Who Owns That Domain? A Guide to WHOIS (and RDAP) Lookups

Whether you’re evaluating whether a domain is trustworthy, checking when one you own is due for renewal, or just curious who’s behind a site, the registration details are public information - you just need to know how to ask for them.

WHOIS is being replaced, quietly

For decades, this meant querying WHOIS, a protocol from the early internet with an inconsistent, barely-standardized text response format that varied by registry. It’s being phased out in favor of RDAP (Registration Data Access Protocol) - a modern, structured, HTTPS-based successor that ICANN now requires registries and registrars to support. RDAP returns actual structured JSON instead of loosely-formatted text, which is why most modern lookup tools (including ours) query RDAP under the hood even though people still colloquially call it “a WHOIS lookup.”

What you can actually see

A domain lookup typically surfaces the registrar, creation date, expiry date, current status codes, and the domain’s nameservers. What it generally won’t show anymore is the registrant’s personal contact details - name, email, phone number are redacted by most registries by default, a privacy change driven largely by GDPR. Organization name and registrar-level details usually remain visible where they’re not personally identifying.

Looking one up

Our WHOIS Lookup Tool queries the public rdap.org bootstrap service, which automatically redirects to whichever registry is actually authoritative for a given domain’s TLD, and returns the structured result in plain language.

Registration details vs. where a domain actually points

Registration information tells you who owns a domain and when it expires - it says nothing about where that domain currently resolves to, which is a separate question answered by DNS records instead. If you need to check what IP or mail server a domain is actually configured to use right now, our DNS Lookup Tool covers A, MX, TXT, NS, and other record types for exactly that.