How to Find the Publisher of a Website – 5 Easy Methods (With Images)

Finding a website’s publisher or author could be quite challenging if you are new to the internet. Many website publishers do not prefer to reveal their identity for some reasons. So, here I am presenting you five unique ways to find the publisher of a website.

Note: This article is not to be confused with – How to find the publisher of an article.

1. Whois Record Method

There are millions of websites getting registered on a daily basis from a variety of domain and hosting providers. A website’s registration process involves providing your personal details like your name, address, phone number, etc. And as soon as the website is registered, all these details are stored in the DNS (Domain Name Server) records.

Several tools are available to access the DNS records of a website, and one of them is the whois tool. Here is a step by step process of how to find the publisher of a website with the help of whois tool.

Step-1: Open a website having whois record checker option.

In this case, we use this who.is tool.

Step-2: In the search bar, type the URL of the website and hit enter

who.is

Step-3: After hitting enter, you will be able to see the website’s complete record, which includes:-

Website’s IP Address
Registrar data – This is where you will find the publisher’s information like name, contact number, address, etc.
Name server records
Hosting provider of the website
Date of Registration & Expiry

whois data

If you are lucky enough, you will find the publisher’s information in the Registrar Data of the who.is record. Otherwise, it probably means that the publisher is using a privacy protection guard. This guard does not allow the DNS Records information to reveal publicly.

In this case, you might want to abandon this option and look for the next one.

2. Contact Us Page

The easiest way to find a website’s author information is the contact us page of a site.

Here’s the example of a contact us page

However, a majority of publishers prefer not to reveal their contact information. In this case, you are left with a contact box to fill your information and wait for the publisher or the owner to contact you back.

Alternatively, if the website has a Terms & Conditions page, there are chances the website publisher’s information is hidden somewhere inside there.

3. Backlink Method To Find a Website Publisher

This is by far the most untapped and smartest way to find a website’s publisher. And if done right, there is a 95% chance of finding the complete publisher information. Not to mention, this method could seem a bit tough to those who are not introduced to SEO yet.

What is a backlink?

A backlink is an incoming link that a website receives from any other site in the form of a hyperlink. For example, This is a backlink to Wikipedia
So now, if you check the Backlink Records of Wikipedia, you will find this domain listed over there.

So here’s the step by step tutorial to look for the publisher of a website using the backlink method:-

To check the backlinks of a site, you will need access to an SEO tool that allows you to check a website’s backlinks. In this case, I am going to show you how to check a site’s backlink via the ahrefs tool.

Step-1: Create a trial account in ahrefs. After you create the account successfully, you are presented with a dashboard to audit multiple websites.

ahrefs dashboard