Trust API

Trust API

Website Trust and Fraud Detection

Introduction

The BuiltWith Trust API provides you with an overview of a website domain - allowing you to make the call on how much it can be trusted. We use attributes such as technology spend, time, relationships with other sites, current response, keywords and undisclosed methods to determine the trustworthiness of a domain.

Trust API Explained

The general access method is as follows -
https://api.builtwith.com/trustv1/api.[xml|json]?KEY=[YOUR KEY]&LOOKUP=[DOMAIN]

Authentication

You must provide your API key in each lookup. See the examples for how this works.

Login or Create a Free Account to get your API key.

Get Domain Example

XML Get Domain
https://api.builtwith.com/trustv1/api.xml?KEY=[YOUR KEY]&LOOKUP=hotelscombined.com

JSON Get Domain
https://api.builtwith.com/trustv1/api.json?KEY=[YOUR KEY]&LOOKUP=builtwith.com

JSON Get with stop words and performing additional live lookup
https://api.builtwith.com/trustv1/api.json?KEY=[YOUR KEY]&LOOKUP=builtwith.com&LIVE=yes&WORDS=gold,diamonds

Best Practices

If you are providing a list of newly registered domains always use the &LIVE=true option as our DB will always return suspect. If you are working through a large list provide &LIVE=true only if the status comes back as 'needLive' (2 in json) - this will increase throughput performance.

Reference

GET Request Parameters

Name Examples Required
KEY Login or Create a Free Account to get your API key.
This is your key, use this for lookups.
Yes
LOOKUP cnn.com
hotelscombined.com
Trust API supports subdomains and internal pages but only using the LIVE lookup feature of Trust API.
Yes
LIVE yes
Performs a live lookup of the website in question. This slows down the response. A result with a status of 'needLive' requires the LIVE option to determine if the website is suspect or not. Live lookups slow down the response of the API, you should consider calling this if the non-LIVE lookup response status is 'needLive'.
No
WORDS medicine,rolex
If the words specified here are in the HTML of the website the result will have Stopwords set to true for LIVE lookups.
No

Response Object

Result

Result is the root object returned from the lookup

Name Example Description
Domain hotelscombined.com The domain/subdomain/url that was looked up.
Status ok suspect (1 in json) - the website is suspect because of one of the attributes we found
ok (0 in json) - we think this website is ok
needLive (2 in json) - lookup this site again with &LIVE=yes parameter for a more detailed response
LiveRecord LiveRecord explained below Result from doing a live lookup on the domain.
DBRecord DBRecord explained below Result from our database
DBRecord

This contains the results from performing a lookup in our DB for the domain.

Name Example Description
EarliestRecord 1436584145 epoch seconds time for the earliest technology record for the domain - checked DBIndexed is true first
LatestUpdate 1543584145 epoch seconds time since we updated a technology - checked DBIndexed is true first
PremiumTechs 5 The amount of premium techs we found on the website.
LiveTechs false true if the website has any currently live technologies tracked.
AffiliateLinks false If the site has any affiliate program advertising systems on it currently.
PaymentOptions true If the site has a payment provider of mentions a payment system.
Ecommerce true If the site has an eCommerce technology or cart / buy links.
Parked false If the site is using any parked techs or mentions parked.
Spend 0 Average monthly spend across the entire domain.
Established true If the website is older than 1 year old from our technology indexing.
DBIndexed true If this website is in our DB - if false the site is suspect
LiveRecord

This contains the results from performing a live lookup on the domain

Name Example Description
LookupError The remote name could not be resolved Any error from trying to lookup the website
WebsiteError Website Lookup Failed Similar to LookupError except could be blank HTML response
StopWords true true is your stop words (supplied) found on the site
Spend 0 Average monthly spend from the webpage technologies found
Parked false If the site is using any parked techs or mentions parked.
AffiliateLinks true If the site has affiliate advertising.
PaymentOptions true If the site has a payment provider of mentions a payment system.
Ecommerce true If the site has an eCommerce technology or cart / buy links.

Code Examples

JSON/XML have integrations in all modern programming languages. Here's some StackOverflow topics for various languages - Python, C#, Java, PHP, C++, TSQL and Ruby.

Error Codes

Note error messages in this format cannot be guaranteed, your implementation should also consider non-200 response codes as errors. The Lookup property will be null (json) or not provided (xml) if the error is server related. View all potential well-formed error codes.

Terms of Use

Our standard terms cover the use all of our APIs.

In general, you can use the API to enhance your product in many ways. The only limitation is you cannot resell the data as-is or provide duplicate functionality to builtwith.com and its associated services.