Common mistakes

Typing a domain from memory is a small motor task done fast, often on a phone. Every slip produces a different, valid domain name, and the browser goes there without complaint. If that name is registered by someone else, your visitor arrives at their site instead of yours.

Typosquatters register the slips that are most likely for a popular name and fill them with ads, look-alike login pages, or mail servers that collect misaddressed email. TypoScan generates the same slips so you can see them first.

A slip usually lands on a key that touches the one you meant: beside it, or just above or below. TypoScan uses that layout for two kinds of variant: the wrong key instead of the right one (exanple.com), and the wrong key as well as the right one (exsample.com). For letters it only counts letter keys, because reaching up to the number row by accident is much rarer.

Punctuation causes its own mistakes. Skip the dot after www and www.example.com becomes wwwexample.com, a completely separate domain. The same goes for other subdomains, and the one for email matters most: mailexample.com can catch mail meant for mail.example.com. Add a dot inside the name and part of it becomes a subdomain of something else: ex.ample.com belongs to whoever owns ample.com, which is why TypoScan checks that domain instead.

Hyphens go both ways. Brands with a hyphen lose it when people type quickly, and long names gain one where people hear a break. Leaving out an existing hyphen is far more likely than adding a new one, and the scores reflect that.