NameStake

Check an Australian business name.

Checked against ASIC business names, the ABR, IP Australia trademarks, the domain registries and global search crowding.

What NameStake checks

One search runs five checks against the official Australian sources. Coverage varies by name, and any single check can be temporarily unavailable, in which case the report says so rather than guessing.

ASIC business names register

Matched against ASIC's published dataset on data.gov.au, refreshed weekly. Similar names are matched with fuzzy search, so near-duplicates and typo variants surface alongside exact hits.

Australian Business Register

ABN Lookup, for entity and business names already registered to an ABN.

IP Australia trademarks

The Australian Trade Mark Search, plus selected international offices, for marks that could clash with the name.

Domain availability

Common endings including .com.au, .au and .com, checked over RDAP, the registries' own protocol, with a DNS fallback. Reported as appears available, never as guaranteed.

Global search crowding

How much competition the exact phrase already has online, which is what decides whether anyone will ever find you under it.

How the brandability score works

Every name gets a score out of 100, built from two halves. Brand quality is how the name reads and sounds: syllable count, length, pronounceability, distinctive letters, and how well it works as a coined name you can pour meaning into rather than a generic description. Availability is whether you can actually have it: the domains and the Australian registers.

The two are deliberately kept apart, because they fail differently. A beautifully built name that is already registered is worth nothing to you, so an exact register match, or losing both the .com and the .com.au, caps the overall score no matter how well it reads.

Part of the score comes from a language model assessing connotation and how ownable the name feels. When that is unavailable the report says the vibe check is missing and reweights the rest, rather than quietly scoring you differently.

Before you register a business name in Australia

NameStake tells you whether a name is worth pursuing. It does not register anything. When you are ready, the order that saves the most wasted effort is roughly this.

  1. Check the name is not already on the ASIC register, and that nothing confusingly similar is either.
  2. Search the trademark register. A business name registration gives you no trademark rights, and someone else's mark can stop you trading under a name ASIC happily registered to you.
  3. Secure the domain before you tell anyone the name. Domains go in minutes and register entries take days.
  4. Get an ABN if you do not have one, then register the business name with ASIC. You need the ABN, or at least an application reference, first.
  5. Consider registering a trademark if the name matters to the business, which is the only step that actually gives you exclusive rights to it.

Do each of those on the official sites: asic.gov.au, abr.business.gov.au and ipaustralia.gov.au. Plenty of lookalike sites charge for the same registrations, and some are not connected to the government at all.

Questions people ask

What the scores mean, how definitive a result is, what “appears available” actually tells you, and where every figure comes from are all answered in the FAQ. The short version: everything here is an indicative signal, never a ruling, and the official registers are always the last word.