You get a detailed report on a single name: who owns it, where to buy it, what alternatives exist, and how competitive the name is across TLDs.

Use search when you’re brainstorming. Use check when you’ve found something worth investigating.

Try it

Check is live now at instantdomainsearch.com/research. You can also find it under the Tools menu in the nav bar.

If you’re checking domains in bulk, our bulk domain search tool handles up to 10,000 domains at once. And if you want to search by extension, each TLD has its own dedicated search page with pricing and market data.

Questions or feedback? hello@instant.ai.

Our domain availability data is getting a major accuracy upgrade. We now pull data directly from registries like VeriSign, Google Registry, Radix, and Identity Digital. No middlemen. No retail registrar APIs. Just source-level data flowing into our own systems.

This means better accuracy, faster results, and something we care deeply about: we never send your searches to third-party retail registrar APIs.

What are direct registry partnerships?

Most domain search tools check availability by querying a retail registrar’s API. You type a name, the tool forwards it to GoDaddy or Namecheap’s backend, and the registrar returns a result. That registrar now knows what you searched for.

We skip that step entirely.

Registries are the organizations that actually manage TLDs. VeriSign runs .com and .net. Google Registry operates .dev, .app, and .new. Radix manages .fun, .online, .site, .store, and others. Identity Digital runs hundreds of extensions like .live and .world. These are the sources of truth for domain data.

We now partner with these registries directly to get:

• Zone files from VeriSign, ICANN’s Centralized Zone Data Service (CZDS), and hundreds of gTLD providers. These are daily snapshots of active delegated names for a given extension. We download fresh copies every night.
• Reserved, blocked, and trademark lists for 380+ TLDs, with more coming soon. These tell us which domains are unavailable for reasons beyond simple registration, like registry holds or trademark protections.
• EPP (Extensible Provisioning Protocol) checks for hundreds of TLDs. When we need real-time verification, we query registries directly using the same protocol that registrars use to register domains. For .com, this means a direct EPP query to VeriSign.

All of this data gets processed, indexed, and distributed across our servers worldwide. When you search, your query runs against our local index. No retail registrar is contacted. No retail registrar sees what you typed.

How a search works

Here’s what happens when you type a domain name on our site:

1. Your browser connects to our nearest server. We run on Google Cloud with servers distributed globally. A load balancer routes you to the closest data center so latency stays low regardless of where you are.

2. Your query hits our local index. The search runs against our pre-built zone file and registry data across 800+ TLDs. No retail registrar is contacted. This is what makes results come back in under 25 milliseconds.

3. We verify with registries when needed. For domains that may have changed status since our last nightly index, our check service runs EPP queries directly with registries for hundreds of TLDs over TLS. The registry does see the queried domain name during this check, but registries manage the zone, they don’t sell domains. Registrars sell domains. Big difference.

4. For the few TLDs without zone file access, we compile availability from DNS. A small number of extensions don’t publish zone files. For those, we run DNS lookups through our resolver infrastructure, which queries authoritative nameservers on our behalf. Similar to EPP, the relevant DNS operators can see the queried domain, but these are infrastructure-level queries, not retail registrar searches.

5. Results stream back instantly. We use JSON streaming to deliver results before the full response is even complete. Your browser connection uses HTTPS, and registry EPP sessions use TLS.

At no point does a retail registrar learn what you searched for. For live verification, the relevant registry operator or DNS resolver can see the queried domain, but these are infrastructure providers that manage the zone, not companies in the business of selling you domains or tracking your search behavior.

The only time a registrar knows

There’s exactly one moment when a registrar learns about your domain interest: when you click a link to buy it.

We partner with registrars like Namecheap, GoDaddy, Spaceship, Hostinger, Porkbun, Network Solutions, and Dynadot. When you find a domain you want, we link you to whichever registrar supports that extension at the best price. We call this smart partner routing.

This is how we keep the product free. We earn a referral commission from the registrar when you complete a purchase. That commission is paid by the partner, not added to your price. We don’t sell your search data. We don’t sell ads targeted to your searches. Our goal is to help you compare registrars and find the cheapest price for whatever extension you want.

We’re ICANN-accredited and privately held

Instant Labs, Inc. is an ICANN-accredited domain registrar. ICANN accreditation requires meeting strict technical, financial, and operational standards. For us, it means direct access to registry data, the ability to participate in the domain ecosystem at the highest level, and accountability to the standards that govern how domain data is handled.

We’re also a privately held company. We don’t answer to outside investors pushing us to monetize user data or sell search analytics. Our incentives are simple: build the best domain search tool, keep it free, and earn commissions when people buy domains through our partner links.

We’ve been running this service since 2005. Nearly 50 million people have searched for domains on our site. We’ve never front-run a domain search, never sold search data, and never will.

We will never register domains you search for

This comes up a lot:

If I search for a domain on your site, will someone register it before I can?

No. We don’t preemptively register or warehouse domains that people search for. Our entire business model depends on you trusting us enough to search here first and then buying through one of our partner registrars. Undermining that trust would be self-destructive.

Millions of domains are registered and expire every day. If you search for a domain and find it registered shortly after, it’s almost certainly a coincidence.

Why this matters

Domain searches reveal business intent. If you’re searching for acmefinance.com, you’re probably exploring a financial services company called Acme. That’s competitive intelligence if it ends up in the wrong hands.

We built this architecture because we believe the domain search process should be transparent. You should be able to explore ideas freely, compare prices across registrars, and only share your intent when you’re ready to buy. Going direct to registries is how we make that possible.

Questions? Reach out at hello@instant.ai.

If you’ve searched for a domain name in the last twenty years, you’ve probably used one of our free tools. Instant Domain Search has powered nearly half a billion searches across 80+ countries.

Today we’re introducing instant.ai, a research lab building more tools to go from idea to something real.

What’s worked

Instant Domain Search started as a tiny Web 2.0 project: a single page that did one thing incredibly well. Twenty years later, it’s still one of the most-used domain search tools on the internet.

If we learned anything from this, it’s that speed wins.

When tools keep up with your thinking, you try more ideas and build momentum. You keep pulling the thread 🧶🤏

We made it faster, simpler, and even built within modern workflows. Behind the scenes, some of the hundreds of technical improvements include:

• Tim Baker engineered our web experience to truly feel “instant”: gutting our JS bundle, eliminating cascading re-renders, and hunting down every main-thread blocker killing performance.
• Rudi Floren architected our availability data more accurately by building a Rust service from scratch that pools EPP connections across registries for real-time registry checks.
• Antonio Stoilkov rebuilt our search UI to feel thoughtless with a rebuilt, modernized experience across desktop and mobile.

And many more. That work compounded into 2.5x growth over the last 12 months. Now, we’re expanding into more wicked fast tools: Instant Registrar, API, and much more.

What’s next

Instant sits in a really special part of the internet: people come to us when an idea is cooking. A new startup, side project, newsletter, or even a name they can’t shake.

Now that AI is making it dramatically easier to build, the hard part now isn’t if you can make it. Instead, it’s whether you can keep the idea in motion enough to ship.

Our goal with instant.ai is to build small, mighty fast tools that help you go from “I have an idea” to “it’s on the internet.”

The new branding

Here’s a teaser of our new branding. We kept the lightning bolt because that’s the ethos to everything we build: speed and momentum.

What’s new is making our design system even more obvious, and almost invisible when it’s working. Our tools feel magical, and we want our branding to reflect that too with a creative, human feel.

A huge amount of this came from Paden Spencer’s artwork and world-building, Spencer Alexander Marsh’s logo illustrations, and Jordan Clarke’s simplification of our UI/UX. We’ll be sharing more of their work as we roll the new system out.

And of course, there’s explorations of new mascots (Jiffy!) because why not.

About Instant

Instant started as a Web 2.0 side project back in 2005 out of the first Y Combinator batch.

Now, we’re a small (but mighty!) team of designers, developers, and marketers obsessed with building simple software.

If you’re curious about anything we’re building, we’d love to hear from you. Send me an email: matt@instant.ca 🫰

We’ve nearly doubled the number of domain extensions you can search. See some of the new ones:

What changed

For a long time, we only surfaced TLDs that were well-supported across our registrar partners. We had the data for hundreds more, but lacked a reliable way to route searches to the right partners for each extension. So we kept the list conservative.

That’s no longer the case. With our improved smart partner routing, we can now correctly match every TLD to the registrars that actually support it. Which means we can finally open up the full list.

Some highlights

Here’s a taste of what you can now search:

.now · .how · .channel · .talk · .forum · .free · .new · .bot · .spa · .music · .bio.br · .kyoto · .osaka · .berlin · .barcelona · .cologne · .quebec · .wales · .cymru · .africa · .basketball · .rugby · .bible · .museum · .luxe · .organic · .realty · .career · .lotto · .fast · .hot · .select · .spot · .deal · .vana · .you · .soy

Plus hundreds of country-code extensions (.ar, .dk, .fi, .fr, .hk, .jp, .kr, .nz, .pe, .ro, .se, .vn and many more), internationalized domains in scripts like Arabic, Hindi, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, and a big batch of Brazilian .br extensions.

The full list of newly supported TLDs is at the bottom of this post.

Try it

Search for a domain with an extension you couldn’t find before. It’s live now at instantdomainsearch.com.

Feedback? hello@instant.ai.

Full list of newly supported TLDs

.abogado, .ac, .ac.id, .ad, .adm.br, .adv.br, .ae, .ae.org, .aero, .africa, .agr.br, .ar, .arq.br, .art.br, .as, .ato.br, .barcelona, .basketball, .berlin, .bh, .bi, .bible, .bio.br, .biz.id, .blog.br, .bmd.br, .bot, .br, .broker, .bzh, .career, .case, .cat, .cfd, .channel, .cl, .cm, .cn.com, .cng.br, .cnt.br, .co.com, .co.id, .co.il, .co.jp, .co.kr, .co.th, .cologne, .com.ar, .com.br, .com.de, .com.hk, .com.my, .com.ng, .com.pe, .com.pt, .com.ru, .com.se, .com.sg, .com.tr, .com.vn, .compare, .cv, .cx, .cymru, .cyou, .de.com, .deal, .desi, .dk, .ec, .ecn.br, .eco.br, .edu.pl, .eng.br, .etc.br, .eti.br, .eu.com, .eus, .far.br, .fast, .feedback, .fi, .flog.br, .fnd.br, .fo, .forex, .forum, .fot.br, .fr, .free, .fst.br, .gb.net, .gd, .gdn, .ggf.br, .gr, .hamburg, .hk, .hn, .hot, .how, .ie, .im, .imb.br, .in.net, .in.th, .ind.br, .inf.br, .is, .it, .je, .jobs, .jor.br, .jp, .jp.net, .jpn.com, .ke, .koeln, .kr, .krd, .kyoto, .lc, .lel.br, .li, .locker, .lotto, .lt, .lu, .luxe, .lv, .ma, .markets, .mat.br, .med, .med.br, .ml, .mn, .moi, .mu, .mus.br, .museum, .music, .mw, .my, .my.id, .name, .ne.jp, .net.br, .new, .ng, .no, .nom.br, .not.br, .now, .nrw, .ntr.br, .nu, .nz, .observer, .odo.br, .ooo, .or.id, .org.br, .org.il, .org.za, .organic, .osaka, .pe, .pk, .pm, .ponpes.id, .ppg.br, .pr, .pro.br, .psc.br, .pt, .pw, .qsl.br, .quebec, .radio, .radio.br, .re, .realty, .rec.br, .ren, .ro, .ru, .rugby, .ruhr, .rw, .sa.com, .saarland, .sbs, .sc, .sch.id, .scot, .se, .select, .sh, .si, .slg.br, .so, .soy, .spa, .spot, .srl, .srv.br, .st, .sx, .taipei, .talk, .taxi.br, .teo.br, .tf, .tm, .tmp.br, .to, .trading, .travel, .trd.br, .tur.br, .tv.br, .uk, .uk.com, .uk.net, .us.com, .vana, .vet.br, .vg, .vlog.br, .vn, .voting, .vu, .wales, .wang, .web.id, .wf, .wien, .wiki.br, .xin, .xn--3ds443g, .xn--5tzm5g, .xn--czrs0t, .xn--fjq720a, .xn--q9jyb4c, .xn--unup4y, .xn--vhquv, .you, .yt, .za.com, .zlg.br

Instant Domain Search now intelligently matches you with the right registrar for any domain extension.

How It Works

When you search for a domain, we check your TLD against every registrar in our network: GoDaddy, Spaceship, Namecheap, Porkbun, Hostinger, Network Solutions, and Dynadot. The result? You only see purchase options from partners that actually support your domain extension.

Search for marksmarketing.page? We show you GoDaddy, Spaceship, Namecheap, and Porkbun. Partners that don’t support .page are grayed out with a clear explanation, so you know exactly what’s available before you click.

Why This Matters

• Every link works. Every “Register” button takes you somewhere that can complete your purchase.
• Niche TLDs, fully supported. We’ve expanded to 800+ TLDs, and the routing keeps up.
• Total transparency. See exactly which registrars support your domain before you click.
• Getting even smarter. Soon, smart routing will also factor in pricing to help you find the best deal.

Try It Now

Search for a domain at instantdomainsearch.com. Pick an extension like .page, .now, .how, or .museum and see smart routing in action.

Questions? hello@instant.ai