Accelerate domain name availability search with ChatGPT plugins
Use ChatGPT plugins to quickly find available domain names for your website
Probably the best use case for ChatGPT is as a brainstorming tool. For instance, when I’m looking to name a new article, business, or application I’m creating, I use the AI-powered chatbot to whip up a solid list of candidate names in just a few seconds. Maybe I use one of them or maybe I don’t, but at minimum, it helps get my creative juices flowing to come up with more and better names of my own.
But if all you’re doing is coming up with lists of ideas, then you’re missing out on some of the most powerful features of ChatGPT. The chatbot also has powerful plugins that can help you with research and evaluation of the generated ideas.
For instance, when doing domain availability research, generating ideas is only the first step. Then you have to go to a website like godaddy.com and search each name to see if it’s actually available, which can take a lot of time. But with plugins in ChatGPT, you can completely eliminate this step. Activate the plugin, and you can have ChatGPT not only generate the names for you, but also check their availability. And it all happens at lightning speed. I estimate that using ChatGPT with a domain availability search plugin saves at least 90% of the time I used to spend on this task!
How to activate a domain availability search plugin with ChatGPT
To activate plugins in the ChatGPT Plus user interface, click the dropdown in the upper left corner and select '“Plugins.”
Once you have activated plugins, you will see a new dropdown menu labeled “No plugins installed.” From this menu, select the “Plugin store.”
Once you’ve opened the plugin store, search for “domain” to turn up lots of plugins that do what we want. I went with GoDaddy because it’s a name I know and trust, but I’m sure that most of these would work just as well. (One Word Domains claims to also do price comparison, but as best I can tell from experimentation, it hallucinates its price comparisons and is only connected to GoDaddy.)
Once you’ve selected the plugin you want, return to the chat interface, and you’re ready to work!
Generate domain names and check availability all at once!
Now that we’ve got our plugin enabled, we can begin prompting ChatGPT to generate names and check their availability. Click here to see a full sample chat using this workflow.
Here are some prompting strategies that work well for getting good results:
Explicitly instruct ChatGPT to use the plugin to check the availability of the domains it generates for you. You can also ask it to check any examples you come up with yourself.
Give ChatGPT the criteria you want your domain names to satisfy. In my case, I asked for cutesy names for an online journaling app that transcribes audio to text. I also specified that I want the names to be unusual enough that the “.com” domain names might still be available.
Give ChatGPT examples of names you came up with that meet your criteria and ask it to generate similar names. This usually improves the quality of the outputs. If your explicit instructions aren’t clear, ChatGPT can often infer a pattern from the examples and still output a pretty good response.
Give ChatGPT specific strategies for coming up with responses. In my case, I suggested that it try combining words relevant to the app’s functionality, like “scribe” or “voice,” with common personal names. For instance, “scribe” + “Robert” = “Scribert”. Alternatively, I suggested that it try combining words with animal names. For instance, “record” + “corgi” = “Recorgi”. These approaches produced good results.
If the outputs aren’t exactly what you want, try refining your criteria or strategies. In my case, I realized that I preferred one-word responses, whereas most of the responses I got from ChatGPT were two words. It was challenging to give the chatbot instructions to improve the output, but I was successful, and the results were gratifying. I told it,
You've generated some good two-word names, but let's try to create names that are a single word by mashing up the first part of one word with second part of another word. For instance, we might join the prefix “journal” with the suffix “alligator” to produce “journalligator.” The challenging part is to stitch the words together in a way that feels seamless by finding a suffix that starts with the same sound as the prefix.
The outputs were quite solid, though, of course, the best ones were unavailable. Still, I got some really solid name ideas. I also formed a much clearer idea of what I wanted, got inspiration for coming up with my own name ideas, and greatly cut down on the time involved in checking which names are available.
Bonus points: Have ChatGPT evaluate your list of name ideas
Having trouble deciding which name to use? In addition to generating names and checking their availability, ChatGPT can also evaluate names for you, using the criteria you yourself have specified. Ask it to use your criteria to create a grading rubric with five scoring categories, with each category scored from 0-2 points. Here’s the rubric I generated:
Short Length: 2 points for names with fewer syllables and shorter overall length, 1 for moderate length, and 0 for longer names.
Ease of Spelling and Pronunciation: 2 points for names that are straightforward to spell and pronounce, 1 for moderate difficulty, and 0 for challenging names.
Brandability: 2 points for names with strong branding potential, 1 for average, and 0 for low potential.
Memorability/Catchiness/Cuteness: 2 points for highly memorable, catchy, or cute names, 1 for moderately memorable, and 0 for less memorable names.
Relevance to Purpose: 2 points for names that clearly relate to the app's purpose, 1 for some relevance, and 0 for little to no relevance.
Next, ask it to make a table to score your favorite ideas. Maybe you agree with the grades or maybe you don’t, but at the very least, this will help you think about the strengths and weaknesses of each name.
In my case, ChatGPT really liked “Scribert”, which received a total score of 10/10, and it also scored “Loguana,” “Dictoad”, “JotJaguar”, and “NoteyNest” highly. Meanwhile, it gave low scores to some of the ones I liked, including “TranscribeTiger” and “SpeaknScribe.” It turns out that in my head, I have some additional scoring considerations not reflected in our criteria: I want my domain name to be interpretable and not too weird, and I happen to find alliteration pleasing to the ear.
However, ChatGPT’s scoring was useful to me for thinking about what the weaknesses or drawbacks of my preferred names might be. “SpeaknScribe” is three words, and someone who hears it pronounced out loud might misspell it “SpeakandScribe.” And “TranscribeTiger” is four syllables, which is a lot. These are factors I need to seriously consider when choosing a name.
Conclusion
ChatGPT is an incredibly versatile tool, especially for brainstorming and idea generation. Plugins and scoring rubrics make it even more powerful by adding functionality for quickly evaluating and choosing among ideas.
If you aren’t using plugins with ChatGPT, then you’re missing out on a lot of what it can do. The time savings you can get on a task like domain availability research can be very significant when you connect ChatGPT to a software tool that cuts out all the manual cut-and-paste and point-and-click.
In addition to domain availability search, it’s also worth checking out plugins for generating flow charts, mind maps, and other visualizations of your generated ideas. I’ll cover these in a future post!