.org TLD audit hub
The non-commercial signal — historically used by nonprofits, foundations, and OSS projects.
The .org TLD was delegated in 1985 alongside .com and .net, intended for non-commercial entities, and is administered today by Public Interest Registry. The use restriction has been formally non-binding since the early 2000s — anyone can register an .org — but the cultural signal has stuck. Standards bodies (w3.org, ietf.org), open-source foundations (apache.org, mozilla.org), the Wikimedia Foundation, and a long tail of nonprofits, religious organizations, schools, advocacy groups and reference projects still use it as the canonical default. There was a 2019 controversy when Internet Society announced an attempted sale of PIR to a private equity firm Ethos Capital; that sale was blocked by ICANN in 2020 amid heavy community pushback, and pricing has stayed broadly aligned with the legacy gTLD norm since. From a technical standpoint .org has DNSSEC enforced at the registry level and resolution latency comparable to .com. Email reputation on .org is sometimes mildly elevated for charitable senders, though that effect is small and dominated by domain age and authentication. We score .org identically to .com but flag in our SEO audit when commercial sites adopt it solely for the trust halo, since visitor expectation can mismatch.