.museum TLD audit hub
Sponsored TLD restricted to museums and museum-related organizations.
The .museum TLD launched in 2001 as one of the first sponsored TLDs (sTLDs) under ICANN's new-gTLD program. It is sponsored by the Museum Domain Management Association (MuseDoma) and registration is restricted to museums, museum professionals, and museum-related organizations as defined by the International Council of Museums (ICOM). Verification of museum status is part of the registration process. Adoption has been modest — there are only a few thousand active registrations — and many museums have continued to use .org or country-code TLDs as their primary domain instead. The namespace supports DNSSEC and operates under standard registry hygiene. SEO has no special handling for .museum but the cohort is small and link-graph reputation is strong because most registrants are reputable institutions. We rarely audit .museum sites in practice but treat them as a high-trust niche.