Domain age checker

It reduces what you enter to the domain a registry holds: blog.example.co.uk becomes example.co.uk, using the ICANN section of the public suffix list. It then finds that registry's RDAP server in the bootstrap file IANA publishes, and reads the domain's record from it. The site itself is never contacted.

RDAP, the Registration Data Access Protocol, is the replacement for WHOIS. It returns the same registration facts as structured JSON instead of free text. ICANN requires every generic TLD registry and registrar to run RDAP, and since 28 January 2025 they no longer have to run WHOIS, except for .com, .name and .post.

Country-code registries set their own rules, and several have no RDAP service. When this page was written, IANA's file listed no RDAP server for .de, .io, .co, .eu or .jp, among others. For those the checker says so rather than guessing; the registry's own WHOIS service is the place to look.

Registration date and age

The registration date is when the current registration was created. A transfer to another registrar keeps it. A domain that expires, is deleted and is registered again by someone else gets a new date, so a domain with a long history can show a recent one. The age is counted from that date to the day of the check.

Expiry and last changed

The expiry date is the registry's. Renewing moves it forward, and the last changed date moves with any update to the record, such as a renewal, a nameserver change or a transfer. Some registries publish no expiry date at all; the result says when one is missing.

Status codes

• client transfer prohibited, and the other prohibited statuses, are locks. They are normal and protect the domain from being moved or changed by mistake. client means the registrar set it; server means the registry did.
• active or ok means no restrictions apply.
• client hold or server hold means the registry does not publish the domain in DNS, so it does not resolve.
• redemption period and pending delete mean the registration was deleted. Unless the owner restores it, the name goes back to the pool.

Nameservers show where the domain's DNS is hosted, and DNSSEC shows whether the registry holds a signed delegation for it.

Age is not a ranking signal on its own. Asked in 2019 whether domain age matters, Google's John Mueller answered: "No, domain age helps nothing." What tends to come with an old domain, years of content and the links it earned, is what counts, and a new domain can earn the same.

Where age is useful is due diligence. Before you buy a domain, or pitch a site for a link, compare its registration date with the history of the site on it. A domain whose content goes back fifteen years but whose registration is a year old most likely lapsed and was picked up by someone new.

Google treats buying such a domain to borrow its reputation as spam. Its spam policies define expired domain abuse as an expired domain "purchased and repurposed primarily to manipulate search rankings by hosting content that provides little to no value to users."

GET /api/tools/domain-age?url=example.com returns the same result as JSON: domain, rdapUrl, checkedAt, registeredAt, age (years, months and days), expiresAt, daysUntilExpiry (negative once it has passed), lastChangedAt, registrar, status, nameservers and dnssec. Dates are ISO 8601 in UTC, and any field the registry does not publish is null.

A TLD with no RDAP service returns a 422 with the code no_rdap_service. A domain the registry has no record of returns a 404 with domain_not_found, which usually means it is not registered.