About LegitSonar

LegitSonar answers one question: is this website worth trusting with your money or your details? It holds trust scores for 607,293 domains and can analyse any other one on demand.

What this is

Most people meet a website through a link — an advert, a message, a search result — and have a few seconds to decide whether it is real. LegitSonar exists for those few seconds. Type a domain, get a score out of 100, and see the reasoning behind it: how old the registration is, whether the certificate is genuine and who issued it, whether the owner is identifiable, whether the site sits on infrastructure shared with known bad actors.

Every signal is shown, not just the number. A score you cannot interrogate is a score you cannot argue with, and this subject deserves argument.

Where the data comes from

Two sources, and the reports say which applies.

• The corpus. 607,293 domains gathered from public reputation data, each with a score, findings and registration details as they stood when the domain was last assessed.
• Live analysis. Any domain can be checked on the spot. LegitSonar resolves its DNS, reads its WHOIS record, completes a TLS handshake to inspect the certificate and fetches the page itself, then scores what it finds. This takes a few seconds and the result is added to the corpus.

Nothing is bought from a data broker, and no report is edited by hand. If a score is wrong, it is wrong because a signal was wrong — which is a thing that can be shown and fixed.

What a score cannot tell you

A trust score is an indication, not a verdict, and being honest about its limits is the only way it stays useful:

• A new site is not a dishonest site. Age is a strong signal because most scams are short-lived, but every legitimate business was new once.
• A high score is not a guarantee. A site can be compromised, sold, or simply change its behaviour the day after it was scanned.
• The signals are technical. LegitSonar can see that a certificate is valid and a registration is old. It cannot see whether an order will arrive.
• Scores age. Each report shows when it was last analysed. If that date is old, re-run it — the button is on every page.

How it is funded

LegitSonar is an independent project. There are no accounts, no subscriptions and nothing to buy. No advertising is sold, and no site can pay to change its score or have a report removed. If that ever changes, it will be stated here before it happens anywhere else.

If something is wrong

Reports are generated automatically and automated things get things wrong. If a domain you own or use is scored unfairly, write to [email protected] with the domain and what you believe is inaccurate. See Contact for what to include, and the methodology for how the score is put together in the first place.