Our Data Sources
WebRefer intelligence derives from diverse, complementary data sources—combining proprietary collection infrastructure with partnerships and public datasets to deliver comprehensive internet coverage.
Comprehensive Web Intelligence Foundation
Domain Registry Data
Direct access to WHOIS and RDAP records across all major TLDs. Registration dates, expiry information, registrant details, and historical ownership changes.
DNS Infrastructure
Complete DNS record analysis including A, AAAA, MX, NS, TXT, and CNAME records. Hosting provider identification and infrastructure mapping.
Technology Signatures
Detection of 3,000+ technologies from HTTP headers, JavaScript libraries, meta tags, and DOM analysis. CMS, frameworks, analytics, and security tools.
Content Analysis
Text extraction, language detection, topic classification, and content structure analysis. Support for both textual and visual content understanding.
SSL/TLS Certificates
Certificate chain analysis, issuer identification, validity monitoring, and organization data extraction from extended validation certificates.
Web Traffic Signals
Inbound link analysis, referring domain profiles, and traffic estimate enrichment through panel data partnerships and integration.
Primary Data Collection
The core of WebRefer's data infrastructure is our proprietary collection platform. Distributed crawlers continuously scan the internet, processing hundreds of millions of web pages monthly and extracting structured data for analysis. This active collection provides the foundation for our custom web analysis and technology detection capabilities.
Crawling Infrastructure
Our collection platform operates from multiple geographic locations, ensuring comprehensive coverage and avoiding visibility limitations inherent to single-region collection. We implement respectful crawling practices, honoring robots.txt directives while maximizing data completeness. Dynamic scaling enables rapid expansion for internet-wide scans or intensive collection on targeted segments.
Collection frequency varies by domain importance and client requirements. High-value targets receive daily or weekly monitoring, while broader internet coverage operates on monthly refresh cycles. Custom collection schedules are available for clients requiring specific monitoring cadences.
Registry and WHOIS Data
Domain ownership intelligence requires authoritative data from registries and registrars. We maintain direct feeds and partnerships that provide WHOIS and RDAP data for all major TLDs, including historical records that enable ownership change tracking.
Coverage and Freshness
Our domain registry data covers over 1,500 TLDs including all gTLDs and major ccTLDs. Bulk zone file access for applicable TLDs provides complete domain enumeration. WHOIS data freshness varies by TLD, with major extensions refreshed at least weekly and priority domains monitored daily.
For domain list projects, we combine registry data with active crawling to identify live websites and filter parked or inactive domains.
DNS and Infrastructure Data
Understanding internet infrastructure requires comprehensive DNS analysis. Our DNS intelligence capabilities include full record type analysis, nameserver mapping, and hosting provider identification.
We continuously monitor DNS configurations across billions of domains, tracking infrastructure changes and maintaining historical records. This data supports cybersecurity applications, infrastructure due diligence, and technology ecosystem mapping.
Technology Detection
Our technology detection library identifies over 3,000 distinct web technologies across categories including content management systems, e-commerce platforms, analytics tools, advertising networks, security implementations, and infrastructure providers. Detection relies on HTTP header analysis, JavaScript library fingerprinting, HTML meta tag extraction, DOM structure analysis, and network behavior patterns.
We continuously update detection signatures as technologies evolve, ensuring coverage of emerging platforms. Our CMS and hosting analysis, SaaS adoption tracking, and security technology detection services leverage this comprehensive detection capability.
Third-Party Enrichment
We supplement proprietary collection with selected third-party data sources that enhance coverage or provide specialized attributes. These partnerships include company firmographic databases for organization matching and enrichment, traffic estimation panels for popularity and reach metrics, geolocation services for IP-based location attribution, and industry classification databases for vertical segmentation.
Third-party data undergoes the same validation processes as proprietary collection, ensuring consistency and accuracy across all data sources. Learn more about our quality assurance in our methodology documentation.
Data Freshness and Updates
Internet data becomes stale quickly as websites change, companies evolve, and technologies are adopted or deprecated. Our collection infrastructure operates continuously, with refresh frequencies tailored to data type and client requirements.
For enterprise clients with ongoing monitoring needs, we offer continuous data feeds through API integrations that provide near-real-time updates on monitored domains and segments.