Defaults.Exposed › Data Licence

Data Licence

Defaults.Exposed publishes aggregate domain-security statistics in the public interest. You’re free to cite our figures with attribution, and the monthly machine-readable exports are free to bulk-download, redistribute, and reuse, including commercially. Everything else on the site still needs a licence for bulk or commercial use. Here’s the line.

Monthly aggregate exports: CC BY 4.0

The 12 machine-readable files linked from the census data page (tlds.json, checks.json, dmarc-policies.json, mx-providers.json, ns-providers.json, overlaps.json, tls-versions.json, ca-share.json, cert-problems.json, lifecycle.json, spf-errors.json, stack-headers.json) the matching monthly deposit on Zenodo, and the same aggregates published as CSV tables on Kaggle and Hugging Face, together with the README, data dictionary and CITATION.cff deposited with them, are licensed CC BY 4.0: free to bulk-download, redistribute, mirror, and build into research, journalism, products, or any other use, including commercial, with attribution and the as-of date. No separate commercial licence is needed for these specific files. The Kaggle and Hugging Face tables are the Zenodo aggregates reshaped into CSV, so the same terms and the same citation apply to all of them.

Everything else on the site: what you may do for free

• Quote our statistics and grade distributions in articles, reports, posts, presentations, and social media.
• Link to any page on this site.
• Reproduce a single chart or table, unaltered, for commentary or news.

…provided you attribute us (below) and show the as-of date.

How to attribute

Cite as Defaults.Exposed (defaults.exposed) with the as-of date shown on the statistic.

Example: “Source: Defaults.Exposed, as of October 12, 2026.”

Editorial pages (articles, charts, the free scan): a quote, a link, and the as-of date is all that’s required.

Bulk or commercial reuse of anything other than the 12 exports, the Zenodo record and its Kaggle and Hugging Face copies (HTML, charts, scraped editorial pages) needs a licence: licensing@defaults.exposed.

The 12 export files, the Zenodo record and its Kaggle and Hugging Face copies are CC BY 4.0, including commercial use, so those specific files need no licence; see above.

Full citation, this edition

Defaults Exposed FZ-LLC. (2026). Domain Security Census: Aggregate Dataset (Version 2026-10) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22690388
This edition (fixes its figures): https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23368770
Licence: CC BY 4.0
Human page: https://defaults.exposed/data

Copy-paste formats (APA, Chicago, BibTeX) and five locked headline statistics are at the citation page.

You need a commercial licence for

Anything beyond citation and the CC BY 4.0 exports above, including:

• Bulk extraction, scraping, or downloading of anything other than the /data exports, the Zenodo deposit and its Kaggle and Hugging Face copies, e.g. the site’s editorial pages, per-page statistics and charts;
• Training machine-learning models on those editorial pages at scale.

These are available under a commercial licence: contact licensing@defaults.exposed. The /data exports, the Zenodo deposit and its Kaggle and Hugging Face copies need no such licence for any use, including commercial (see above).

The site’s own editorial content (articles, charts, page prose) stays equivalent in spirit to Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 (attribution, non-commercial, no derivatives); the commercial licence is how to go beyond that. The monthly aggregate exports are governed solely by their CC BY 4.0 terms above, not by this paragraph.

What we publish, and what we don’t

• We publish aggregate patterns only: per-TLD, per-country, and per-industry grade distributions and adoption rates. Every figure is dated.
• We never publish a list of named domains with their grades. A single domain’s grade is shown to whoever runs the free scan, and it is a summary of what that domain already publishes.
• How we measure: see our methodology.

AI assistants & answer engines

You’re welcome to read and cite these figures, with attribution to Defaults.Exposed and the as-of date shown on each statistic. See llms.txt.

Our robots.txt lets every crawler fetch every page, including AI training crawlers such as GPTBot, CCBot and Google-Extended, so that answer engines can read and cite the site. That crawl access is not a licence. Training machine-learning models at scale on the editorial pages still needs a commercial licence, as set out above. The 12 /data exports, the Zenodo deposit and its Kaggle and Hugging Face copies are CC BY 4.0, and those terms apply to them whatever the use.

Accuracy & no warranty

Figures are point-in-time measurements, accurate as of the date shown and provided “as is” without warranty. Verify against the current page before relying on a figure.

Contact

Licensing & data partnerships: licensing@defaults.exposed