Domains and WHOIS

How do I check how old a domain is?

Domain age is the cheapest due-diligence check there is: one lookup, one field, and it catches most of the sites that were set up last Tuesday to take your money.

Run a WHOIS lookup and read the “Creation Date” or “Registered On” field — that is the date the domain was first registered, and the difference between it and today is the domain’s age. It survives GDPR redaction, so it is available on every domain. One caveat matters: if a domain was allowed to expire and drop, the creation date resets when someone re-registers it, so the field tells you how long the current registration has run, not how long the name has existed.

Worked out 2026-09-10 (IST) · gTLD WHOIS/RDAP creation date semantics

The three dates, and what each one means

Dates in a WHOIS record
Field	What it means	What it does not mean
Creation Date / Registered On	When this registration began	Not when the website launched
Updated Date / Last Updated	The last change to the record — contacts, name servers, status, or a renewal	Not when the site content changed
Registry Expiry Date	When the paid term ends	Not when the name becomes available — add roughly 75 days

Reading age as a trust signal

What an age band usually means
Age	Reasonable reading
Under 30 days	Treat with real caution for anything involving payment. Most scam and phishing domains are under a month old.
1–6 months	New but not disposable. Check for an imprint, a GST number, a registered address.
6 months – 2 years	Normal for a young business.
2–10 years	Established. Combine with the expiry date — a long forward renewal signals intent to stay.
Over 10 years	Long-lived, or a re-registration wearing an old name. Check the archives.

What to check alongside the age

Expiry date. Renewed several years forward suggests a real business. Expiring in three weeks on a site asking for card details does not.
The TLS certificate. Issued yesterday on a “ten-year-old” shop is a contradiction worth resolving.
Name servers. Parking name servers on a supposedly trading business mean there is no business.
Status codes. clientHold means it is suspended right now.

Sources: ICANN Registrar Accreditation Agreement 2013, ICANN Transfer Policy, ICANN Expired Registration Recovery Policy, ICANN Registry Agreement Specification 4 (RDAP), IETF RFC 9083 and RFC 5731 (EPP status codes), and the EU General Data Protection Regulation as applied by ICANN’s Registration Data Policy.

Check your own numbers

Read the creation, update and expiry dates for any domain in one lookup.

WHOIS LookupRegistrar, dates, name servers and status codes for any domain.

Frequently asked

Does domain age affect SEO?

Only weakly and indirectly. Google has said repeatedly that age itself is not a ranking factor. What correlates with age is everything that takes time to accumulate - links, brand mentions, crawl history, a stable topic. A ten-year-old domain with none of those outranks nothing.

Is buying an aged domain worth it?

Sometimes, and the risk is real. You inherit the history, including manual actions, spam links and whatever the previous owner did with it. Before buying, check the archived copies of the site, look at the backlink profile, and search the exact domain for complaints. An aged domain with a bad past is worse than a new one.

Why does the creation date not match when the website launched?

People routinely register a name months or years before they build anything, and companies buy names defensively and sit on them. The creation date is when the registration began, not when a site appeared. Archive snapshots are the better guide to when a site actually went live.

How can I tell if a domain was re-registered after dropping?

A creation date that is recent while archived snapshots of the site go back years is the classic signature. A large gap in those snapshots, or an abrupt change of language and topic across the gap, confirms it. WHOIS itself will not tell you - the old registration is gone from the record.

Need domain and DNS checks inside your own product?

We build WHOIS, RDAP, DNS and SSL lookups as embeddable widgets or a plain JSON API in your branding, wired to your own lead form. Tell us which checks you need and we will send a working demo.