Domain Research API

Fastly's Domain Research API allows you to programmatically retrieve algorithmic domain search results and check domain availability. The Domain Research API might be useful if you want to:

• check if domain names are available for registration or for sale in aftermarkets.
• add a domain discovery experience to your product.
• monitor domain name state changes over time.

How it works

The Domain Research API is part of the Fastly API, which requires a Fastly API token. You can use the Fastly API to enable the Domain Research API for your account.

The Domain Research API has two endpoints. The Suggest endpoint allows you to retrieve domain search results, and the Status endpoint allows you to check domain availability.

The Status endpoint has two variants. The Precise variant allows you to check the registry-level availability of a domain (e.g., for new registrations), and the Estimated variant allows you to check DNS and aftermarket-level availability of a domain (e.g., not registry-level).

Limitations and considerations

The Domain Research API has the following limitations and considerations:

• The most common use case of the Status endpoint is to determine if a domain is available for registration from a registrar. The inactive status means a domain is available for registration.
• By design, the Status endpoint accepts only a single domain per API request. If your use case calls for checking multiple domains, you'll need to check them one at a time.
• Our platform limits Domain Research API requests to a total runtime of 30 seconds. If an upstream provider fails to respond within that timeframe, our API will return a best-effort value, typically unknown or undelegated.
• The Suggest and Status endpoints are intentionally decoupled. Domain availability information is not present in Suggest endpoint responses, and Status endpoint responses do not include search result suggestions.

Billing

The Domain Research API is disabled by default. Users assigned the superuser role can enable it on the Products page.

Billing for the Domain Research API is based on Domain Research API requests. There are three types of billable Domain Research API requests:

• Suggest API requests: The number of HTTP requests sent to the Suggest endpoint.
• Status-Precise API requests: The number of HTTP requests sent to the Status endpoint.
• Status-Estimated API requests: The number of HTTP requests sent to the Status endpoint, with the &scope=estimate parameter explicitly set. These responses include a subset of the data returned by the Status-Precise API consisting of (i) DNS-level domain delegation (or undelegated) data and (ii) Aftermarket listing metadata (if present for a given domain). These responses do not include domain registry-level availability data.