Which domain is which

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Overview

Three different domains describe a seller, and they are routinely confused with each other because a small publisher has one domain doing all three jobs. The moment they differ — a rebrand, a holding company, a network selling someone else’s sites — the distinction decides whether your storefront can go live. Only the third is inventory. Your brand domain is never a product’s coverage. An organization also claims the domain it operates as. Its buyer accounts use that claim as their operator domain, each with its own operating-unit code. See Your organization’s domain.

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A worked example

Raptive operates a network and sells CafeMedia’s sites:

• Registered domain raptive.com — the account was created by someone with a @raptive.com email.
• Brand domain raptive.com — Raptive is who the buyer is dealing with.
• Publisher domains cafemedia.com, wholesomeyum.com, … — the sites whose inventory is for sale, each with its own adagents.json.

Here the registered and brand domains happen to match. That is the easy case and it verifies automatically. The rest of this page is about when they do not.

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Why the brand domain has to be verified

Your brand domain is your buyer-facing identity: it is where we read your logo and company description, and it is what a buyer sees they are transacting with. So we do not take it on assertion. An unverified brand domain blocks go-live — it appears as the operator_domain readiness check and stays a blocker until it resolves. Verification has two shapes depending on whether the brand domain matches the domain your account is registered under.

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It matches your registered domain

Your registered domain must be approved. There are three ways to get there, and an account admin, or an admin of the organization that manages the account, can use any of them for buyer, seller and organization accounts alike:

1. An email on the domain. An active member of the account has an email address at the registered domain. This needs no action beyond signing in with that address.
2. A DNS TXT record. In your account’s domain settings, choose Verify with a DNS record. Apostra shows a record name and a record value. Add that TXT record at your DNS provider, then choose Check now. Apostra reads the record directly from DNS, with no third party and no sign-in.
3. A manual review. Choose Request manual review and say why you can’t use the first two, for example because you are an agency working on a client’s behalf. An Apostra admin reviews it and, if it holds up, attests the domain.

Once the registered domain is approved, a brand domain equal to it verifies automatically, and the storefront’s readiness updates right away. There is no sync to wait for.

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The DNS record

The record is a TXT record at a dedicated host under your registered domain, so it does not add to the TXT records at the domain’s apex: The token is random and belongs to one account and one registered domain. If you change the account’s registered domain, Apostra issues a new token for the new domain; the old record does not verify it. Some DNS providers add the domain for you, so enter the name as _apostra-domain-verification if yours does. DNS changes can take a few minutes to appear. Until Apostra can see the exact value, the check answers that it is still pending, whether the record is missing, wrong, or the lookup did not complete. A check never approves a domain on a failed lookup. The same account can run a check once every few seconds. If the domain is already approved, for example by an email on the domain, there is nothing to verify. If it stays pending here, the account domain has not been approved yet. That is the thing to chase, not the brand domain.

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It differs — a rebrand, an alias, or a holding company

This is the case that generates support tickets. A seller registers as spanglishmovies.com and sells as latinxctv.com; a company owns both loopme.ai and loopme.com. Both are legitimate, and neither verifies on assertion. Two conditions must hold, in order:

1. Your registered account domain is approved (as above). Alias evidence is never a way around this — an unapproved account cannot verify any brand domain.
2. Published evidence links the two domains to the same organization or ownership chain. We look for either:
   • AAO brand hierarchy — both domains resolve into a shared ownership chain in the registry, or
   • brand.json — one domain’s manifest names the other. An authorized_operators entry carrying the other domain counts, as does a manifest that otherwise links to it.

A DNS record, an email address or a review for your registered domain does not prove a different brand domain. Only the published linkage does. If the evidence does not exist, publishing or correcting it is the fix, and it is yours to make: we read what you publish. If the evidence does exist and the check is still pending, it is waiting on Apostra review — either it was not accepted or it was not detected automatically.

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Changing your brand domain

Rebrands happen, and so do accounts registered under the wrong domain. Setting a new brand domain re-runs verification against it from scratch, so expect the readiness check to return to pending until the new domain resolves. Two properties worth knowing:

• Re-saving the same brand domain does not re-run anything. A brand domain already verified — including one an Apostra admin attested manually — keeps its verification when you update other parts of your business profile. A profile update cannot silently un-verify you.
• Evidence lookups fail closed. If the registry or brand.json lookup times out, the result is “not verified”, never “verified”. A pending check after a change may simply mean the lookup has not completed against fresh evidence yet — the check runs again each time the storefront is read, so open the storefront to retry.
• Withdrawing approval withdraws the verification. If the account domain stops being approved, a brand domain that was verified through that approval goes back to pending. A verification an Apostra admin attested directly stays.

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When it stays pending

Work down this list; each step is a different owner.

1. Is your account’s registered domain approved? Nothing else can succeed first. Needs a member email matching the domain, a DNS TXT record Apostra has checked, or Apostra attestation. The readiness check says which of these can work for you: if no active member of the organization has an email address on the registered domain, email cannot work, so use the DNS TXT record or Request manual review. This is common when a company’s people email from one domain and its brand lives on another.
2. Does your brand domain match the registered domain? If yes and it is still pending, the blocker is step 1.
3. If it differs, is the linking evidence published? Check that the AAO registry resolves both domains into one ownership chain, or that one domain’s brand.json names the other. Redirects do not count.
4. Evidence published and still pending? It is with Apostra for review. Your agent can file that for you — ask it to, rather than waiting.

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