“How long has this site been around?” sounds like one question. It’s really two: how long has the current owner held the address, and how long has there been a website at it. Two public records answer them, and the gap between them is often the most interesting part.
Date 1: when the domain was registered
Every domain name is registered through a registry, and registries publish basic facts about each name: when it was registered, when it expires and which company (the registrar) manages it. You can look these up yourself.
The modern way is RDAP, the Registration Data Access Protocol, which has replaced the older WHOIS service as the standard source for generic domains such as .com, .org and .net. Many registrars and lookup sites show RDAP data in plain language. Personal details of owners are usually hidden for privacy, but the dates are not.
What the registration date tells you: how long the current registration has existed. If a domain was registered last month, whoever runs the site has only held the address for a month.
What it doesn’t tell you: whether the address was used before. When a domain expires and someone else registers it, the registration date starts again from that day. The history before it vanishes from the registration record.
Date 2: when the web archive first saw the site
The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has been saving copies of web pages since the 1990s. For most addresses that have had a website for a while, it can show the first time it saved a page there, and what that page looked like.
What the first capture tells you: that a website existed at the address by that date. It’s often earlier than people expect: plenty of well-known sites were captured within months of launching.
What it doesn’t tell you: when the site actually started. The archive doesn’t capture everything, and small or new sites may be captured late or not at all. “Never captured” means the archive has no copy, not that the site is fake.
Reading the two dates together
Put the dates side by side and three patterns appear:
| Pattern | What it usually means |
|---|---|
| Registration and first capture close together | The site has been run by the same registration since it started. |
| No captures, recent registration | A new site. Nothing unusual by itself. |
| First capture well before the registration date | The address was used before and registered again, often by someone new. |
The third pattern matters. Expired domains with a history are bought because their old reputation still carries weight: links from other sites, a familiar name, sometimes a place in search results. Most buyers have ordinary reasons. Some don’t. Either way, the site you see today may have nothing to do with the one people remember.
CheckAnySite flags this pattern when the archive saw the address more than 90 days before its current registration date. The margin is there because registration dates and first captures are recorded separately and can differ by a few weeks for perfectly ordinary reasons.
Changes since you last looked
Age is one part of history. The other is change: a site that switched technology, dropped its contact page or suddenly shows traces of an AI builder has changed in ways worth knowing about. Every time we scan a site, we compare the result with our previous scan and list what changed, from AI traces and technologies to HTTPS, the title and the score. If you want to be told when that happens, you can watch a site and get an email when a new scan finds changes.
A two-minute check
- Look up the domain’s registration date (RDAP or WHOIS).
- Open the Wayback Machine and note the first capture date.
- If the first capture is much older than the registration, look at the oldest captures: was it the same kind of site?
- Compare what the site says about itself (“trusted since 2005”) with both dates.
Do it in one step: the Domain History tool shows the first capture, the registration date, whether the address was probably registered again, and what changed between our scans.