How to Choose Your Domain Name (Without Regretting It)

Choose a short, brandable name you can say once over the phone and have someone type correctly first time. For a UK business, register the .co.uk and the .com together, use the .co.uk as your main address if your customers are British, and redirect the other. Check the trademark register before you pay a penny, skip hyphens and numbers, and resist stuffing keywords into the name: that shortcut stopped working years ago. Distinctiveness matters more now than it did when we first wrote this guide in 2012, because AI assistants now recommend businesses by name, and a generic name gets muddled with every other firm that sounds like it.

What we said in 2012, and how it has aged

The original version of this post was published in September 2012, back when our founder Mo Rafi was teaching WordPress at Google Campus London and most readers were buying their first ever domain. The advice then: keep it short, always buy the .com first, purchase from GoDaddy or Domainmonster, avoid hyphens and numbers, and put your main keyword phrase in the domain. The example we used was carrots: if you sell carrots, get carrots in the name. (There is more about those workshop years on our story page.)

Some of it has aged well. Short still wins. Owning the domain yourself, in your own registrar account, is still non-negotiable. Hyphens and numbers are still a nuisance.

Three pieces of that advice are now wrong, though, and it is worth being plain about why.

Keyword domains lost their magic. Not long after the original post went live, Google cut the ranking boost that exact match domains used to enjoy, and it never came back. A name like cheapcarrotscambridge.co.uk no longer outranks anybody by virtue of the words in it.

“.com first” is no longer the rule for UK firms. More on that below.

Registrars are not forever. Domainmonster, the registrar we recommended and used ourselves, has since been retired as a brand. Choose a registrar for reliability and painless transfers, not for whichever banner discount is running that week.

Brandable vs keyword domains in 2026

A brandable domain is a distinctive name that means nothing until you give it meaning. A keyword domain describes what you do in plain search terms. In 2012 the keyword route looked like a clever shortcut. Here is how the two compare now:

	Brandable name	Keyword name
Example	a coined word, or a surname plus trade	freshcarrotsdelivered.co.uk
Ranking effect	none from the name itself; brand searches build value over time	none; the old exact match bonus is long gone
Memorability	high once people have heard it twice	low; it blurs into every competitor
Protectability	strong; you can trademark it	weak; nobody can own a generic phrase
AI assistant clarity	high; every mention clearly points at you	poor; assistants confuse you with the generic phrase
Room to grow	the name never limits you	add a second product and the name stops fitting

For a small local firm the sweet spot is often a hybrid: a short distinctive word in front of a plain trade description. Our client TWF Roller Garage Doors is that pattern done properly. Nobody mistakes them for a generic listing, and the growth (revenue up 44 per cent across our work together) came from the marketing, not from keywords in the name.

.co.uk or .com for a UK business?

In 2012 we told everyone to buy the .com first, even if they only ever planned to trade in Britain. That advice has flipped.

If your customers are in the UK, make the .co.uk your primary address. Google treats country code endings as a geographic signal, British buyers recognise and trust .co.uk, and for local trades it quietly says “we are here” before a visitor has read a word.

The .com still matters, just differently. If it is available, buy it at the same time and redirect it to the .co.uk. That stops a copycat or a competitor picking it up later, and it catches the people who type .com out of habit. If the .com already belongs to an unrelated business on another continent, do not lose sleep: carry on with the .co.uk.

Two extra notes. The shorter .uk ending (without the .co) also exists now; add it if you want the set complete, but treat it as a defensive purchase rather than a necessity. And never run two copies of your site on two domains: pick one primary, redirect everything else to it, and keep your email on the same domain as the website.

The new endings: .agency, .law, .ai and the rest

Hundreds of new domain endings have launched since the original post: .agency, .clinic, .law, .studio, .london and many more. Google has been consistent about them: they rank neither better nor worse than anything else. Choose one for branding reasons, or not at all.

They work best when the pairing is short and natural, a law firm on .law or a design studio on .studio. Two cautions apply. People still type .co.uk on autopilot, so if the matching .co.uk is free, buy it and redirect it. And a handful of the bargain basement endings are heavily used by spammers, which can make an email address on one look slightly off to a wary recipient.

Then there is .ai, fashionable with tech companies, though it is actually the country code for Anguilla that the wider world has adopted as shorthand for artificial intelligence. Nothing wrong with it if your brand suits it. For most UK service businesses it is a novelty, not an upgrade.

The test that has survived every one of these changes is the radio test: say the full address aloud once. If the listener cannot type it straight in, keep looking.

Staying out of trademark trouble

This is the check almost everyone skips, and the most expensive one to skip.

Before you register anything, search the UK Intellectual Property Office trademark register for the name and anything close to it. It is free and takes minutes. Then check Companies House for near identical company names, and run a plain Google search in quotes to see who else already answers to it.

Never register another firm’s brand, or a close misspelling of it, even “just to be found for it”. A .uk domain can be taken off you through Nominet’s dispute resolution service, and a .com through the international UDRP process. Losing a dispute after you have printed the signage, ordered the workwear and built the website costs vastly more than an afternoon of checking would have.

Two more habits worth keeping. If the domain you fancy has existed before, look up its past in the Wayback Machine first; an expired domain can arrive with a spam history you do not want to inherit. And once your trading name has proven itself, consider registering your own trademark, so that the checking runs the other way.

How AI assistants read your brand name

Here is the part nobody saw coming in 2012. A growing share of buying journeys now starts inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Google’s AI results, with a question like “who can rebuild my website in Cambridge?”. The assistant answers with names. Whether yours comes up, and whether the details attached to it are actually yours, depends on how cleanly your brand reads across the open web.

A distinctive name is a real advantage here. Every review, directory listing and mention of a unique name accrues to one entity: you. A generic name is ambiguous, and an assistant can blend the opening hours of one “Cambridge Web Design” with the reviews of another, without anyone ever telling you it happened.

The practical rules are simple: use exactly the same trading name everywhere, make the domain match that name, and state your name, location and trade in plain text on your homepage. Keep your Google Business Profile consistent with all of it. We wrote up a way to test yourself in does ChatGPT recommend your business, and this discipline now has a name of its own: generative engine optimisation, which we offer alongside traditional SEO.

Ten checks before you buy

1. Shortlist no more than three names, and sleep on them.
2. Say each one aloud, as if over the phone. If you have to spell it, drop it.
3. Google the name in quotes and see who already answers to it.
4. Search the UK IPO trademark register for the name and close variants.
5. Check Companies House for near identical company names.
6. Confirm the .co.uk and the .com are both available; if they are, buy both.
7. Check the social media handles you care about are free.
8. If the domain has existed before, review its history in the Wayback Machine.
9. Register it in your own account, under your own email address, with auto renew switched on. Never let a designer or agency own your domain; we build websites for a living and we still insist clients hold their own.
10. Pick one primary address, redirect everything else to it, and set up email on the same domain.

Most of these checks cost nothing, and the free checking continues once the site is live: our SEO tools hub collects what we use day to day, and the best free SEO tools list covers the visibility and rank checkers that will tell you whether the new name is bedding in.

Frequently asked questions

Does the domain name itself still affect Google rankings?

Hardly at all. The words in your domain are neither a boost nor a penalty in 2026. What moves rankings is the content on the site, the links and mentions pointing at it, and how often people search for your brand by name. If anything, a keyword stuffed name now works against you with humans, because it looks like the sort of site that ranks by trickery. Our DIY SEO guide covers the things that genuinely matter.

I only trade in the UK. Do I really need the .com as well?

You need it as insurance, not because anything breaks without it. If it is free, buy it and redirect it. If somebody unrelated already owns it, carry on with the .co.uk; plenty of respected British firms do exactly that.

Are hyphens and numbers still a bad idea?

Yes, and for the same reason as in 2012: they fall apart when spoken. Is it “2” or “two”? Does the hyphen go before or after the word? Autocomplete and QR codes have softened the problem, but a name that needs explaining is still a name working against you.

The name I want is already taken. What now?

Check whether it is actually in use. If the site is parked or abandoned, the owner may be willing to sell, and a whois lookup or a domain broker can open that conversation. If it is an active business, walk away and pick something else. Whatever you do, do not register a near miss spelling of a competitor: that path ends in a dispute you will probably lose.

We rank well on an old keyword domain. Should we move to a brandable one?

Not casually. Moving domains is a proper project: every old URL needs a permanent redirect to its new equivalent, your Google Business Profile and every listing needs updating, and you should expect some turbulence while search engines digest the change. If you are rebranding anyway it is entirely doable, but track your positions closely during the move; our guide to checking your Google rankings shows how to do that without paid tools.

Still torn between two names, or sitting on a 2012 vintage keyword domain and wondering whether it is holding you back? We are happy to take a look. Luckywebs is a London based SEO and web agency rated 4.7 stars from 60 Google reviews, and we have been helping owners pick sensible domain names since the Google Campus workshop days.

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