Brand Watch

The problem

Someone registers a name that reads like yours. One character swapped, one letter doubled, one word appended, or the same word under a different ending. To a customer glancing at an address bar or an inbox, it is your name.

The damage is rarely the website. It is email. A lookalike domain with a working mail record can send invoices, password resets and staff requests that appear to come from you, and the first you hear of it is a customer asking why your payment details changed.

The names that matter are registered quietly and used weeks later. Nobody watches the gap, because watching it by hand means checking thousands of variations of your own name every day.

What Brand Watch does

You give it your brand name once. It generates every plausible lookalike of that name across a set of domain endings, and it checks all of them every day. When one of them wakes up, you are told.

Waking up means something specific: a name that resolved nowhere yesterday resolves somewhere today, or it gained a mail record, or its nameservers changed. A name sitting unregistered and untouched produces nothing, because nothing happened.

The part other monitors do not have

Most monitoring tells you a lookalike domain was registered. That is the easy half, and on its own it is noise: most registrations are harmless, and an alert for every one of them trains you to ignore all of them.

Brand Watch runs every serious finding through the DomainGuard engine already on this site, and attaches its verdict to the alert. So you are not told that a name exists. You are told what its record shows, and what that record is worth worrying about.

What it reads

• Live DNS. A, MX and NS records for every variation, every day. This is the layer that reveals a name is in use before anything is visible on the web.
• Official registry record (RDAP). Pulled when something changes: registration date, registrar, and current status.
• The page itself. Whether an address responds, and whether your brand name appears on it.
• DomainGuard verdict. The full prior-history reading, run automatically on anything serious.

How it decides what is worth an email

Every finding is scored before it reaches you. A working mail record weighs the most, because a name capable of sending email in your name is the case that costs money. A registration date inside the last thirty days and a live page carrying your brand name each add to the score.

Above the threshold you get an email the same day, with the DomainGuard verdict attached. Below it, the finding waits for the weekly summary. Well below it, the finding sits on your dashboard and never interrupts you. The point of the scoring is that an alert from this tool means something.

What it cannot do

• It reports registration and DNS records that are already public. It does not determine trademark rights and it is not legal advice.
• It cannot see a name nobody has registered yet. It tells you the day that changes, not before.
• It cannot cover every possible spelling of every name. It covers the variations that typo traffic and impersonation actually use, which is a deliberately smaller set than every string a computer can produce.
• It cannot tell you what the owner of a lookalike name intends. It tells you what their records currently allow them to do.
• It does not register, buy or take down anything on your behalf.

Price

$12 per month, or $99 per year. One brand name, ten domain endings, checked daily, with email alerts and the DomainGuard verdict on every serious finding.

Scan your name free. No account. See how many lookalikes of your name are registered right now and how many can receive email. The full list comes by email. Watching them daily is what you pay for.

The documented alternatives start near $200 a year and stop at telling you a name was registered.

Status

In development. The monitoring engine and the variation generator are built and running on this server. Alerts and subscriptions are not open yet.

Brand Watch reports publicly available registration and DNS data. It does not provide legal advice and does not determine trademark rights.