Brand Watch helps you spot the look-alike domains around a brand: the ones already registered to your customer, the ones taken by other people, and the ones still free to grab. Attackers often register a near-identical domain (a different ending, a common misspelling) and use it to spoof email or host a fake site, so seeing the gaps in one place makes it easier to protect a brand before someone else takes advantage.
What Brand Watch shows you
Open Brand Watch from the main navigation. The page has three tabs across the top:
- Matrix: a per-customer grid of each brand against a set of domain endings (TLDs), showing which you own and where the gaps are.
- Expiring Soon: a worklist across all your customers of taken Brand Watch domains whose expiry date falls inside a window you choose.
- Available Now: a worklist across all your customers of Brand Watch domains currently flagged as free to register, grouped by brand.
In the Matrix tab, domains are grouped by brand label. For example, example.net, example.uk and example.co.uk all roll up to a single EXAMPLE row. Only customers that have at least one validated domain appear in the customer picker, because Brand Watch only builds coverage for ownership you have actually proven.
[Screenshot: the Brand Watch matrix with owned and gap cells for one brand]
Reading the matrix
Pick a customer from the Customer dropdown (business accounts have a single customer, which is selected for you). Each brand becomes its own small table, with one column per watched TLD. The legend at the top of the page explains every cell state:
- A green tick means you own that domain on this account. Click it to jump to the domain on Domain Management.
- A grey magnifying glass means the cell is a gap that has not been checked yet.
- A green AVAIL pill means the domain was checked and is available to register.
- A red NOT AVAIL pill means the domain is taken, reserved, or sits on a TLD we cannot register on your behalf. Where we have an expiry date, it appears in small text under the pill (for example, in 421d).
- The final column (a three-dots icon) lists any other TLDs you own for that brand that fall outside the watched columns.
Click any gap cell to open a details panel. Brand Watch checks availability for that exact domain and shows the verdict, the registration price and registrar where we have them, and, for taken domains, an option to look up the expiry date by WHOIS. To check a whole brand at once, use the Check all button in that brand's header; it works through every un-owned watched TLD in turn and fills the cells in as each result comes back. Verdicts are saved, so they are still there when you reload the page.
Choosing which TLDs to watch
Brand Watch decides which columns to show for each brand using a three-level order. The most specific level wins:
- A per-brand list, if you have set one for that brand (shown with a brand override chip).
- Otherwise your account-wide default list, which you set once and which applies to every brand without its own list (tenant default chip).
- Otherwise a built-in default (a sensible mix of generic and UK endings), shown with a system default chip until you replace it.
Use the Tenant default TLDs button (top right of the Matrix tab) to set the list applied to brands that do not have their own list. Use the gear icon next to a brand to give that single brand its own list. In the Configure watched TLDs panel, your current selection appears as removable chips; below it, a catalogue lets you click TLDs to switch them on or off, with a search box that also matches whole groups (typing uk brings up the UK and EU group). The order you select them in is the order the columns appear in, so you control the layout. Saving a brand panel while it is using the account default creates a list just for that brand; the Revert button removes it again so the brand falls back to the next level down.
To save or undo a TLD list you need permission to configure Brand Watch (or the Tenant Admin role). Other users can still see what is in effect; for them the controls are simply view-only.
Expiring Soon and Available Now
The Expiring Soon tab lists taken Brand Watch domains whose expiry falls inside a window you pick (14, 30, 60, 90 or 120 days), sorted soonest first. A domain does not become free on its expiry date: most registries run a grace period (the current owner can still renew normally), then a redemption period (the owner can recover it for a fee), then a short pending-delete phase before the name is actually released. The Earliest available column estimates when the name could realistically be registered, based on each registry's published grace and redemption windows, so allow a little extra time for pending-delete.
The Available Now tab lists the domains we currently have flagged as free, grouped by brand, so you can scan a brand and see every registrable ending at a glance. Use Refresh to fetch the list again; behind the scenes it is rebuilt regularly by our automatic availability checks.
Common pitfalls
- No customers in the picker: only customers with at least one validated domain are listed. Validate a domain on Domain Management first to populate Brand Watch.
- Availability and WHOIS checks rely on the platform-wide ICUK registrar connection. If it has not been set up yet you will see a message saying it is not configured; a platform admin can set it up under Platform, Integrations, Registrar.
- If the registrar connection is in TEST mode, verdicts show a TEST registrar badge and reflect the sandbox, not the live registry. Switch to LIVE for real-world results.
- A domain marked as available may sit on a TLD that is not in your registrar catalogue, in which case we cannot register it through ICUK directly. Sync the catalogue from Platform, Integrations, Registrar if you think a TLD should be there.
- WHOIS expiry is only offered for domains already confirmed as taken, and not for domains you already own (those have their own expiry tracking on Domain Management). Some registries withhold the expiry date, so a lookup can legitimately return no date.
- Register-when-available and automatic invoicing are coming in a later phase, but alerts already work: we send you a notification (and an email, where that alert type is enabled) the moment a watched domain flips from taken to available. For now, when a domain is free, register it through your usual registrar and add it to monitoring on Domain Management.