The website domain must relate recognisably to the brand name
The requirementstatement
The registered website's domain must bear a recognisable relationship to the legal name or the DBA.
- Severityseverity
- HighHIGHRejected by at least one carrier or provider, and a common cause of failure at the rest.
- When it bitesphase
- Gates approvalapprovalGet this wrong and the brand or campaign is refused at registration.
- What is checkedobject
- brand.website vs brand.company_name / brand.dba
- Where it liveslayer
- BrandBRAND
- How Ekas settles itdetectability
- AI · formAI_FORMAI · crawlCRAWL
- A semantic question about what you wrote: whether a description matches a use case, whether a name looks like a filed entity. Judged by a model against written criteria. Needs your live site or policy page fetched and read. Ekas crawls it the way a reviewer would.
- What the fix involvesfailureClass
- Fix the fieldRETRY_FIELD
- A better value in the form fixes it. Ekas can rewrite it and re-check.
- Who requires itauthorities
- TwilioBandwidth
- When it appliesapplicabilityText
- Applies to every 10DLC registration.
Why this rule existsrationale
A reviewer confirms a brand exists by opening its website, and a domain with no visible connection to the name gives them nothing to confirm — they cannot tell a rebrand from a borrowed site. Honest causes are everywhere: a company that acquired a better domain, a practice trading under a founder's name on a descriptive URL, a store on a platform subdomain.
How to fix itremediation
Register the domain the business actually trades under, and make sure that domain's home page names the business in its title or header. Where the domain genuinely differs from the name, add the trading name to the DBA field so the two can be connected. Done when a reviewer landing on the site can see the registered name on it.
A compliant exampleexample
company_name: Acme Coffee Co, LLC · website: https://acmecoffee.com
Common mistakespitfalls
- A platform subdomain such as a myshopify.com store is the common version of this, and it fails for a second reason as well — it is not the brand's own domain.
Rules you will hit next
Other brand rules at the same severity. A registration is judged as a whole, not rule by rule.
BRD-006Submit every name line above the address on a multi-line IRS recordHighHIGHBRD-007TCR takes only the first line of the IRS-registered nameHighHIGHBRD-010Take the legal name from the CP-575 or 147C, never a W-2 or W-9HighHIGHBRD-014An acquired business registers the details it filed taxes underHighHIGHBRD-027EIN must be old enough to have propagated to IRS recordsHighHIGHBRD-034Validate a non-US identifier against its home register before submittingHighHIGH
BRD-132 is one of 196 brand rules in the 915-rule 10DLC registry. Free to cite under CC BY 4.0.