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What makes for a great domain name?

Name Guppy scores domain names based on a series of criteria.

How it works

Scoring

Name Guppy scores domain names on a 1600-point scale. Name Guppy doesn't score a website according to popularity, size, traffic, or number of backlinks. Name Guppy evaluates the quality of the name itself: its readability, memorabilty, integrity, and convenience as a domain name.

Criteria

Length

All other things being equal, the shorter the domain name, the better.

Common words

A domain name that uses common words is scored higher than one that uses obscure or made-up terms.

Name Guppy uses a list of the 10,000 most frequent English words, derived from Google's "trillion word corpus."

Non-alphabetical characters

Domain names are penalized for each hyphen or numeric character.

Top-level domain

Some TLDs are well-known and trusted while others are commonly abused and have spammy reputations. Dot com domain names are given special weight.

Homophones

Word-of-mouth advertising for a domain name suffers when the name contains words that sound similar to other words.

Vulgar terms

Sometimes the sequence of letters in a domain name contains unintentional words that can be vulgar or embarrassing.

Rankings

Name Guppy keeps a live ranking of the top ten thousand active domain names.

API

Name Guppy's domain name scores can be accessed via a public REST based API.

Usage

Send all data requests via GET method to:

https://api.nameguppy.com

Parameters

Parameter	Required?	Valid options	Description
domain	yes	Any valid domain name	The domain name to score
notes	no	none	Do not return evaluation notes

Examples

By default, the API returns a JSON string including up to three arrays of evaluation notes ("good," "bad," and "warning"), unless the notes parameter is given with a value of none.

Example with notes

https://api.nameguppy.com/?domain=testsite123.com

Response:

{
  "domain": "testsite123.com",
  "score": 941,
  "percent": 59,
  "stars": 3,
  "rank": 195,
  "notes": {
    "warning": [
      "It contains a homophone: sight, cite, and site"
    ],
    "good": [
      "It's short (fewer than 15 characters)",
      "It contains common words: site and tests",
      ".com is king",
      "Its top-level domain is trusted"
    ],
    "bad": [
      "It contains 3 non-alphabet characters"
    ]
  }
}

Example without notes

https://api.nameguppy.com/?domain=testsite123.com&notes=none

Response:

{
  "domain": "testsite123.com",
  "score": 941,
  "percent": 59,
  "stars": 3,
  "rank": 195
}

Rate Limiting

Data requests are throttled to prevent abuse and ensure stability for all users. Name Guppy's API uses a "fixed window" rate limiting algorithm. This means that an individual IP address may make a certain number of data requests each hour, after which requests are denied until the next hour window begins.

The current limit is 1000 requests per hour.

Legal

The Name Guppy API service is provided "as is," without warranty of any kind, and may not be functional on any machine or in any environment.

Our API is free to use as long as you attribute Name Guppy as the source of the data.