Inspect a URL without visiting it

Tool Last tested 24 October 2026

Paste an absolute URL into this inspector to separate its fields without requesting the destination. It uses the browser’s URL parser¹ and a bundled Public Suffix List; it cannot tell whether a site is safe.

Read the result from the hostname outward

The hostname is shown in two forms: the ASCII representation returned by the URL parser and a Unicode display decoded from punycode labels. The public-suffix boundary separates the suffix from the registrable-domain portion and any subdomains. Both the ICANN and private sections of the bundled list are used², so a hosted-service suffix can differ from a country or generic top-level suffix.

The port is shown separately. When the parser removes an explicit scheme-default port, the output says so rather than pretending to recover the original spelling. The path, raw query and fragment remain separate fields. Repeated query parameter names retain their order³; decoded values sit beside the raw query so that the two representations are not confused.

Start with an address you are entitled to inspect. The tool does not need a real secret to demonstrate its behavior: the demo accepts reserved example addresses. Keep confidential information out of screenshots or messages you create from its output.

What a structural flag means

User information draws attention to text before the destination hostname. An IP-address flag means there is no domain boundary for the suffix list to identify. The mixed-script check works within each hostname label and ignores Common and Inherited characters, including digits and hyphens. A Latin top-level label does not make a Cyrillic label mixed: пример.com and пример.рф have no mixed-script flag; аpple.com does because its first letter is Cyrillic and the rest are Latin. The separate lookalike warning uses a deliberately small character map. Neither check is comprehensive spoof detection.⁴

Percent-encoding and an unusual port are displayed as structural details. They do not establish the purpose of a page. A correctly parsed URL may still describe an unexpected destination, and an ordinary-looking hostname does not reveal the contents behind it.

The list is pinned to its documented snapshot. If no explicit rule matches, the output identifies the default rule.⁵ If the hostname is itself a public suffix, the tool reports no registrable-domain portion instead of inventing one. It does not check whether that name is registered.

Privacy boundaries

The component holds input in page memory and renders it as text. It has no submission form, remote lookup, destination link, preview, automatic clipboard operation or storage function. A restrictive content-security policy also blocks connection attempts in the standalone component. Clear removes the current fields and returns focus to the input.

The published browser observation record records strings inspected without visiting them. The earlier sixteen-case run remains separately available with the measurement files. Its zero-request result covers the component’s Resource Timing action window, excluding initial loading. That is a page-resource observation, not a packet capture or a guarantee about browser extensions, clipboard managers or every process on a computer.

Reuse and maintenance

The original tool code is MIT licensed. The bundled Public Suffix List retains its Mozilla Public License notice; its provenance and method identify the snapshot and transformation. Updating the list changes data, so boundary cases should be rerun after each update.

For the smaller teaching example, use Read the actual hostname. For differences among server-side parsing APIs, use the parser matrix. Those pages answer different questions from this browser tool.

Not covered on this page

• Reputation, malware, redirects or page contents.
• DNS, ownership or registration availability.
• Comprehensive Unicode spoof detection.