issued.live: Certificate Transparency, ICANN Registrations and DNS in One API
Every certificate issued for every domain on the public internet gets written to a public log. Anyone can read them. Almost nobody does — because the raw feed is a firehose of tens of thousands of entries a second, and a certificate on its own doesn’t tell you much. That’s the gap issued.live fills. It reads the Certificate Transparency logs continuously, joins them to ICANN zone-file…
Certificate Transparency logs continuously record every certificate issued for every domain on the public internet. While anyone can read the raw feed, it's overwhelming due to the sheer volume of data. This is where issued.live comes in – it aggregates the information, merges it with ICANN zone-file registration data and its own DNS scans, and presents a concise record for each domain, showing the changes over time. The service is free, requiring no key or sign-up for domain lookups.
The same record is available in three formats: JSON for scripts, Markdown for humans or language models, and MCP (Model Context Protocol) for agents. JSON provides a stable identifier for the exact certificate, while Markdown offers a more readable document format. MCP allows agents to query the service directly as a tool.
The data comes from three sources: Certificate Transparency logs, ICANN zone-file feeds, and DNS scans. The DNS scans ensure each domain's current status, providing a confirmed observation rather than a live lookup. This joined information answers questions that would be unanswerable from any single source: the current state of a domain, its past IP addresses, and newly registered domains.
It's important to note that a null value for the registration date means "we do not hold this information" and not "the domain is not registered." The same applies to the first_cert_seen field – it indicates the first time any Certificate Transparency log carried a certificate for that name, not necessarily when the domain was first registered. The service is built on the principle of observation drawn from public logs, not guessing or inferring information.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.