.cn TLD audit hub
China ccTLD — administered by CNNIC, with stringent ICP-licensing requirements for hosting in mainland China.
The .cn TLD is administered by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) and has tens of millions of active registrations. Owning a .cn domain is necessary but not sufficient for serving traffic from servers in mainland China — you also need an ICP filing or ICP license issued by China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and the application requires a Chinese-incorporated entity, a registered Chinese postal address, and identity verification. Sites without ICP filings can still be reached from outside the Great Firewall but will face slow or blocked traffic from inside China. SEO treats .cn as a China-bound geotargeting signal; Baidu remains the dominant Chinese search engine and explicit Baidu Webmaster Tools registration matters more in this market than Search Console. Email deliverability has China-specific quirks; QQ Mail, NetEase 163, and Sina each have idiosyncratic filtering policies. We pay attention to ICP filing status when auditing operational health on .cn properties.