Whois Lookup, Check Domain Registration Details Free
This whois lookup tool checks any domain’s registration status, registrar, creation and expiration dates, and nameservers using live RDAP registry data. Find out who a domain is registered with and when it expires, with no sign up needed.
Enter a domain to see its registration date, expiry, registrar, nameservers and DNS records.
RDAP, not classic WHOIS. RDAP is the modern replacement for the WHOIS protocol. It returns structured, consistent data instead of free text that every registry formatted differently, and it is what registries are now required to publish.
Why contact details are usually blank. Under GDPR and ICANN policy, registrars redact registrant names, addresses and emails from public records. A blank contact field is the system working as intended, not a sign the domain is suspicious.
Country domains. Some ccTLD registries publish limited RDAP data or none at all. Where that happens you will see fewer fields rather than an error.
WHOIS in name, RDAP and DNS-over-HTTPS underneath
This tool is called a WHOIS lookup because that is the term everyone searches for, but it does not speak the original WHOIS protocol at all. Classic WHOIS, defined in RFC 3912, is a plain text protocol over a raw TCP socket on port 43, a scheme browsers have never supported and never will, since browsers restrict script initiated connections to a small set of web friendly protocols. What this tool actually queries is RDAP, the structured JSON successor to WHOIS, plus a separate DNS lookup, both of which run over ordinary HTTPS and are therefore fetchable from any browser.
Two separate calls, two separate services
www. subdomain are stripped, and it is checked against a domain pattern that requires at least one dot and a valid top level domain, rejecting obviously malformed input before any network request fires.
https://rdap.org/domain/{domain}, requesting the application/rdap+json media type. rdap.org bootstraps the query to whichever registry actually holds authority for that top level domain and returns the structured record: registration, expiration, and last updated dates from the events array, registrar name from a vCard field, nameservers, status codes, and DNSSEC signing state.
https://dns.google/resolve, one per record type: A, AAAA, MX, NS, TXT, and CNAME. Each is a normal HTTPS GET with an Accept: application/dns-json header, resolved in parallel with Promise.all rather than one after another.
Both destinations are third party public infrastructure, not this site’s own servers. The domain you enter is sent directly from your browser to rdap.org and to Google’s DNS resolver, and neither request passes through or is logged by convertnow.tools. That is a meaningful distinction from the broken link checker and page speed analyzer tools on this site, which do route through our own backend, because those tools need to fetch arbitrary page content that CORS would otherwise block, while RDAP and DNS-over-HTTPS are both designed from the ground up to be called directly by browsers.
DNS record types returned
| Type | What it holds | IANA reference |
|---|---|---|
| A | IPv4 address the domain points to | RFC 1035 |
| AAAA | IPv6 address, the modern successor to A records | RFC 3596 |
| MX | Mail server responsible for accepting email for the domain | RFC 1035 |
| NS | Authoritative nameservers for the domain’s DNS zone | RFC 1035 |
| TXT | Free text records, commonly used for domain verification and email authentication (SPF, DKIM) | RFC 1035 |
| CNAME | Alias pointing one hostname to another | RFC 1035 |
DNSSEC signing status
The delegationSigned flag in the RDAP secureDNS block tells you whether the domain’s zone is cryptographically signed under DNSSEC, which protects against DNS response spoofing. Most domains are still unsigned.
ccTLD coverage gaps
Some country code top level domains have never adopted RDAP or restrict what they publish through it. Expect thinner results for certain ccTLDs compared to gTLDs like .com, .org, or .net.
- RFC 3912 defines the original port 43 WHOIS protocol this tool’s name references but does not use.
- RFC 8484 defines DNS-over-HTTPS, the transport Google’s resolver uses here.
- IANA DNS Parameters registry is the authoritative list of every DNS record type, including the six queried here.
- Google’s DNS-over-HTTPS JSON API reference documents the exact response format this tool parses.
What WHOIS still shows
Verifying a domain’s registrar and nameservers before a DNS migration, confirming MX records point where they should after switching email providers, checking whether a domain you are interested in buying is actually available or just parked, investigating a suspicious domain’s registration status as part of a phishing report, and troubleshooting a site that will not resolve by checking whether its A or AAAA record is even present.
FAQ: Whois Lookup
WHOIS is an older protocol from the 1980s that returns unstructured plain text, formatted differently by every registry, which makes it hard to parse reliably. RDAP (Registration Data Access Protocol) is its modern replacement, standardized by IETF and adopted by ICANN, that returns structured JSON with consistent field names across registries. This tool uses RDAP because it is more reliable and is the direction the entire domain industry has been moving since around 2019.
Since GDPR took effect in 2018, most registrars redact personal registrant details from public WHOIS and RDAP records by default to protect privacy, showing only the registrar’s proxy contact information instead. This is standard practice across the industry and does not indicate anything unusual about the domain, it applies to the vast majority of domains registered by individuals today.
Most generic top level domains (.com, .net, .org, .io, and similar) support RDAP reliably. Some country code domains (ccTLDs) either haven’t fully adopted RDAP yet, restrict public access to their registry data, or block cross origin browser requests, which will cause the lookup to fail or return partial data here. This is a limitation of the specific registry, not of this tool.
Yes, indirectly. If the lookup returns “No registration record found,” the domain is very likely unregistered and available. If it returns registration details, the domain is taken. For a definitive availability check before purchasing, it’s still worth confirming directly with a domain registrar, since availability can change between the lookup and the moment you try to register it.
These statuses mean the domain has expired and is moving through the standard deletion process. “redemptionPeriod” is a roughly 30 day window where the original registrant can still pay a redemption fee to recover it. “pendingDelete” is the final 5 day window before the domain is deleted and released back into the public pool, often picked up quickly by domain marketplaces once it drops.
Every lookup queries the authoritative registry in real time, so the expiration date reflects the current record at the moment you search, not a cached or delayed snapshot. Registries typically update their RDAP records within minutes to hours of a renewal or change being processed by the registrar.
Registration data exists at the root, or “registrable,” domain level, for example example.com, not for individual subdomains like blog.example.com. If you enter a subdomain, the tool will attempt the lookup as entered, but registries generally only hold records for the root domain, so it’s best to search the root domain directly for accurate results.
No. Your search is sent directly from your browser to the public RDAP registry service to fetch results, this site does not log, store, or track the domains you look up.
From the blog
How the web actually moves
DNS, TLS, headers and the hops between a click and a page.
