Autocorrect leakage risk
Autocorrect leakage is the quietest way a brand loses customers. Nobody complains, nothing errors, and your analytics show nothing at all — because the searcher typed your name, watched it become a different word, and read the result without noticing.
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What autocorrect leakage is
A phone keyboard does not check whether the word you typed is a real word. It checks whether a nearby word is more likely. When your brand is one letter away from a common English word, the correction engine has a strong opinion, and it wins.
The search then completes somewhere else. The searcher believes they found what they were looking for, so nothing gets corrected a second time. That is leakage: real demand, arriving at the wrong door.
Why autocorrect picks the wrong word
Three factors decide the outcome, and only one of them is about you:
- Frequency — the correction engine reaches for the most common candidate, so a rare spelling never outranks a common word.
- Edit distance — one letter swapped, added, or dropped is close enough to be treated as a typo rather than as a name.
- Position — names typed into a search box with no context get corrected harder than the same word typed in a sentence.
How to measure leakage in your name
The measurable version of this question is simple: is there a common word within one letter, or within one sound, of your brand?
- 1 List every string that is one edit away from your name — each letter swapped, added, or removed in turn.
- 2 Check those strings against a list of the most frequent English words, not a full dictionary. Obscure words do not win corrections; popular ones do.
- 3 Do the same check on sound rather than spelling: respell your name the way it sounds and see whether the result is already a real word.
- 4 Score each of those hits by how common the word is. “Knight” losing to “night” is a serious leak; losing to a word nobody uses is not.
Five ways to plug the leak
You do not have to rename the company. Leakage is a routing problem before it is a naming problem:
- Own the alias. Register the common misspelling and redirect it, so the searcher who types the corrected word still lands with you.
- Add a distinguishing letter. One deliberate change — a doubled consonant, a leading syllable — moves the name out of the danger zone.
- Put the spelling in your own copy. If the name is spoken more than read, state the spelling once on the homepage and in your email signature.
- Buy the ad. Bidding on the corrected word is the paid version of the redirect, and it is often cheaper than renaming.
- Own the ending people assume. On a “.io” or “.co”, the visitor who types “.com” is not lost as long as the “.com” belongs to you and redirects — the same trick, applied to the part of the address nobody says out loud.
Worked example: a name that is one letter from a common word
“Knight” is the textbook case. It is a real English word, but it is the rare one — so both search suggestions and voice input prefer the homophone “night”.
knight
DTRI 36 /100
- The analyzer flags the risk directly: the name is one letter away from the far more common word “night”, so autocorrect and voice input find it first.
- The silent “k” compounds it. A listener types what they heard, which is “night”, and never reaches for the letter that was never spoken.
- This is why the name scores as risky despite being short, famous, and easy to say: ease of speaking and ease of finding are different properties.
Frequently asked questions
What is autocorrect leakage?
It is traffic lost when autocorrect, search suggestions, or voice input replace your name with a more common word. The searcher accepts the correction without noticing, so you lose the visit and never see it in your analytics.
How does autocorrect decide which word to insert?
It favours the most frequent candidate within a small edit distance of what you typed. A rare brand spelling never outranks a common word that is one letter away, which is why frequency matters more than similarity.
Can I stop autocorrect from changing my brand name?
You cannot change the keyboard, but you can change what happens next. Register the corrected spelling and redirect it, publish the spelling in your own copy so people type it deliberately, and consider bidding on the near-word if the leak is expensive.
Is autocorrect leakage the same as a typo?
They overlap but differ in who notices. A typo is the searcher's mistake and is often obvious enough to be corrected. Leakage produces a plausible, correctly spelled word that looks intentional, so the searcher finishes their journey elsewhere.
Keep reading
Mobile-friendly domain checker
Most first searches happen on a phone keyboard. Check whether your domain survives a thumb slip, whether that slip lands on a common word, and whether the ending is one the keyboard supplies.
Brand name spelling test
A brand name spelling test tells you whether a stranger who hears your name once can type it correctly. Learn the six failure modes, then score your own name free.
How we score a name
The full DTRI formula with every weight, grade band, and data source published — plus where the model stops being useful.
Score your shortlist in one pass
Paste up to 25 names and see which one survives being heard, typed, and autocorrected.