No front-running

I will not register the domain you just typed

Domain front-running is the practice of registering a domain immediately after a user searches for it, then offering to sell it back at a markup. It is widely suspected and difficult to prove. It has happened to me. It probably has not happened to you, because you did not notice. It is happening on the internet right now to thousands of people who do not know it is happening.

What it looks like

You search for a domain on a free domain search tool. Let us say you search for "castflow.com". The tool tells you it is available. You think about it for a day. The next day you go back to register castflow.com. It is now listed on a domain aftermarket at $1,500. Or it is registered to a holding entity that will let you have it for $850 if you contact them. Or it has gone to "domain auction" with five bidders, all of which are bots.

The pattern repeats often enough to have a name. It does not always happen. It does not always happen on the same tool. Sometimes it is the tool itself running the front-running. Sometimes it is a data partner of the tool. Sometimes it is a leaky DNS lookup that allows a third party to harvest searches. The exact mechanism varies. The outcome is the same. You searched. Someone else got the domain. You are now being asked to pay more for it.

Why this site does not do it

I am not a registrar. I do not own a domain aftermarket. I do not have a relationship with any company that owns or operates a domain aftermarket. I have no inventory of speculatively registered domains. I have no incentive to register a domain you searched for, because I would have to pay $10 a year to hold it and I would never recoup the cost.

The only revenue this site generates is the affiliate commission Namecheap pays me when someone clicks through from a result and registers a domain. That commission is small. It is enough to keep the lights on. It is not enough to fund a domain-squatting operation.

Beyond incentives, the technical surface this site exposes is intentionally narrow. Searches are not logged against IP addresses. Searches are not stored in any database. The Bloom filter lookup happens entirely in memory on my server. There is no third party who could be partnered into a front-running scheme even if I wanted one.

How to spot a front-running tool

The pattern is rarely advertised. But you can usually tell.

It pushes you toward a specific registrar. If a tool aggressively recommends one registrar, that registrar is paying it, and you should suspect that the relationship goes deeper than affiliate fees.

It offers an "upgrade" or "premium" tier that includes domains. Tools that hold domain inventory are tools that have an incentive to acquire domain inventory. Inventory often starts as a search someone made yesterday.

It logs you in. Free tools that require an account are collecting search history. Search history is the raw material front-running needs.

It mixes "buy now" results with "available" results. The premium results are the ones that were available recently and got swept into the aftermarket. The mixing is the tell.

It exists primarily to sell aftermarket domains. The free search is the funnel.

How to protect yourself

If you find a domain you genuinely want, register it within a few hours. Do not test it on multiple search tools. Do not share the name with friends in a Slack thread until it is registered. Do not type variations into multiple tools comparing the results.

Use a search tool that does not have an inventory incentive. That is what this site is for. There are also a small number of registrars that run search tools without inventory exposure — Cloudflare and Porkbun are the cleanest of them.

If you suspect a domain you searched has been front-run, you have very little recourse. The aftermarket pricing is legal. The original registration was technically legitimate. You can refuse to pay the markup and pick another name. That is almost always the right move.

The wider point

The domain industry has known about front-running for at least fifteen years. The major search tools have repeatedly denied doing it. Independent investigations have repeatedly found behaviour that looks indistinguishable from doing it. Nothing has been formally proven against the big incumbents. Nothing is likely to be.

I think the simplest defence against front-running is to use tools whose business model cannot benefit from it. I built one. Use whichever tool you trust. If you do not trust this one, use Cloudflare or Porkbun's search. Do not use any tool whose company sells domain inventory.