Infrastructure

· 9 checks — DNS, redirects, IPv6, crawlability, URL variants, and domain intelligence rolled into one auditable list.

SCORE

GRADE

FIX

REVIEW

PASS

INFO

Probed from New York, United Stated

301 Moved Permanently

Checks

5 PASS 2 REVIEW 2 FIX

URL Variants

Action

www/non-www, trailing slash, HTTP→HTTPS

FIX

www/non-www, trailing slash, HTTP→HTTPS

Both www and non-www versions serve content

Got: Both variants return 200 Expected: One variant 301-redirects to the other

HTTP version does not redirect to HTTPS

Got: HTTP 301 Expected: 301 redirect to HTTPS

www / non-www

200https://www.newscientist.com/

200https://newscientist.com/

Inconsistent — duplicate content risk

HTTP → HTTPS

301http://newscientist.com/ → http://www.newscientist.com/

HTTP version does not redirect to HTTPS

CDN & Delivery

Action

No CDN detected

FIX

No CDN detected

A CDN can significantly improve load times for users around the world by caching content at edge nodes closer to them.

No CDN detected

Consider using a CDN to improve global delivery speed and reduce origin load.

IPv6 Readiness

Action

No IPv6 support

REVIEW

No IPv6 support

No IPv6 (AAAA) records found

IPv6 support is increasingly important for global accessibility. About 40% of internet users have IPv6 connectivity.

No IPv6 Support

About 40% of internet users have IPv6. Consider adding AAAA records.

IPv6 support is increasingly important for global accessibility. About 40% of internet users have IPv6 connectivity.

Why this matters

No AAAA records — same impact as 'no IPv6 (AAAA) records'; IPv6-preferring clients pay extra latency falling back to IPv4.

Source: Google IPv6 stats

TLS Certificate Expiry & Recommendations

234 days until leaf cert expires — 5 issues to address

REVIEW

Certificate validity

234

days left

0d 30d 60d 90d+

Recommended actions

Prefer TLS 1.3 — TLS 1.2 is acceptable but TLS 1.3 removes RSA key exchange and improves latency
Add includeSubDomains to the HSTS directive
Add the preload directive and submit to hstspreload.org once max-age + includeSubDomains are in place
Enable DNSSEC on your domain for DNS spoofing protection
Enable OCSP stapling on your TLS server to remove a CA roundtrip and protect user privacy

DNS Records

1 A records, 493 ms lookup

PASS

1 A records, 493 ms lookup

Resolves to 1 IPv4 address(es)

Got: 199.232.26.217

Single A record — no DNS redundancy

Multiple A records provide failover if one server goes down.

No IPv6 (AAAA) records

2 nameserver(s) configured

Got: ns2.anlremote.com, ns1.associated.co.uk

1 mail exchanger(s) configured

CAA records not checked

CAA record lookup requires a specialized DNS resolver. This check will be available in a future update.

SPF record present in TXT

DNS resolution is slow (493 ms)

Slow DNS adds latency to every page load. Consider a faster DNS provider.

Got: 493 ms

A	199.232.26.217
AAAA	—
CNAME	—
NS	ns2.anlremote.com, ns1.associated.co.uk
MX	10 newscientist-com.mail.protection.outlook.com
TXT	google-site-verification=ypnbQuw23B-j_q4pAZ_1VWNxeXT_CnzP9VuvOpQAF2I stripe-verification=a4502261c4b923dc747897879b1524de6775f3da7b943b70f3b0c8fad116... sending_domain144091=a9ffbbe3a3d348f6e44472d1cc029866e2bfd9cce940c2b9484d4e961e6... yahoo-verification-key=gjArdWAt+jjxcyEm2jOTib+FMQ5ogqr48qpvotc8tjY= mt915ak5t83eui28aqhje13va0 figma-domain-verification=e82fb42a2e4b9a64bc017081a64e6b63ceaec2c6a8e1d93ff3ebcc... dropbox-domain-verification=1vucbqmm5vbp 0ed1fe018ab4dda0ff6d204839afd4ae391864b461 figma-domain-verification=5b7de1392eee2670c88aba6fa930640f885018dc7867c36dadb36e... google-site-verification=JtAA8XZVp8oeG8rs35HVo1pzD6tvLDeJV3aHNb6nCQQ airtable-verification=21f08445d3c56642dc465f311797c229 notion-domain-verification=kM6uRfjyrQZsgKNknURuuUSR6peXpbtqicEqv2fC8AX google-gws-recovery-domain-verification=68616798 google-site-verification=ui55QjTzfWso2clbVxMSL3bECD3HogYskijFhOg04NM SPF v=spf1 include:spf.protection.outlook.com include:aspmx.sailthru.com ip4:195.234... 3823htzztc3j3trnpyltbd429tr7fvsm _globalsign-domain-verification=jF53MoOdqWKEhpQ1I8xgw_ZPznHssTCL6Dx3YLlrL7 0ed1fe018ad4fb62247f3741af8597cef12be90353 _globalsign-domain-verification=klUJkI4MZw-0elRtIBbVGs7d-e1CPM16mbnrVrKORw _globalsign-domain-verification=Gg8ljFFzlje8eE-nSjWOBOBPfWfbwfAERCCdFnmCjd adobe-idp-site-verification=5b900fc919ad0f64ceeecd23484f7a358346a646570f970b3404... zUT8K/xUQp44jsCm1g25xe4aJ3Rq8B5MOFSwe/O7k08eQgvPRK2MDB6hK5Z9zHNcGW0EPkuMq2TUXQOD... google-site-verification=af4VnWe8c0B6-zshdHCD5vKNrH-EMXVxt_eX0C_8hW0 fastly-domain-delegation-scienceisgreat-88437-2018-08-01 b8b12fc8-c437-4842-af0f-73f86c025038 ahrefs-site-verification_7855c7d34098ee8080fff526a03fcc20b0b0123925e2a9d35fc75b6... _globalsign-domain-verification=tbSMDFlrpwhJjhDyfcpLbArvIgDLEbbsGhK8ad0MxB LCnzrCqMcLihvaRvLtuceCx37wKu8++XCE77tQlRszognh9+Siwt+Ny7cU02FeF64USKJ32MRldQXKWr... MS=ms69926792 ZOOM_verify_nbX9sSGbBQ7DVwOebak8Zv fastly-domain-delegation-hsodjjdee-459076-2022-01-14 atlassian-domain-verification=YVO51xB8CMklZCk2cV3OMCVY9wIEP2GoyyujEBzpfD3CD2vSK2... docusign=954c88c1-be23-46cd-857a-baf3e7a2c797
CAA	Lookup not available with standard resolver

Resolved in 493 ms

Multiple A records provide failover if one server goes down.

Why this matters

Single A record means a single point of failure — if that IP goes down, your site is unreachable until DNS TTL expires.

Learn more ▾

Add multiple A records for round-robin failover, or use a managed DNS provider with health-checked failover (Route 53, Cloudflare, NS1). Short TTL (60-300s) lets clients recover faster on outages.

Source: SRE practice / DNS architecture

CAA record lookup requires a specialized DNS resolver. This check will be available in a future update.

Why this matters

Informational: CAA (Certification Authority Authorization) records weren't checked in this scan.

Slow DNS adds latency to every page load. Consider a faster DNS provider.

Why this matters

DNS resolution is slow — anycast DNS providers (Cloudflare, Route 53) typically resolve <50ms globally.

Source: DNS performance benchmarks

Redirect Chain

1 redirect(s), 430 ms total

PASS

1 redirect(s), 430 ms total

Single redirect

Got: https://newscientist.com → https://www.newscientist.com/ (301)

WWW normalization redirect

https://newscientist.com

409 ms · HTTP/1.1

301

https://www.newscientist.com/

20 ms · HTTP/1.1 FINAL

#	URL	Status	Time	Protocol	Server
1	https://newscientist.com	301	409 ms	HTTP/1.1
2	https://www.newscientist.com/	200	20 ms	HTTP/1.1

See the visual redirect chain in the HTTP Probe tab →

A+

Crawlability

robots.txt present, sitemap with 1586 URLs

PASS

robots.txt present, sitemap with 1586 URLs

robots.txt is present

Got: 4625 bytes

sitemap.xml is present

sitemap.xml is valid XML

sitemap.xml contains 1586 entries

Sitemap index with 1586 child sitemaps

robots.txt references sitemap

robots.txt 200 OK

Size 4625 B Sitemaps referenced 2 User-agents GoogleOther-Video, omgili, PanguBot, Timpibot, VelenPublicWebCrawler, ArchiveBot, ecoresearch, Perplexity-User, ecoresearchCrawler, Nicecrawler, nlnbot, tkl.iis.u-tokyo.ac.jp, TurnitinBot, anthropic-ai, Diffbot, GPTBot, mediacloud, netEstate NE Crawler, nlncrawler, XY-Archive-Compliance-Archiver, *, archive-it.org, Claude-SearchBot, FacebookBot, FriendlyCrawler, Meta-ExternalFetcher, TikTokSpider, Authory, LivelapBot, AI2Bot, Grok, LinerBot, OAI-Operator, archive.org_bot, nl-israel_iaharvester2026, SafeDNS, Meta-ExternalAgent, netarkivet.dk, PageFreezer, GoogleOther, PetalBot, TaraGroup Intelligent Bot, webarchiv.cz, Applebot-Extended, bedrockbot, Bytespider, CloudflareBrowserRenderingCrawler, EchoboxBot, Gemini-Deep-Research, iaskspider/2.0, img2dataset, ChatGLM-Spider, ChatGPT-User, Google-Extended, Kangaroo Bot, KunatoCrawler, omgilibot, PerplexityBot, Arquivo-web-crawler, Amazonbot, amazon-kendra-, DeepSeekBot, Meltwater, QualifiedBot, Sidetrade indexer bot, YouBot, bnf.fr_bot, AhrefsBot, cohere-ai, GoogleOther-Image, ImagesiftBot, ISSCyberRiskCrawler, MistralAI-User, OAI-SearchBot, bl.uk_ldfc_renderbot, Ai2Bot-Dolma, ClaudeBot, Claude-User, Claude-Web, ICC-Crawler, Webzio-Extended, wpbot, bl.uk_ldfc_bot, WARDBot, babel, bne.es_bot, SmarshBot, XY-Archive-Compliance-Crawler, DuckAssistBot, Google-CloudVertexBot, Scrapy, Seekr, Europarchive.org, Kulturarw3, mirrorweb, nationalarchives.gov.uk, Cotoyogi, WRTNBot, kb.dk_bot, MSIECrawler, special_archiver, WordPress.com mShots, CCBot Blocking No — crawling allowed

# Robots.txt for https://www.newscientist.com/ updated 01/04/2026

# New Scientist content is made available for your personal and non-commercial

# use subject to our Terms and Conditions of use:

# https://www.newscientist.com/terms/

# Use of any device, tool, or process designed to data mine or scrape the content

# using automated means is prohibited without prior written permission from

# NEW SCIENTIST LIMITED.  Prohibited uses include but are not limited to:

# (1) text and data mining activities under Art. 4 of the EU Directive on Copyright in

# the Digital Single Market;

# (2) the development of any software, machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI),

# and/or large language models (LLMs);

# (3) creating or providing archived or cached data sets containing our content to others; and/or

# (4) any commercial purposes.

# For any licensing queries please contact partnerships@dmgmedia.co.uk.

#

#


User-agent: AhrefsBot

User-agent: AI2Bot

User-agent: Ai2Bot-Dolma

User-agent: Amazonbot

User-agent: amazon-kendra-

User-agent: anthropic-ai

User-agent: Applebot-Extended

User-agent: bedrockbot

User-agent: Bytespider

User-agent: CloudflareBrowserRenderingCrawler

User-agent: CCBot

User-agent: ChatGLM-Spider

User-agent: ChatGPT-User

User-agent: ClaudeBot

User-agent: Claude-SearchBot

User-agent: Claude-User

User-agent: Claude-Web

User-agent: cohere-ai

User-agent: Cotoyogi

User-agent: DeepSeekBot

User-agent: Diffbot

User-agent: DuckAssistBot

User-agent: EchoboxBot

User-agent: FacebookBot

User-agent: FriendlyCrawler

User-agent: Gemini-Deep-Research

User-agent: Google-CloudVertexBot

User-agent: Google-Extended

User-agent: GoogleOther

User-agent: GoogleOther-Image

User-agent: GoogleOther-Video

User-agent: GPTBot

User-agent: Grok

User-agent: iaskspider/2.0

User-agent: ICC-Crawler

User-agent: ImagesiftBot

User-agent: img2dataset

User-agent: ISSCyberRiskCrawler

User-agent: Kangaroo Bot

User-agent: KunatoCrawler

User-agent: LinerBot

User-agent: Meltwater

User-agent: Meta-ExternalAgent

User-agent: Meta-ExternalFetcher

User-agent: MistralAI-User

User-agent: OAI-Operator

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot

User-agent: omgili

User-agent: omgilibot

User-agent: PanguBot

User-agent: PerplexityBot

User-agent: Perplexity-User

User-agent: PetalBot

User-agent: QualifiedBot

User-agent: Scrapy

User-agent: Seekr

User-agent: Sidetrade indexer bot

User-agent: TaraGroup Intelligent Bot

User-agent: TikTokSpider

User-agent: Timpibot

User-agent: VelenPublicWebCrawler

User-agent: WARDBot

User-agent: Webzio-Extended

User-agent: wpbot

User-agent: WRTNBot

User-agent: YouBot

Disallow: /


User-agent: *

Disallow: /21632812681/

Disallow: /activate-subscription/

Disallow: /feed/

Disallow: /login/

Disallow: /logout/

Disallow: /lost-password/

Disallow: /my-account/

Disallow: /registration/

Disallow: /search/

Disallow: /upfront/

Disallow: /wp-admin/

Disallow: /api/

Disallow: /build/

Disallow: /nsj/jobsjson/

Disallow: /nsj/logon/

Disallow: /nsj/newalert/

Disallow: /nsj/analytics/

Disallow: /nsj/apply-profile/

Disallow: /nsj/document/

Disallow: /nsj/emailjob/

Disallow: /nsj/external-redirect-registration/

Disallow: /nsj/invalid-request/

Disallow: /nsj/jbequicksignup/

Disallow: /nsj/jobsrss/

Disallow: /nsj/previewjob/

Disallow: /nsj/searchjobs/

Disallow: /nsj/session-img/

Disallow: /nsj/your-jobs/

Disallow: /nsj/profile/

Disallow: /nsj/remindme/

Disallow: /nsj/searchjobs/

#


User-agent: archive-it.org

User-agent: archive.org_bot

User-agent: ArchiveBot

User-agent: Arquivo-web-crawler

User-agent: Authory

User-agent: babel

User-agent: bl.uk_ldfc_bot

User-agent: bl.uk_ldfc_renderbot

User-agent: bne.es_bot

User-agent: bnf.fr_bot

User-agent: ecoresearch

User-agent: ecoresearchCrawler

User-agent: Europarchive.org

User-agent: kb.dk_bot

User-agent: Kulturarw3

User-agent: LivelapBot

User-agent: mediacloud

User-agent: mirrorweb

User-agent: MSIECrawler

User-agent: nationalarchives.gov.uk

User-agent: netarkivet.dk

User-agent: netEstate NE Crawler

User-agent: Nicecrawler

User-agent: nl-israel_iaharvester2026

User-agent: nlnbot

User-agent: nlncrawler

User-agent: PageFreezer

User-agent: SafeDNS

User-agent: SmarshBot

User-agent: special_archiver

User-agent: tkl.iis.u-tokyo.ac.jp

User-agent: TurnitinBot

User-agent: webarchiv.cz

User-agent: WordPress.com mShots

User-agent: XY-Archive-Compliance-Archiver

User-agent: XY-Archive-Compliance-Crawler

Disallow: /


Sitemap: https://www.newscientist.com/sitemap.xml

Sitemap: https://www.newscientist.com/nsj/sitemapindex.xml

sitemap.xml 200 OK

Type Sitemap Index URLs 1586 entries Valid XML Yes

Child Sitemaps:

A+

Domain Intelligence

newscientist.com — via Nom-iq Ltd. dba COM LAUDE, 31 years, 2 months old, hosted on Fastly

PASS

newscientist.com — via Nom-iq Ltd. dba COM LAUDE, 31 years, 2 months old, hosted on Fastly

Domain registered until Jul 28, 2026 (3 months remaining)

DNSSEC is not enabled

DNSSEC protects against DNS spoofing attacks. While not required, enabling DNSSEC adds an additional layer of security. Contact your DNS provider to enable it.

Registrar: Nom-iq Ltd. dba COM LAUDE

Registrar lock is NOT enabled

The domain can be transferred without an unlock step. Enable registrar lock (clientTransferProhibited) in your registrar's control panel to protect against unauthorized or accidental transfers.

Hosting: Fastly

Got: AS54113

Domain expiry

16 days

July 28, 2026

SSL certificate

234 days

Issued by GlobalSign nv-sa

Domain age

31 years, 2 months

Registered July 29, 1995

DNSSEC

Not enabled

Protects against DNS spoofing

Hosting

Fastly

ASN AS54113

199.232.26.217

Registrar

Nom-iq Ltd. dba COM LAUDE

Unlocked 2 NS records

Expiry timeline

Today

+1 year

Domain expiry SSL expiry Danger zone (≤30 days)

Recommended actions

Renew the domain or enable auto-renewal to prevent accidental expiry
Enable DNSSEC to protect visitors from DNS spoofing
Enable registrar lock (clientTransferProhibited) to block unauthorized domain transfers

Registrar Nom-iq Ltd. dba COM LAUDE

Created July 29, 1995 (31 years, 2 months ago)

Expires July 28, 2026 (3 months)

Last Updated June 18, 2025

Name Servers ns1.associated.co.uk, ns2.anlremote.com

DNSSEC Not enabled

Hosting

IP Address 199.232.26.217

ASN AS54113 (FASTLY - Fastly, Inc., US)

Provider Fastly

Data source: rdap (0.1s)

DNSSEC protects against DNS spoofing attacks. While not required, enabling DNSSEC adds an additional layer of security. Contact your DNS provider to enable it.

Why this matters

Without DNSSEC, an attacker who can poison your DNS can hijack your domain — and SSL certs alone don't stop them.

Learn more ▾

DNSSEC adds cryptographic signatures to DNS records, preventing forged responses from poisoning resolver caches. Without it, an attacker who controls the network path can redirect your domain to a malicious server before any HTTPS handshake happens. Most modern registrars (Cloudflare, Google Domains, Route 53) enable it with one toggle.

Source: ICANN / RFC 4033

The domain can be transferred without an unlock step. Enable registrar lock (clientTransferProhibited) in your registrar's control panel to protect against unauthorized or accidental transfers.

Why this matters

Without registrar lock, an attacker who phishes your registrar credentials can transfer the domain in minutes — total brand hijack.

Learn more ▾

Registrar lock (clientTransferProhibited, clientUpdateProhibited, clientDeleteProhibited) requires extra verification before any transfer/update/delete. Every major registrar offers it free. Combined with 2FA on your registrar account, it's the strongest defense against domain hijacking.

Source: ICANN / domain-security best practice

HTTP Probe Timing

Total 406 ms — DNS, TCP, TLS, TTFB, content transfer breakdown

PASS

DNS Lookup

85 ms

TCP Connect

80 ms

TLS Handshake

161 ms

Time to First Byte

406 ms

Total Time

406 ms

Connection waterfall

DNS Lookup 85 ms TCP Connect 80 ms TLS Handshake 161 ms Server Processing 80 ms Content Transfer 0 ms

All checks on this page are automated. Results are estimates - run targeted manual reviews when the score affects a release decision.