A domain has three ages, and they are easy to confuse. There is the day it was registered, the day the web first saw it, and the day the site on it actually launched. This tool reads the first two. Together they say more than either alone, especially when you are deciding whether to trust a site, buy a link on it, or buy the domain itself.

Where the dates come from

Registration, expiry and registrar come from the domain's own registry, over a protocol called RDAP. It is the official, current record, so it does not go stale the way a cached WHOIS copy can.
First saved is the earliest copy of the home page that the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine holds. It is a floor for how long the site has been public, not an exact launch date.

The Archive is slow and sometimes unavailable. The registry answer appears first, the Archive date fills in a few seconds later, and if it cannot be reached there is a button to try again and a link to look at the snapshots yourself.

Reading the age label

Fresh: under three months. No track record yet.
New: under a year.
Young: one to three years.
Established: three to five years.
Mature: five to ten years.
Veteran: ten years or more.

These bands are ours, chosen to be easy to scan. There is no industry standard for them.

Does domain age affect rankings?

Not on its own. Google's representatives have said repeatedly that the age of a domain is not a ranking factor in itself. What looks like an age effect is mostly everything that comes with age: more links, more content, more history of being useful. A new domain with strong content and good links can outrank an old one with neither.

Where age does matter is in judging trust:

Buying links. Sites built to sell links are often young. A site that is two months old and sells guest posts deserves a closer look.
Spam and phishing. Filters and reviewers treat very new domains with more caution, because most abuse comes from them.
Email. A freshly registered sending domain has no reputation, and mail providers are slower to trust it.

When the archive is older than the registration

This is the most useful thing the tool does with the two dates. If the Internet Archive first saved the domain years before its current registration began, the domain almost certainly expired, was dropped and was registered again by someone new. The age shown by most checkers is then the age of the new owner, not the age of the site.

For SEO that cuts both ways. A dropped domain can still carry links from its old life, which is why people buy them. It can also carry a history you do not want, such as spam or a penalty. Check what the old pages were before you rely on either.

What happens when a domain expires

Expiry is not instant deletion. For most generic domains the usual sequence is a renewal grace period of up to about 45 days, then a redemption period of about 30 days in which the owner can still recover it for a fee, then a short pending-delete stage of about 5 days, and then the domain is released. The exact timings vary by registry and by registrar. When a domain is in one of these stages, its status shows it here.

Why some country domains show no date

Not every registry publishes registration data over RDAP. For those, the tool says so and falls back to the Archive date alone. Domains under a privacy service still show their dates, though not the owner, since registrars hide personal details.

Related tools

Age says how long a domain has existed, not how strong it is. For authority use the Domain Rating Checker. To see where a domain points, use the DNS Checker, and to follow a redirect from an old domain, the Redirect Checker.

Frequently asked

Can the registration date be faked or reset?

Moving a domain between registrars does not change it. The date resets only if the domain is allowed to expire, is deleted and is registered again. That is exactly the case the archive comparison is there to catch.

Why does another tool show a different age?

Some tools read a cached WHOIS copy that can be out of date, and some count from the first archive date instead. This one uses the registry's own record for registration, and shows the archive date separately.

How many domains can I check?

Up to 20 at a time. Paste them one per line, sort the results by age or expiry, and copy or download the table as a CSV. The address bar always holds a link you can share.

Is anything sent to a third party?

The domain you enter is looked up at its registry and at the Internet Archive, both public services. Nothing else about you or your visit is sent.

How old is a domain, and what does that tell you?