.info TLD audit hub
First post-1985 unrestricted gTLD; once popular, now associated with low-trust content.
The .info TLD was the first unrestricted gTLD added after the 1985 set, going live in 2001 under Afilias. The original premise was a generic informational namespace for reference sites, glossaries and knowledge bases. Adoption was strong initially but the namespace later attracted aggressive spam and affiliate-marketing operations because of its low base price and lack of registration restrictions. Trust scores from anti-fraud vendors and email reputation systems have weighted .info downward for over a decade as a result. Wikipedia's ad-blocker test pages, some open-source documentation archives, and a long tail of legitimate informational sites still use it, but for a new commercial brand we generally recommend a different TLD. From a pure SEO standpoint Google does not down-rank .info per se; the issue is link-graph reputation on the cohort of sites that do use it. WHOIS privacy, DNSSEC and transfer policies are on parity with the broader gTLD ecosystem.