WHOIS History API: Every Ownership Change Since 1986

The WHOIS History API gives you programmatic access to the complete ownership timeline of any domain covering every registrar change, registrant update, nameserver modification, and expiry event, going back to 1986. Each record is deduplicated so you only see genuine changes, not noise.

Talk to sales
Get your API key
More Details
curl -X GET 'https://api.whoisfreaks.com/v2.0/whois/history?domainName=whoisfreaks.com&apiKey=API_KEY'
[
  {
    "status": true,
    "whois": "historical",
    "total_records": "246",
    "whois_domains_historical": [
      {
        "num": 1,
        "status": true,
        "domain_name": "whoisfreaks.com",
        "query_time": "2022-04-05 11:35:45",
        "create_date": "2019-03-19",
        "update_date": "2022-02-17",
        "expiry_date": "2023-03-19",
        "domain_registrar": {
          "iana_id": "1068",
          "registrar_name": "namecheap, inc",
          "whois_server": "whois.namecheap.com",
          "website_url": "http://www.namecheap.com"
        },
        "registrant_contact": {
          "name": "redacted for privacy",
          "company": "privacy service provided by withheld for privacy ehf",
          "city": "Reykjavik",
          "state": "Capital Region",
          "zip_code": "101",
          "country_name": "Iceland",
          "country_code": "IS",
          "email_address": "[email protected]",
          "phone": "+3544212434"
        },
        "administrative_contact": {
          "name": "Redacted for Privacy",
          "company": "Privacy service provided by Withheld for Privacy ehf",
          "city": "Reykjavik",
          "state": "Capital Region",
          "zip_code": "101",
          "country_name": "Iceland",
          "country_code": "IS",
          "email_address": "[email protected]",
          "phone": "+3544212434"
        },
        "technical_contact": {
          "name": "Redacted for Privacy",
          "company": "Privacy service provided by Withheld for Privacy ehf",
          "city": "Reykjavik",
          "state": "Capital Region",
          "zip_code": "101",
          "country_name": "Iceland",
          "country_code": "IS",
          "email_address": "[email protected]",
          "phone": "+3544212434"
        },
        "name_servers": [
          "dns8.cloudns.net",
          "dns4.cloudns.net",
          "dns3.cloudns.net",
          "dns7.cloudns.net"
        ],
        "domain_status": [
          "clienttransferprohibited"
        ]
      }
    ]
  }
]
google.com
apple.com
stripe.com
apifreaks.com
pricing backgroundEclipse Top RightEclipse Top LeftEclipse WHOIS Stats

Our Products

What is a WHOIS History API?

Historical Whois API

Standard WHOIS only shows a domain’s current registration status. WHOIS History API provides a chronological record of past WHOIS records, making it possible to trace ownership changes over time. This is especially valuable for cybersecurity, fraud investigations, and due diligence, where historical ownership data can reveal critical context. WhoisFreaks offers one of the deepest historical WHOIS datasets available via API, with coverage from 1986 to the present, 1,529+ TLDs, and 4.1B+ records.

Historical WHOIS Lookup Tool
Documentation
Our Product

Product

How the WHOIS History API Works?

WHOIS History Lookup API

Making a WHOIS History API call is identical in structure to a live WHOIS lookup, change the whois parameter from 'live' to 'historical' and the API returns an array of all unique historical WHOIS records for that domain, ordered from most recent to oldest.

Example request
GET https://api.whoisfreaks.com/v1.0/whois?whois=historical&domainName=example.com&apiKey=YOUR_KEY

Each record in the response follows the same structured format as a live WHOIS response - registrar, registrant, contacts, dates, nameservers, and raw WHOIS text making it trivial to process programmatically or diff against previous records to detect changes.

Explore Plans
Documentation
Response Preview
[
  {
    "status": true,
    "domain_name": "whoisfreaks.com",
    "query_time": "2024-07-11 13:03:30",
    "whois_server": "whois.verisign-grs.com",
    "domain_registered": "yes",
    "create_date": "2019-03-19",
    "update_date": "2024-02-18",
    "expiry_date": "2025-03-19",
    "domain_registrar": {
      "iana_id": "1068",
      "registrar_name": "NAMECHEAP INC",
      "whois_server": "whois.namecheap.com",
      "website_url": "http://www.namecheap.com",
      "email_address": "[email protected]",
      "phone_number": "+1.9854014545"
    },
    "reseller_contact": {

Features

What Each Historical WHOIS Record Contains?

Seamlessly integrate valuable data and features into your platform.

Request a Quote
Talk to sales
Feature icon

Full Registrar Record

Each Record will have name, IANA ID, WHOIS server and contact details of the domain registrar at a specific time.

Feature icon

Contact Details

WHOIS record will have Registrant, administrative, technical, and billing contact details like email,fax and phone.

Feature icon

Important Dates

Creation date, last updated date, and expiry date at time of capture, these details helps in building the full timeline.

Feature icon

Domain Status

Covers domain status codes at time of capture that will be helpfull in predicting the domain life cycle over a longer duration.

Use Cases

WHOIS in Action

See how our users leverage WHOIS data to gain actionable insights.

Feature icon

Data Enrichment

A reverse WHOIS search on a lead's email or company name returns the full domain portfolio for your CRM record.

Feature icon

Domain Registration and Portfolio Analysis

Reverse WHOIS your own registrant email to surface forgotten domains before they lapse.

Feature icon

Threat Intelligence

Reverse WHOIS one malicious domain's registrant email to map the rest of that actor's infrastructure in one query.

Feature icon

Brand Monitoring & Brand Protection

Reverse WHOIS your trademark as a keyword and catch cybersquatted domains before a phishing campaign starts.

Feature icon

Competitive Intelligence

Reverse WHOIS a competitor's organization name to reveal domains they registered before an unannounced launch.

Feature icon

Research & Due Diligence

Check a counterparty's claims with a reverse WHOIS search on their registrant email, using our pre-GDPR era records.

Request demo background

Integrate our WHOIS APIs now to power your threat intelligence, access real-time and historical domain data, and make smarter security decisions.

Request Demo

Integrations

Seamless Integration For Every Workflow

The WhoisFreaks WHOIS History API ships with official Python and Go SDKs so you can pull complete ownership timelines going back to 1986 into threat intelligence scripts and investigation pipelines.

Zapier, Make, and n8n let no-code analysts retrieve and log historical records automatically whenever a domain is flagged, routing results to case management systems, Notion, or Google Sheets.

For SIEM and SOAR platforms, the API enriches security incidents with full registrant history so analysts can trace infrastructure pivots and build correlated timelines without leaving their investigation workflow.

Explore Integrations
Explore SDK
Integration Workflow

Related WHOIS Lookup Products

Domain Monitoring

Domain Monitoring

Stop reading the history after the fact and get WHOIS and RDAP change alerts inside of 10 minutes.

Domain Monitoring
Reverse WHOIS API

Reverse WHOIS API

Take any past registrant from the history and find every single domain that identity holds today.

Reverse WHOIS API
WHOIS API

WHOIS API

Compare a domain's history against its live record for the owner, registrar, dates, and nameservers.

WHOIS API

FAQs

FAQs about the Domain WHOIS API: endpoints, parameters, response fields, and rate limits.

Is each WHOIS Record in historical database unique?

Yes, each WHOIS record will be unique. We only save unique WHOIS record of the domains.

What type of data do you provide in Historical API endpoint and how often is it updated?

Our Historical API offers a blend of up-to-date information and comprehensive unique historical data. We will provide all previous unique records related to that domain along with the latest data. Please note that we update our database on monthly basis, so the maximum data latency in our historical api data can be 1 month.

How far back does the WHOIS history go?

WhoisFreaks holds WHOIS records going back to 1986 - the beginning of the modern domain registration era. This is one of the deepest historical WHOIS archives available via public API.

Is every historical record unique?

Yes. We only store a new record when the WHOIS data has genuinely changed from the previous capture. Deduplication means you get a clean ownership timeline - not hundreds of identical snapshots.

How is the historical WHOIS API different from the live WHOIS API?

The live WHOIS API returns the current registration record fetched directly from the registry in real time. The historical WHOIS API returns all past records from our database, including the current record if it differs from the most recently stored one. Both use the same endpoint and response structure, only the 'whois' parameter changes.

Will I be charged if no historical records are found?

If no records exist in our database for a domain, no API credit is charged. You receive an empty result at no cost.

Can I use the historical WHOIS API for OSINT investigations?

Yes, this is one of the most common professional use cases. Law enforcement agencies, cybersecurity researchers, and threat intelligence teams routinely use historical WHOIS data to trace the evolution of infrastructure used in cyberattacks, fraud schemes, and disinformation campaigns.