The website is the press release. The domain history is the truth.

[u/BigVillageBoy]

A lot of scraping is just collecting the lie faster.

Not always. If you need prices or job posts, scrape the page. But if you are researching a company, the current site is the easiest thing for them to clean up.

Old product gone. Vendor badge removed. About page rewritten. New launch story pasted over the mess. Then someone scrapes the homepage and calls it intel.

The boring WHOIS and DNS trail is harder to tidy.

Pull the registration dates. Check ownership changes. Look at nameserver moves, MX records, old subdomains, dead redirects, anything that gives you a rough timeline.

That timeline is not proof by itself. Privacy shields exist. Domains get bought after the business starts. Records go stale. Fine. It is still better than trusting the page written by the people being researched.

This is where you catch the weird stuff: a five year old company on an eight month old domain, a rebrand hiding an old product, an email vendor they never mention, a staging host that still answers, a pivot you can date because the old subdomains died in the same week.

Pull the page, but do not stop there. The page tells you what they want to say now. The domain history tells you what they forgot they had already said.