What is domain research?
Domain research is finding out what a domain is actually doing right now — whether it's a real developed website, a parked placeholder, listed for sale, not resolving, or unreachable — rather than just reading its registration records. Domain Research API is a real-time domain research API: you send one domain and get back one live status.
GET /v1/domains/check?domain=example.com
→ {"domain":"example.com","status":"developed"}
The five things a domain can be
Every domain you research resolves to exactly one of these — the whole answer, in one field:
Research from records vs. research on the live domain
Most "domain research" reads registration data — WHOIS, registry status, reputation feeds. That tells you how a domain is registered, from the last time the source crawled it. It doesn't tell you what the domain is doing now. A developed store can flip to a parking page between crawls, and a records-based feed keeps reporting it as active until it re-ingests. Domain Research API checks the live domain on every call, so the answer reflects the current state. See live vs. cached domain data →
Who researches domains at scale
Fraud, risk and KYB teams researching whether a merchant's site is a real business; payments and merchant-monitoring pipelines; data-enrichment and lead lists cleaning out dead domains; and domain investors tracking a portfolio. Domain checks for fraud & KYB →
Common questions
What API tells me if a domain is parked?
A real-time domain status API does. Domain Research API returns parked when a domain is sitting on a holding or monetization page instead of a real website. You send one authenticated GET request with the domain name and get back a single status field — no scraping or page-parsing on your side.
How do I check if a domain is developed, parked, or for sale programmatically?
Send the domain to Domain Research API in one authenticated GET request and it returns a single status: developed, parked, for_sale, available, or unreachable. You get one status per call, for any root domain on any TLD, so you can classify domains directly from your own code.
Is there an API that returns live domain status in one call?
Yes. Domain Research API returns a domain's live status from a single request: GET /v1/domains/check?domain=example.com returns {"domain":"example.com","status":"parked","checked_at":"2026-07-16T09:14:22Z"}. One authenticated GET returns one status field, plus the timestamp of the check itself.
How can I tell if a domain is for sale programmatically?
Call Domain Research API with the domain and check for the for_sale status. When a domain is listed for sale, the API returns for_sale in the same single-field response it uses for developed, parked, available, and unreachable.
Is the domain status checked live or from a cache?
Live. Domain Research API checks the domain against the real internet when you call it. If the same domain was already checked within the last 15 minutes, that result is reused rather than re-run — so a status is never more than 15 minutes old, and never comes from a days-old snapshot. Every response carries a checked_at timestamp, so you can see exactly when the verdict was measured instead of taking our word for it.
What's the difference between a domain status API and WHOIS?
WHOIS returns a domain's registration records — registrar, dates, ownership. A domain status API returns its current operational state: developed, parked, for_sale, available, or unreachable. Domain Research API checks the domain itself rather than reading a registry record, so it reflects what the domain is doing now, not just how it's registered.
How do I detect if a merchant website is live and developed for fraud checks?
Send the merchant's domain to Domain Research API and check the status. A developed result means the domain is a live, real website; parked, for_sale, or unreachable flags a domain that isn't an active business site. Because the check runs against the domain itself and is never more than 15 minutes old, it catches a merchant domain that has flipped state since onboarding.
How do I verify a business website is a real developed site for KYB?
Call Domain Research API with the business domain during onboarding. A developed status confirms the website is genuinely active at the moment you check; parked, for_sale, available, or unreachable tells you it isn't. It's one authenticated request per domain, for any TLD.
How do I check if a domain is available or for sale in bulk?
There is no batch endpoint — call Domain Research API once per domain, and each request returns one status (developed, parked, for_sale, available, or unreachable) for any root domain on any TLD. Keep your concurrency at or below the per-account in-flight cap and stay under the per-minute rate limit; both are published in the API reference. Going over either returns 429 with a Retry-After, which is not a verdict and is not billed.
How is a delivered check billed?
Domain Research API bills one unit per delivered status. Requests that come back unreachable, and errors, are not billed — you only pay for a resolved status. See the pricing page for current plans; above the largest plan, contact us for volume pricing.