Web Catalog · established 2011 Full Information About Any website
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Retired section

Domain Profiles: What Those Pages Held, and Which Sources Still Answer

A profile page was a presentation layer over five third-party feeds. All five have closed, and the questions they answered are now split across separate sources.

5 feeds, 0 still open Replaced by the reference section Reviewed 2026-08-26
A wall of empty rectangular frames where record cards used to sit, with a handful of frames still holding faded cards.

For a period this catalog kept a page per domain: type in an address and get back a blended summary of what could be known about it. General registration information at the top, then an estimated traffic position, a safety and reputation rating, a list of apparent competitors and similar sites, and a count of inbound links. It looked like one dataset. It was five.

What each block actually came from

Every block on a profile page was somebody else's data, fetched and reformatted. That is worth spelling out, because it explains precisely how the whole section became impossible to maintain rather than merely dated.

The five feeds

BlockSourceStatus
Traffic positionAlexa, with Compete for United States figuresAlexa closed 2022; Compete withdrawn 2016Both were panel and clickstream estimates presented as a single position. See Alexa Rank.
Inbound linksYahoo Site ExplorerClosed 2011The last free public link index. Its closure created the paid market that replaced it.
Safety ratingSiteAdvisor and Web of TrustPublic lookups withdrawnOne folded into a consumer product, one removed from the extension stores. See site safety checks.
Registration informationwhoisStill available, and betterThe one block that outlived the page. Structured now as RDAP as well.
Competitors and similar sitesDerived from the blocks aboveGone with its inputsNever an independent measurement; a computation over the other feeds.

Why the whole section went rather than most of it

A page assembled from five feeds has the durability of its shortest-lived input, and this one lost four. The remaining block, registration data, is genuinely useful and is the only part worth keeping, which makes a profile page the wrong container for it: a page that is four-fifths empty is worse than a page about the one thing it can still say.

There is a second reason, and it is the more decisive one. The mechanism these pages ran on was bulk querying of third-party services and republishing the results. That was always against the terms of the services being queried, and the combination of platform enforcement, the closure of the free feeds and tightened regulation on data reuse has made it impractical as well as impermissible. The page on robots.txt and crawl limits sets out where that boundary now sits.

Where those questions are answered now

Split up, and better for it. The registration questions are answered directly from the registry, which is authoritative and obliged to publish. The resolution questions are answered from DNS. The measurement questions are answered by commercial vendors whose methods and blind spots can at least be stated. Nothing is blended, so nothing is presented with more confidence than its source deserves.

That is what the website data section is: eleven pages, one per question, each one about a single source rather than a summary of five. The three browser decoders do the part a profile page did usefully, which is naming the fields in a record you already have, without querying anything.

The general lesson

An aggregate is only as durable as its least durable input, and it hides which input that is. A source published under obligation, such as a registry record, outlives a source published as a product. The report on closed measurement tools is the full version of that argument, with dates.

What replaced it

The same questions, one source at a time

Six of the eleven reference pages cover ground a profile page used to summarise.

The whois recordReading an RDAP responseDNS record typesNameservers and delegationThe domain lifecycleHow traffic is estimatedAlexa Rank, 1996 to 2022Site safety and reputation Record field decoderDNS record decoderLifecycle calculator

Frequently asked questions

What was on a domain profile page?

A blended summary of a single domain: general registration information, an estimated traffic position, a safety and reputation rating, a list of apparent competitors and similar sites, and a count of inbound links. Each block came from a different third-party service, and the page was a presentation layer over five separate feeds.

Why are the old domain profiles gone?

Because every service that supplied them closed. The traffic position came from Alexa, retired in 2022, and from Compete, withdrawn in 2016. The link count came from Yahoo Site Explorer, closed in 2011. The safety rating came from SiteAdvisor and Web of Trust, neither of which still offers a public lookup. A page assembled from five feeds cannot outlive all five.

Where can the same questions be answered now?

Split across sources rather than blended into one page. Registration facts come from the registry, through whois or RDAP, and are more reliable than they ever were. Resolution comes from DNS. Traffic and authority figures come from commercial vendors, with their methods and limits stated. The reference section covers each in turn.

Will the profile pages come back?

Not in that form. The mechanism they depended on, bulk querying of third-party services and republishing the results, was always against those services' terms and is now both technically and legally impractical. What replaced it here is a reference section explaining how to read each source directly, which is narrower and durable.