WHOIS Is Dead, Long Live RDAP — How to Look Up Domain Data in 2026

WHOIS, the 40-year-old protocol for looking up domain registration data, is being replaced by RDAP (Registration Data Access Protocol). Here's how to use it. RDAP vs WHOIS Feature WHOIS RDAP Format Plain text Structured JSON Standard Ad-hoc IETF RFC 7480-7484 Auth None Optional OAuth Encoding ASCII UTF-8 Discovery Manual Bootstrap via IANA How to Query RDAP Get the RDAP server URL from IANA bootstrap: https://data.iana.org/rdap/dns.json Query the domain: https://rdap.verisign.com/com/v 1 /domain/google.com Parse the JSON response for: Registration date Expiration date Registrar name Nameservers Status codes DNSSEC info Bonus: Combine with DNS Google DNS API gives you A, MX, NS, TXT records: https://dns.google/resolve?name=stripe.com&type=MX I built a WHOIS/RDAP + DNS lookup tool that combines both — free on Apify Store (search knotless_cadence whois ).