The data
Every morning (UTC) we pull the full .com zone file from ICANN’s Centralized Zone Data Service. That’s every .com name with nameservers, about 167 million of them. We diff it against the day before, and the difference is the day’s new and dropped names. Our count starts on 23 September 2026.
When a name is missing from the zone file, it’s almost always free to register. The exception is a name someone owns but parked with no nameservers, so the generator calls these names “open” and gives you a Verify button that asks the .com registry (Verisign) directly. Check before you buy.
How a name becomes keywords
We split every name into dictionary words. Hyphens and digits break a name first, then each run of letters is split against a ranked list of about 126,000 English words, topped up with newer terms like “ai”, “crypto” and “saas”. The split built from the most common words wins, socatfood.com becomes “cat” + “food”.
- Whole words only. education.com doesn’t count toward “cat”.
- Words of two letters or more count; single letters don’t.
- A word counts once per name, however many times it appears.
- Names in other scripts (punycode, starting “xn--”) stay whole.
A keyword’s active names are the names in today’s zone that contain it. New and dropped are the day’s added and removed names that contain it, and net is new minus dropped.
What the colours mean
A tile’s colour is its momentum: new names in the window you picked (1, 7 or 14 days) against the same stretch just before it. Double the pace and the tile goes full green; halve it and it goes full red. Where that earlier stretch falls before our first day, the colour showsnet growth instead, the share of new names still standing after the drops. Every colour comes with an arrow (▲ ▼) too.
The lists skip filler (“the”, “and”, “in”) and two-letter scraps like “de” and “la”. Short words that sell, such as “ai”, “go” and “my”, stay in.
Spikes
A spike is a word that lands in at least 20 new names in a day, at 3 times its normal pace or more. Normal pace is its average over the week before. Spikes follow news, product launches and marketing pushes, and sometimes one buyer grabbing a whole batch. You’ll find them on the spikes page and in the RSS feed.
Monthly reports
Each monthly report adds up the month: new and dropped names, the size of the zone, and the words that moved. The current month’s report updates every day.
What we keep private
The zone file licence lets us publish counts and statistics, not the names themselves. So you won’t find a list of what got registered or dropped. The only names you see are the ones the generator builds for you and checks against the zone.
Quoting Domaintile
Cite the page with its date, for example: Domaintile, “September 2026 .com domain report”, https://domaintile.com/reports/2026-09.Keyword pages and reports show the date of their numbers, and every monthly report has a CSV download.