Tracking Domain Names for a Competitive Advantage

There are many companies that track domain names to get a competitive advantage over their competitors or to monitor another company’s strategic initiatives. Previously I discussed the use of IP address monitoring to track new domain purchases, but some companies simply track new domain registrations to essentially do the same thing.
I read a blog post in Boston Magazine where they speculated about where a Boston-based news outlet wanted to expand (prior to their demise). Because of domain privacy, they aren’t able to know for certain that the company bought those other names, but based on the date of registration and the registrar, they could get a pretty good idea about who registered the domain names.
There are many types of information a company can use to track a competitor. They are able to monitor trademark and patent filings, follow business license applications, watch city/state filings…etc. A company’s domain registrations are another tool to allow outsiders to look ahead and make predictions or assumptions about another company’s strategy.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn
  1. I also like to use domaintools to monitor categories of domains. For example Elliot, you could set up an alert for “Lowell” and get an email every day with a list of the Lowell related domains that were registered – would give you good insight into who is doing what in town.

  2. Here are two ways to prevent the site from finding your information.
    For shared hosting – use a hosting company that fills their shared servers with a lot of domains, that way the tool will show your domain and 100 others domains which may, or may not, be your domains.
    For dedicated hosting – use separate IP addresses for your sites
    – Richard

  3. I think myipneighbors.com is providing inaccurate results. I checked hardworking.com and results hundreds. I’m assuming the dedicated IP address was used in the past. This is a misleading information IMO.

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