Does domain age matter for SEO?
Less than most SEO folklore suggests. Google's John Mueller has said plainly that domain age on its own doesn't help rankings. What older sites often do have is the things that do matter: years of content, links earned over time and a track record with visitors. So treat age as context for judging a site, not as a ranking lever. Where it genuinely helps is trust with people: 'Online since 2008' tells a new visitor this isn't a fly-by-night site.
Where the registration date comes from
Paste any domain and we query RDAP, the registry protocol that replaced WHOIS, through the public rdap.org service, and read the domain's registration event. From that we show the registration date and the age in years. We also look up the earliest snapshot in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, which is useful when a domain was re-registered: RDAP reports the current registration, while Wayback can show the site existed earlier.
Known limits
Some country-code domains don't publish a registration date over RDAP, so the age can come back empty for them. A domain that expired and was registered again shows the newer date. Results are cached for 30 days, but the age in years is recalculated from the registration date on every view, so it never lags behind. A failed lookup is retried after 5 minutes.
How old is a domain? Three dates that can disagree
When people ask how old a domain is, they can mean three different things. The registration date is when the current registration began, which is what RDAP reports. The first-seen date is when the Internet Archive first saved a copy of the site, which can be earlier if someone else registered the domain before. And the business behind the site can be older or younger than both. This domain age checker shows the first two side by side, so you can spot when they differ.
How to check domain age free by hand
You don't need any tool to check domain age free. Run an RDAP lookup at lookup.icann.org, or a WHOIS lookup at a registrar, and look for the creation or registration date. Then open web.archive.org, enter the domain and note the year of the earliest snapshot. Our domain age checker simply does both lookups in one step and keeps the result for 30 days.
Using domain age to judge a website
If you've ever wondered 'how old is this website?' before trusting it, domain age is a useful quick check before buying from a shop you don't know, accepting a guest-post offer or replying to a partnership email. A store claiming ten years of happy customers on a domain registered last month deserves a second look. Age alone proves nothing, though: plenty of legitimate businesses launch on new domains, and old domains are sometimes bought and reused by spammers. Read it alongside other signals, such as contact details, reviews on independent sites and the site's own history in the Wayback Machine.
Buying an old or expired domain
When an expired domain is registered again, RDAP shows the new registration date rather than the original one, so a domain registration date checker will report it as young. Google's spam policies also cover expired domain abuse, where an old domain is bought and reused for unrelated, low-value content, so a previous owner's history isn't a shortcut to rankings. If you buy an aged domain, look through its Wayback history for spam or unrelated content first.
What RDAP is and why it replaced WHOIS
WHOIS was the original way to look up who registered a domain and when, but it returned free-form text that looked different at every registry and had no standard way to handle privacy or errors. RDAP, the Registration Data Access Protocol, returns the same kind of information as structured JSON over HTTPS, with standard fields for events such as registration, last update and expiry. ICANN made RDAP the definitive source for generic top-level domains such as .com, .net and .org, and ended the requirement for their registries and registrars to run WHOIS in January 2025. That's why this tool reads RDAP: the dates come back in a consistent format that can be parsed reliably.
Why some domains show no age
Many country-code registries run their own systems and aren't bound by ICANN's rules. Some don't offer RDAP at all, and some publish a domain's record without its registration date, often for privacy reasons. When that happens the checker can't show a registration date, and the Wayback Machine first-seen date becomes the best available clue. Many country-code registries also offer a lookup page on their own website, which is worth trying for a definitive answer.
Show your established date as a badge
Copy the HTML snippet and paste it on your homepage, About page or footer. The 'Online since' badge reads the same registration date, and the age it shows keeps up with time automatically. It works on WordPress, Shopify, Wix, Webflow, Ghost, Squarespace, Blogger and plain HTML.