Only 97 of 3,461 vendor domains carry a hyphen, and 94 of them sit on a .com
2.8% of the domains in The Wall's index use a hyphen in the business name. The longer the name, the likelier the hyphen: 2.3% of short names carry one, against 4.9% of names at 21 characters or more.
The Wall's August 9 snapshot records 3,461 domain strings. 97 of them carry a hyphen in the name itself, before the suffix. That is 2.8% of the index. The other 3,364, 97.2%, run the name together without one.
How the hyphen rate climbs with name length
| Name length | All domains | Hyphenated | Hyphen rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 to 10 characters | 1,748 | 40 | 2.3% |
| 11 to 15 characters | 1,193 | 37 | 3.1% |
| 16 to 20 characters | 439 | 16 | 3.6% |
| 21 or more characters | 81 | 4 | 4.9% |
| All domains | 3,461 | 97 | 2.8% |
The rate rises at every step, and it roughly doubles from the shortest names to the longest. The count tells a different story. 40 of the 97 hyphenated domains, 41.2%, belong to names of 10 characters or fewer, simply because short names are so common. The median hyphenated name runs 11 characters, one more than the 10-character median for the index as a whole.
Almost all of them use exactly one hyphen. 93 of the 97 (95.9%) split the name in two, as in b-reel.com and fractional-cmo.com. Three use two hyphens, including insight-by-design.com and online-sales-marketing.com. One, s-i-r-k-a.com, spells its name letter by letter with four.
The suffix split is sharper than the length split. 94 of the 97 hyphenated domains, 96.9%, end in .com, against 82.4% of the full index. Inside .com, 3.3% of the 2,851 domains carry a hyphen. Outside it, only 3 of 610 do, 0.5%. Those three are ah-ha.ai, b-y.net, and bull-software.ro.
The Wall's index does not record why a founder chose a hyphen, so the read is interpretation, not data. The pattern fits a firm that wanted a .com, found the joined name taken, and split it to get one. Newer suffixes such as .ai and .agency have fewer taken names, so the workaround is rarely needed there. For a buyer, a hyphen says nothing about quality. It says the clean version of the name was already registered.
One sourcing note. Hyphen counts are computed against the first label of each domain string in the August 9 snapshot, which holds 3,461 domain records against a 3,460-listing total, a one-record variance carried through from the capture. Length bands match those in the name-length briefing, and hyphens count toward length. Suffix and digit analysis of the same domain set are covered in the top-level-domain briefing and the digit briefing.
How this was computed. Figures are computed from The Wall's index of approved, US-based, machine-verified-live listings, using the index snapshot current when each briefing was published: 2,286 listings at launch (August 3, 2026) and 3,460 in the latest snapshot (captured August 9, 2026). Engagement data (rates, minimum project sizes, team sizes, founding years, ratings) are provider-declared figures published on public Clutch profiles; they were present for 1,517 of the 2,286 launch listings (corrected November 7, 2026: earlier versions counted 221 records whose figures did not come from Clutch, and briefings that used them carry correction notes), and coverage counts for later snapshots are stated inside each briefing that uses them. Percentages of "disclosed" values exclude listings that publish no figure. Nothing in this briefing is estimated or modeled. Sourcing standards: editorial policy.