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There's a claim that gets thrown around in naming-tool comparisons: "most Namelix names are taken." We've made a softer version of that argument ourselves. But nobody ever shows the data — so we collected it.
The setup
In June 2026 we ran four real product ideas through Namelix's generator, using its defaults: the Auto name style and Medium randomness. For each keyword set we collected every name from the first few pages of results — no cherry-picking, no re-rolls — and then checked the exact .com for each name against the registry, the same day, using the same live availability lookups that power namemyapp.
The four keyword sets:
- "meeting notes ai"
- "fitness coaching app"
- "ai customer support"
- "sustainable fashion brand"
That gave us 138 names. Every single one was presented by Namelix as a suggestion you might fall in love with.
The results
| Keyword set | Names checked | .com already taken |
|---|---|---|
| "meeting notes ai" | 36 | 36% |
| "fitness coaching app" | 27 | 41% |
| "ai customer support" | 20 | 40% |
| "sustainable fashion brand" | 55 | 47% |
| Total | 138 | 42% |
58 of the 138 names — 42% — could not be registered as a .com at any price. Someone already owns them. The denser the niche, the worse it gets: nearly half of the sustainable-fashion names were gone.
42% is the floor, not the ceiling
Two things make the real-world experience worse than the raw number:
Taken names cluster at the top. The most natural, most pronounceable suggestions — the ones you'd actually shortlist — are exactly the ones someone registered in 2019. The quirky five-syllable mashups are available; the names you'd pick are not. Your personal hit rate on names you like will be worse than 42%.
"Available" doesn't mean "safe." We only checked registration status. We didn't screen these 138 names for trademark conflicts. Some of the available ones collide with live marks, which means a cease-and-desist after you've printed the name on your landing page. (We checked a handful through our free brand-conflict tool — there are landmines in the available pool too.)
To be fair to Namelix
Namelix is good at what it does. The names are creative, the logo previews are slick, and it's free. If you want a mood board of naming directions, it's a genuinely useful tool.
The problem is the workflow it leaves you with: generate, fall in love, alt-tab to a registrar, discover it's taken, grieve, repeat. At a 42% kill rate — higher among the names worth loving — that loop eats an afternoon and ends in a compromise name.
The availability-first alternative
We built namemyapp on one rule: never show a founder a name they can't own. Every name in our results has already passed a live domain check across the TLDs you care about, plus an instant trademark screen, before it renders. The price to register is right there next to it.
Run the same niche through namemyapp and compare the experience. Then check our full namemyapp vs Namelix comparison — including this data — before you spend another weekend on names you can't buy.
Methodology notes
- Names collected June 11, 2026 from namelix.com (Auto style, Medium randomness, business-description field left blank).
- First ~3 result pages per keyword set, deduplicated, 138 unique names total.
- Availability checked the same day via live registry lookups (the same Dynadot-backed checks namemyapp uses in production).
- We checked the exact name as a
.comonly. Checking .io/.ai/.app variants changes the absolute numbers but not the structural problem: the generator doesn't check anything before suggesting. - The full name list and per-name results are reproducible; the keyword sets above are enough to re-run the test yourself.
