how.is MCP

The check an operator runs before the money leaves. A domain is the one bill that never gets questioned: a new supplier, a payment portal, a recruiting agency, a reseller. Age, blocklist listings, certificate validity and email authentication answer in seconds what a phone call answers in a day.

Server type: Remote (Streamable HTTP)
Endpoint:    https://how.is/mcp
Transport:   JSON-RPC 2.0 over HTTP
Auth:        none to start, x402 v2 payment header or a Bearer key for paid calls
Tools:       17
Built by:    how.is (domain and website intelligence)
Registry:    not listed in the official MCP registry

Why This Matters for Operators

Two questions sit behind most small business losses: is this counterparty real, and will my mail reach the inbox.

The first is a domain question. A supplier registered eleven days ago, on a network with abuse listings, behind a certificate that does not validate, is a different risk than a company that has held the same domain since 2014. An assistant that can state the age, the listings and the certificate state turns a gut feel into a record.

The second is also a domain question. SPF, DKIM and DMARC decide whether a quote, an invoice or an outreach email lands in an inbox or in spam. Most operators find out after a campaign has already been sent.

What It Actually Does

The endpoint was driven in this sweep without an account. tools/list returned seventeen tools in 15.9 KB of schema, against protocol 2025-06-18.

Tool	What it returns	Price
domain_profile	Bundle: DNS, WHOIS, TLS, DNSSEC, email auth, security score, blocklists, plus IP intelligence for the A record	$0.025
domain_trust	Risk score 0-100, verdict (likely_safe, caution, high_risk, inconclusive), plain-English reasons	$0.020
domain_dns	A, AAAA, MX, NS, TXT records with resolve timing	$0.005
domain_whois	Registrar, creation and expiry dates, nameservers, status codes	$0.005
domain_age	Registration date, age in days and years, and a newly_registered flag for the last 30 days	$0.005
domain_available	Whether a name is free, with first-year and renewal price and the RDAP or DNS source	$0.005
domain_tls	Validity, issuer, protocol, cipher, days until expiry, self-signed flag	$0.005
domain_dnssec	Signed state, validation status, chain of trust, DS and DNSKEY records	$0.005
domain_email_auth	SPF, DKIM and DMARC records with an overall score and recommendations	$0.005
domain_security_score	Letter grade and point score with the scored items behind it	$0.005
domain_blacklist	Whether the addresses behind a domain appear on spam and abuse blocklists	$0.005
ip_lookup	ASN, company, geolocation, privacy flags, abuse contact	$0.005
site_status	Live HTTP status, latency, resolve time, resolved IP, TTL, nameservers, certificate days left	$0.005
site_screenshot	1280-wide JPEG of any public URL, viewport or full page capped at 6000 px	$0.020
page_watch	Whether a page changed since the last call, with a text diff at a 2 percent threshold	$0.005
bot_observatory	Every ASN, named crawler, JA4 TLS fingerprint and firewall rule seen in the last 7 days	$0.050
add_credit	Free. Returns a link the user opens to put card credit on the connection key	free

Two calls were executed with real arguments. Both answers carry a receipt.

domain_trust on example.com returned verdict: likely_safe, risk_score: 0, age_days: 11396, blocklist_listings: 0, https_valid: true and an empty not_checked list, with the method stated as Rule-based: domain age, blocklists, TLS. A heuristic, not a guarantee. The receipt reads rail: sample, charge_usd: 0.0.

domain_email_auth on the same domain returned ok: true with spf: {status: pass, record: "v=spf1 -all"}, a requestId, and a cache block showing a stale hit at ageSeconds: 23212, which is the honest shape of a cached answer rather than a fresh one dressed up as live.

The payment rail is x402, not a subscription

A call outside the free sample returns HTTP 402 with the full terms rather than a signup wall: rail: x402, x402Version: 2, scheme: exact, network: eip155:8453 (Base mainnet), asset: 0x833589fCD6eDb6E08f4c7C32D4f71b54bdA02913 (USDC), amount_atomic: 20000, payTo: 0xa76a0E93C5af3fd43521300B0a58eF5F70fC44F6, maxTimeoutSeconds: 300. Retry the same request with a PAYMENT-SIGNATURE header and it settles. A credit rail is offered alongside for clients that cannot sign, and add_credit produces a link that adds card credit from $5 without ever revealing the key.

What It Does Not Do

• No accounts are connected and nothing is read from your systems. Every answer is about a public domain or a public URL.
• domain_trust is a heuristic on three signals, and the server says so in the response. It is not a credit decision and not a guarantee.
• page_watch needs a first call to store a baseline before any change can be reported, so a fresh connection reports changed: false on day one.
• Email authentication is a record check. It reads the published policy; it does not test a sending reputation or a mailbox.
• Paid calls need a funding rail. Without one, only the sample inputs answer.

FAQ

Can an agent use it without paying?

Yes for the sample inputs, which are the documented examples such as example.com. Any other domain returns HTTP 402 with x402 terms, so an unfunded connection is a demo rather than a service.

What does the trust verdict actually measure?

Domain age, spam and abuse blocklist listings, and HTTPS certificate validity. The response lists the reasons behind the score and names any check that could not run under not_checked.

Is this a monitoring product?

Partly. page_watch diffs a page against its own stored baseline, site_status checks liveness, and bot_observatory returns the crawler and fingerprint activity seen across networks in the last seven days, refreshed hourly.

Where does the email authentication data come from?

The responses name the source. In this session domain_email_auth returned via dns.pizza, so the SPF, DKIM and DMARC posture is measured on the same infrastructure the vendor publishes publicly.

The Operator Test

Ask it about the domain on the last invoice you paid that felt wrong. If the answer is a registration date in the last month, a blocklist listing, or a certificate that does not validate, the tool paid for itself before the second question.

Pairs with dnstwist style watchlist work and with the SEO and site-health entries in this catalog, because AI crawler access and domain trust are read by the same people.

Integration with CorpusIQ

CorpusIQ is the connector layer that lets AI assistants read the systems a business already runs on - accounting, payments, CRM, email, files and analytics - and answer with the source named. It is read-only by design: it retrieves data and never writes to, or acts in, a connected system, which is what makes it safe to point at live accounts.

This page is part of the CorpusIQ directory, the reference we maintain for the MCP server and agent-skill ecosystem. Run alongside CorpusIQ, a third-party server like this one can be combined with a company's own business data in a single answer.

See what CorpusIQ connects