Product Name Checker

A product name is claimed in more places than you check

Most people check one thing — the domain — decide it is free, and stop. But a name is not occupied in one place. It is occupied wherever your customers might already meet it: the address they type, the namespace your code and downloads live under, the channel they search on YouTube, and the launch listings where people go looking for alternatives to what they already use.

A name that is free in three of those and gone in the fourth is the one that costs you a rename later, usually at the point when the logo, the packaging and the first thousand customers are already attached to it. This tool queries all four live when you press check. Nothing is pre-computed, and nothing you type is stored.

What this product name checker actually checks

Four sources, each answering a different version of the same question. None of them is a trademark search — that is a separate step, and the last section explains why it matters more than any of these.

• —Domains — .com, .net and .ai, checked live against the registries rather than a cached list
• —GitHub — whether the organisation handle exists, and separately whether a user already holds it
• —YouTube — whether a channel already answers to that @handle
• —Product Hunt — whether a product has already launched under that slug

Why GitHub matters even if your product is not software

This is the check people skip, because it looks like a developer concern. It is really a namespace concern. A GitHub organisation handle is globally unique, claimed first-come, and in practice never released — and it is public, which is the part that matters. It becomes the URL on your docs, your downloads, your examples and your issue tracker.

Plenty of non-software products end up needing one: a hardware product with firmware, a service with an integration, a brand that eventually open-sources a tool. Checking costs nothing now. Discovering it later means every link you have ever published carries a compromise spelling. Note this tool reports the two cases separately — an existing organisation is a hard conflict, while a dormant personal account holding the handle is worth knowing about but is sometimes negotiable.

A taken YouTube handle is a discovery problem

A @handle on YouTube is unique, and whoever holds it owns the obvious destination for anyone searching your product name on the second-largest search engine there is. If someone else has it, you are competing against them for your own branded searches — with a variant handle that people have to be told about rather than guess.

This matters even if you have no plans to make videos. Your customers will search for you there anyway, looking for reviews, tutorials and unboxings. What they find under your name is worth knowing before you commit to it.

Available is not cleared

Everything above answers one question: has somebody already claimed this? That is not the same question as whether you are allowed to use it. Trademark rights attach to a mark within a class of goods and services, on registers this tool does not search — so a name can come back completely clear here and still belong to somebody else in your category.

The order that saves money is: screen for occupancy first, because it is fast and free and eliminates most candidates; then run a trademark search on the two or three that survive; then register the domain and reserve the handles the same day. Renaming a launched product means new packaging, new URLs, broken inbound links and lost search ranking, and it costs a great deal more than checking did.