Name collision check · five failure modes
Renaming after launch costs the domain, the package, the docs, the search position and the recognition you already paid for. Five things cause it, only one of them is the domain, and a green availability badge sees none of the other four.
competitor: exact, same category BLOCKER
domain: registered high
npm: taken high
app store: clear
trademark: manual research neededSame-category competitor · Highest
Bounded web research on finalists, with each source classified as exact same-category, exact other-category, or unrelated.
Domain · High
Direct registry RDAP lookups on the endings you choose, trusted only after a known-registered control lookup passes.
Package or developer namespace · High for developer tools
Exact lookups against npm, PyPI, GitHub and the Apple App Store.
App store · High for consumer apps
An exact app-name lookup against Apple's public catalog. Google Play and the Chrome Web Store stay manual.
Trademark · Highest when it lands
Preliminary research signals and explicit starting points only. This is never legal clearance, and a finalist needs jurisdiction-appropriate professional review.
A disqualifying collision is reported on its own, never averaged into a number where a strong name can absorb it.
Every claim carries where it came from and when it was checked, so a stale answer is visible rather than assumed.
A source that timed out, rate-limited or does not exist is reported as unknown, never folded into a pass.
Trademark clearance, Google Play, the Chrome Web Store and social handles without supported APIs are listed as your remaining work.
Method
The known-registered canary behind every likely-unregistered claim, and the failure case that made it necessary.
Questions
Checking one candidate name against everything that could force a rename later: an active competitor in the same category, a registered domain, a claimed package or developer namespace, an existing app in the store you need, and preliminary trademark signals. It is wider than a domain lookup and narrower than legal clearance.
No, and this is the most common and most expensive mistake. A free domain says nothing about an active competitor, a claimed npm package, an existing app, or a registered trademark. NamingSignal keeps hard collision signals outside the usability score precisely so a good average cannot hide a disqualifying conflict.
No tool should claim that, and this one does not. NamingSignal surfaces preliminary signals and the starting points for proper research, and labels them as research rather than clearance. A finalist still needs a jurisdiction-appropriate professional review before launch.
Twice. Once across a wide field, so a name with a disqualifying conflict never becomes a favourite, and again on the two or three finalists in depth before anything is printed, registered or announced. Checking one name you already love is the expensive order.
It stays unknown. A timeout, a rate limit, an unsupported TLD or a failed calibration is never reported as clear. An unchecked source and a passing source are different answers and are shown differently.