Everything here is a fact about the string
No score, no grade, no estimate. Length, public suffix, subdomain depth, hyphens, digits, whether the name is internationalised, whether it contains characters that are confused when spoken, and whether it has doubled letters.
That constraint is deliberate. This tool replaced a Domain Authority Checker whose entire model was 90 − (name length × 2) + a bonus for common TLDs, presented as Moz's metric. It measured how many letters were in the name and reported it as authority.
Authority is computed from a link graph by companies that maintain one. It cannot be derived from a string, and any tool claiming otherwise is guessing. The [msm_tool slug="domain-name-audit"] reports what a name can actually tell you.
A domain is read more than it is clicked
That is the argument for looking at these properties at all. A name gets said down a phone, printed on a van, read off a business card, typed from memory and dictated to someone writing it down. The characteristics that make those go wrong are all visible in the string.
Hyphens and digits are dictation problems
Both are perfectly fine typed. Both fail the moment someone has to say the name aloud.
A hyphen cannot be conveyed without saying the word "hyphen", and the listener has to know whether it is a hyphen, a dash or an underscore. Digits are worse: "four" and "for" are indistinguishable spoken, and so are "to", "too" and "two".
This is the practical cost. There is no confirmed direct effect on search ranking, and the effect on a business whose customers cannot repeat its address is considerable.
A year in a name ages it
A domain containing 2024 looks visibly dated in 2026, and renaming later breaks every existing link unless each one is redirected. Names outlive the campaigns that inspire them.
Internationalised names carry a confusion risk
Characters from other scripts can closely resemble Latin letters — Cyrillic а and Latin a are visually identical in most typefaces. That similarity has been used for phishing, which is why browsers sometimes display the encoded punycode form instead of the name as registered.
Internationalised domains are legitimate and often the right choice for a non-Latin audience. Worth knowing before choosing one that your name may appear to some visitors as a string beginning xn--.
Why co.uk counts as one suffix
The registrable part of a co.uk address is the label before it, not co. Treating co as the domain name would misreport its length, its hyphens and everything else.
The tool recognises the common two-part suffixes. The full public suffix list runs to tens of thousands of entries and would have to be fetched; anything not recognised falls back to the last label, which is correct for the overwhelming majority of names.
What this deliberately does not tell you
- Authority, ranking or traffic. Those need a backlink index or your own analytics.
- Whether the domain is available. That is a registrar lookup.
- Whether the name is any good. Memorability, meaning and brand fit are judgements, and a short clean name can still be a bad one.
- Whether it infringes a trademark, which is a legal question and the one that most often stops a name.
Choosing a name
Short enough to say in one breath. No hyphens if the name will ever be spoken. No digits for the same reason. A TLD that matches your audience — a country code signals a country, which helps if that is your market and hurts if it is not.
Then say it out loud to someone and ask them to write it down. That test finds more problems than any tool does.