Typosquatting is registering misspellings of a well-known domain to catch visitors who mistype it.
Typosquatting is when someone registers a domain that's a near miss of a popular one, hoping to catch people who make a typing mistake. Someone aiming for example.com might land on exmaple.com, examples.com or example.co, and find a page they never meant to visit.
What's on the typo domain varies. Sometimes it's a page full of ads that earns money from every mistaken visit. Sometimes it's a competitor. At its worst, it's a convincing copy of the real site built to steal passwords and card details, or a domain used to send phishing emails that look genuine.
Common typosquatting techniques
- Misspellings: swapping or dropping letters, like goggle.com
- Doubled or missing characters: exampple.com or exmple.com
- Different TLDs: example.co or example.cm instead of example.com
- Look-alike characters: a capital I in place of a lowercase l, or characters from other alphabets in internationalised domain names
- Added words: example-login.com or example-support.com
- Missing dots: wwwexample.com
Why typosquatting matters for your business
Typosquatters can take traffic and sales that should be yours, damage your reputation if visitors see scam content under a name like yours, and target your customers with phishing. Email is a big risk too: a typo domain can receive mail that people meant to send to you, including invoices and password resets.
How to protect your brand from typosquatting
- Register the obvious variants of your domain, especially common misspellings and the main TLDs, and redirect them to your main site.
- Monitor new registrations for names containing your brand.
- Set up email authentication with SPF, DKIM and DMARC, so it's harder for others to send mail pretending to be you.
- Tell customers which domain you use for email and payments.
- Register your trademark, which strengthens any future complaint.
You don't need to buy every possible typo. Focus on the ones people are actually likely to make.
Typosquatting vs cybersquatting
Cybersquatting is the broader practice of registering a domain in bad faith to profit from someone else's trademark, often to sell it back to them. Typosquatting is one form of it, using misspellings rather than the exact name.
What to do about a typosquatted domain
If someone has registered a typo of your trademark in bad faith, you can file a complaint under the UDRP for generic domains, or the matching process for a country code domain. If the site is being used for phishing or malware, report it to the registrar and the hosting provider, who can often act quickly under their abuse policies.