Domain Age Checker

How old is this domain? Get its WHOIS registration date and exact age in days and years, with a maturity class you can filter on. A domain registered three weeks ago and one registered in 1997 are very different counterparties - this is the cheapest way to tell them apart at scale.

Run it in the Console, call it from your own code over the Apify API, or wire it to an AI agent through Apify MCP.

What you get

One dataset item per domain:

Field	What it is
domain	The cleaned domain (scheme, path, port, userinfo and trailing dot stripped)
createdAt	Registration date from WHOIS, ISO 8601, or null if the registry does not publish one
ageDays	Whole days since registration
ageYears	Age in years to one decimal place
maturity	new under 1 year, established 1 to 5 years, mature 5 years and up, unknown when no date was found
checkedAt	ISO timestamp of the lookup
note	Present only when no creation date could be parsed
error	Present instead of the above when WHOIS could not be reached at all

Example 1 - vetting a list of sites

Input:

{ "domains": ["github.com", "wikipedia.org", "some-brand-new-shop.com"] }

Output (real run, 2026-08-15 - one row per domain):

{
  "domain": "github.com",
  "createdAt": "2007-10-09T18:20:50.000Z",
  "ageDays": 6884,
  "ageYears": 18.8,
  "maturity": "mature",
  "checkedAt": "2026-08-15T16:24:49.545Z"
}

{
  "domain": "some-brand-new-shop.com",
  "createdAt": "2026-07-28T09:14:02.000Z",
  "ageDays": 18,
  "ageYears": 0,
  "maturity": "new",
  "checkedAt": "2026-08-15T12:00:00.000Z"
}

Filtering a prospect or backlink list on maturity === "new" surfaces the throwaway domains in one pass.

Example 2 - a single domain, pasted as a URL

{ "domain": "https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page", "maxDomains": 25 }

Normalized to www.wikipedia.org before the lookup. Pass the registrable domain (wikipedia.org) for the cleanest WHOIS answer, since subdomains have no WHOIS record of their own.

Example 3 - a TLD that publishes no creation date

{
  "domain": "example.de",
  "createdAt": null,
  "ageDays": null,
  "ageYears": null,
  "maturity": "unknown",
  "note": "Creation date not found in WHOIS response",
  "checkedAt": "2026-08-15T12:00:00.000Z"
}

You get an explicit unknown rather than a guess, so a missing record can never be mistaken for a young domain in your filter.

Pricing

Currently free to run. This Actor has no per-event charge at the moment - you pay only your normal Apify platform usage (compute units) for the run itself.

The charge event, if per-event pricing is turned on later, is domain-checked: one event = one domain looked up, including the case where WHOIS answers but publishes no creation date. A WHOIS connection failure (the error rows) is not charged.

The Pricing tab on this Actor's page is always the live number and beats anything written here.

When NOT to use this

• You want the full WHOIS record. Only the creation date and the derived age fields come back - no registrar, nameservers, registrant, status codes, or expiry date. For expiry and renewal warnings, use our Domain Expiry Monitor.
• Your TLD hides registration dates. Several ccTLDs (.de, .uk, .nl and others) do not publish a creation date in public WHOIS. You will get maturity: "unknown", and no tool can do better from public WHOIS alone.
• You are checking a subdomain. blog.example.com has no WHOIS record; look up example.com instead.
• You want a domain authority or SEO score. Age is one signal among many. This returns the registration facts, not a ranking metric, and it is not a replacement for a backlink tool.
• You need thousands of lookups per hour. WHOIS servers rate-limit by IP and lookups are sequential. Cap is 100 domains per run by design.

FAQ

How do I check the age of a domain? Pass it as domain, or a list as domains. ageDays and ageYears are computed from the WHOIS creation date, so you get an exact figure rather than an estimate.

How do I check the registration date of many domains at once? Use the domains array - up to 100 per run (maxDomains, default 25). Duplicates are removed and URLs are cleaned to bare domains automatically.

Why does domain age matter? A domain registered days ago behind a fresh site is the single cheapest signal that something is a throwaway - phishing, scraped-content farms, fake stores and burner outreach domains skew heavily new. Age alone proves nothing, but as a first filter it is fast and free of false confidence.

Does it work for .io, .ai, .app, .dev and other newer TLDs? Yes, when the registry publishes a creation date. The lookup tries the TLD's WHOIS server first and falls back to IANA's referral, so any TLD with a public WHOIS server is followed.

Why is createdAt null for some domains? Either the registry does not publish it (common for several European ccTLDs) or the domain is not registered. Both come back as maturity: "unknown" with a note.

Is the date the registration date or the last transfer date? It is the creation date as published by the registry or registrar - it does not reset when a domain changes owner or registrar, which is what makes it useful. It does reset if a domain fully expires, drops, and is registered again by someone new.

What is the difference between new, established and mature? Under 1 year is new, 1 to 5 years is established, 5 years and over is mature. The raw ageDays is always there if you would rather set your own thresholds.

Use from code or an AI agent

curl -s "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/EliAI~domain-age-checker/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=$APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -X POST -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"domains": ["github.com", "wikipedia.org"]}'

Agents: connect Apify MCP and call the EliAI/domain-age-checker tool.

• Capability: read WHOIS registration date and compute exact age for one or many domains
• Required input: domain (string) or domains (array)
• Returns: one JSON row per domain - createdAt, ageDays, ageYears, maturity
• Bounded: maxDomains up to 100 per run, 12s per WHOIS query
• Side effects: none - read-only WHOIS queries on TCP port 43

Who uses it

• Fraud and trust teams flagging merchant or seller sites registered in the last few weeks
• SEO link builders filtering a prospect list of sites by domain age before outreach
• Domain investors checking creation dates across a list of names they are evaluating
• Affiliate managers vetting applicant websites before approving them into a program
• Security analysts triaging domains from phishing reports by how recently they were registered