Mobile-friendly domain checker
Most people meet your domain for the first time on a phone. They heard it, or half-remembered it, and now they are typing it with two thumbs on a keyboard where every letter has neighbours. A mobile-friendly name is one where the likely slip still gets them to you.
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Why the phone keyboard decides your traffic
On a physical keyboard a typo is a rare accident. On a phone keyboard the keys are about seven millimetres wide and the letters are arranged so that the most-used ones sit closest to each other, which is efficient for typing speed and unforgiving for unusual spellings.
The result is that certain letter pairs are genuinely dangerous. Two letters that are half a key apart on the keyboard are, in practice, two spellings of the same thing.
What a mobile check actually measures
NameKnow scores four separate things when it asks how a name behaves on a phone:
- Key distance — how far apart each adjacent letter pair sits on a QWERTY layout, measured in half-keys. Close pairs are the ones thumbs slide across.
- One-key landings — whether changing a single letter for a neighbouring key produces a real, common English word. If it does, a slip becomes a silent redirect to somebody else.
- Reach and length — how many keystrokes the name costs, and whether it needs a shift key, a symbol, or a hyphen that the soft keyboard hides behind a toggle.
- The ending — “.com” is finished for you by autocomplete and the return key, while any other ending is three or four taps the phone will not supply.
The typos that actually cost you money
Not every typo matters. A slip that produces nonsense gets corrected by the user, because the result is obviously wrong. A slip that produces a real word does not get corrected — the searcher sees a plausible result, reads it, and leaves.
That is the asymmetry worth designing against. The expensive typo is not the one that looks broken; it is the one that looks fine.
A mobile-friendly naming checklist
If you are still choosing, these five checks remove most of the risk:
- 1 Put both thumbs on the keyboard and type the name twice. Note any letter where you slowed down.
- 2 Check the awkward pairs: adjacent keys such as “lo”, “ik”, “sd”, and “kl” are where thumb slips live.
- 3 Try swapping each letter for its neighbour and see whether you land on a common word. If one slip reaches a popular word, that name will leak.
- 4 Prefer letters that need no shift key and no hyphen. On mobile, a hyphen is three taps and a decision.
- 5 Type the name and press return without touching the ending: if the phone finishes “.com” for you, the ending is free, and if you have to type it, every visitor pays those taps too.
Worked example: three letters, several traps
“Kat” looks like the safest kind of name — three letters, no silent letters, nothing ambiguous. On a phone keyboard it is surrounded.
kat
DTRI 69 /100
- The “k” key sits between “j”, “l”, “m”, and “i”, so a slip of the thumb reaches “lat” and “mat” — both real words.
- “Kat” is also one letter from “cat”, which is the spelling autocorrect and search suggestions prefer, so a corrected searcher lands on a pet store instead of you.
- Its distinctiveness score is low for the same reason: a name that is one keystroke from common words is hard to own in search.
Frequently asked questions
What makes a domain name mobile-friendly?
Short, letter-only names whose neighbouring keys do not spell other real words. A mobile-friendly name survives a thumb slip and a typo because the slip either gets corrected or still lands on something clearly wrong, rather than on a competitor.
What is a fat-finger typo?
A mistype caused by hitting a key next to the intended one. On a phone keyboard the neighbours are close enough that whole letter pairs behave like single ambiguous letters, which is why some names collect far more typos than others.
Why does a one-letter typo matter so much on a phone?
Because a typo that produces a real word is never corrected. The searcher sees a plausible result and reads it, and you never learn that the visit happened. The same slip typed into an address bar lands on somebody else's domain.
Should I avoid numbers and hyphens in a domain name?
Yes, unless the number is the entire point of the name. Digits can be typed as a numeral or a word, and a hyphen lives behind a keyboard toggle on mobile and is rarely spoken aloud — so listeners have to guess whether it was ever there.
Keep reading
Autocorrect leakage risk
Autocorrect leakage is traffic that silently becomes somebody else's because your name is one letter from a common word. Learn how to measure and fix it.
The radio test for business names
The radio test asks whether a listener can find your business after hearing its name once. Learn which letter patterns and endings fail it, 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.