If you've ever shopped for a domain, you know the routine. You type the perfect name. It's taken. You try a variation. Taken. You add a hyphen, an underscore, a 2 at the end. Now you own a domain that looks like a phishing site.
We rebuilt our domain search to skip that whole dance. When you type a keyword, we don't just check whether it's available — we ask Claude, Anthropic's flagship AI, to suggest a list of names that would actually work for your brand.
What makes this different
Traditional domain search treats your input as a string to look up. Type coffee, get a list of coffee.com (taken), coffee.net (taken), coffee.io (taken), coffeebrand123.com (yours for $9.99).
Our search treats your input as intent. Type coffee and you'll see suggestions like brew.io, roast.shop, mocha.app, beanly.com, perksy.co, frothly.dev — names that share the same vibe as what you typed but aren't just keyword + suffix mutations.
The difference matters because the best domain for your business is rarely the word you typed. It's a name that captures the same idea in a way that's available, memorable, and brandable.
Why Claude
We picked Claude because it's the model that consistently produced the best naming output across our testing. We need names that are:
- Pronounceable. "brewly" works. "qxprzt" doesn't.
- Brandable. Real-feeling, not academic. "brew" works for coffee. "unpretentious" doesn't.
- Short. Most domain names that customers actually remember are under 8 characters.
- Diverse. Not 30 variants of the same word.
Claude reliably hits all four. We tried other models. They tend to either repeat the keyword (getcoffee, coffeehq, mycoffee — useless) or drift into thesaurus-mode (unpretentious, straightforward — academic). Claude generates names that founders would actually consider.
How it stays fast and cheap
There's a trick to using AI in production without bleeding money: don't call it twice for the same question.
When you search coffee for the first time on Rivervo, we call Claude once. The 30 suggestions it returns get saved in our database. The next time anyone searches coffee — the next minute, the next month, two years later — we serve the same suggestions instantly, without calling Claude again.
That means popular keywords are essentially free to serve, and only genuinely new searches incur the AI cost. We pay pennies a month to operate this.
How the suggestions get smarter
Every time someone clicks "Add to cart" on a suggestion, we record it. Every time a suggestion converts into an actual purchase, we record it harder. Once a week, we recompute a "boost score" per (keyword, suggestion) pair from the accumulated click and purchase data.
The result: suggestions that real customers actually like rise to the top. If brew.shop consistently outperforms brewly.com for coffee searches, the next person searching coffee sees brew.shop first.
We started with Claude as the bootstrap brain. Over time, our own dataset becomes the brain — Claude only fills in the gaps for genuinely new keywords nobody has searched before.
What we filter out
A few things you'll never see in our suggestions:
- Premium domains. When name registries decide a specific domain is "premium" and price it at $1,000+, we filter it out. You'll never see a
$1,250shocker in your cart. Every suggestion is in the normal $5-$70 range. - Off-brand TLDs. We have access to 50+ TLDs through our wholesale partner, but we prioritize the ones that actually work for businesses:
.com,.io,.co,.app,.dev,.shop,.store,.tech. The exotic ones (.bet,.bid,.boo) live at the bottom of the list. - Keyword mutations. No
getcoffee,coffeehq,mycoffee,coffeely. These are noise, not branding ideas. We strip them server-side even when the AI tries to sneak them in.
What's next
Right now Claude generates the suggestions and our system filters / ranks them. Over the next few months we'll be letting accumulated click and purchase data play a bigger role — the eventual goal is a domain search that gets noticeably better at recognizing patterns over time, without us touching the code.
If you want to try it, search a keyword on our domains page and watch the suggestions stream in. The first time a new word is searched it takes about half a second longer (that's Claude thinking); after that, it's instant for everyone.
We think this is the version of domain search that should have existed a decade ago. We're glad we got to build it.