.news TLD audit hub
Generic gTLD aimed at news publishers and journalism brands.
The .news TLD launched in 2014 as part of the broader new-gTLD round. The registry, run by Identity Digital (formerly Donuts), positioned the namespace at journalism, niche publishers and news-aggregator brands. Adoption has been mixed: some prominent news organizations registered .news variants defensively but most retained their established .com or .co.uk domains as primary. There are tens of thousands of active registrations, with notable adoption among local-news startups and topic-specific newsletters. The namespace supports DNSSEC. SEO has no special handling for .news, although Google News inclusion has its own publisher-verification process that operates independently of TLD. Email deliverability is on parity with major gTLDs. The most common audit finding on .news properties is structured-data quality — many publishers under-utilize NewsArticle and JSON-LD markup, which materially impacts visibility in Google News and Top Stories carousels.