Which domain is which

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Overview

Three different domains describe a seller, and they are routinely confused with each other because a small publisher has one domain doing all three jobs. The moment they differ — a rebrand, a holding company, a network selling someone else’s sites — the distinction decides whether your storefront can go live. Only the third is inventory. Your operator domain is never a product’s coverage.

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A worked example

Raptive operates a network and sells CafeMedia’s sites:

• Registered domain raptive.com — the account was created by someone with a @raptive.com email.
• Operator domain raptive.com — Raptive is who the buyer is dealing with.
• Publisher domains cafemedia.com, wholesomeyum.com, … — the sites whose inventory is for sale, each with its own adagents.json.

Here the registered and operator domains happen to match. That is the easy case and it verifies automatically. The rest of this page is about when they do not.

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Why the operator domain has to be verified

Your operator domain is your buyer-facing identity: it is where we read your logo and company description, and it is what a buyer sees they are transacting with. So we do not take it on assertion. An unverified operator domain blocks go-live — it appears as the operator_domain readiness check and stays a blocker until it resolves. Verification has two shapes depending on whether the operator domain matches the domain your account is registered under.

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It matches your registered domain

Your registered domain must be approved — either a member of the account has a matching email address proving ownership, or Scope3 attests it. Once approved, an operator domain equal to it verifies automatically. If it stays pending here, the account domain has not been approved yet. That is the thing to chase, not the operator domain.

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It differs — a rebrand, an alias, or a holding company

This is the case that generates support tickets. A seller registers as spanglishmovies.com and sells as latinxctv.com; a company owns both loopme.ai and loopme.com. Both are legitimate, and neither verifies on assertion. Two conditions must hold, in order:

1. Your registered account domain is approved (as above). Alias evidence is never a way around this — an unapproved account cannot verify any operator domain.
2. Published evidence links the two domains to the same organization or ownership chain. We look for either:
   • AAO brand hierarchy — both domains resolve into a shared ownership chain in the registry, or
   • brand.json — one domain’s manifest names the other. An authorized_operators entry carrying the other domain counts, as does a manifest that otherwise links to it.

If the evidence does not exist, publishing or correcting it is the fix, and it is yours to make: we read what you publish. If the evidence does exist and the check is still pending, it is waiting on Scope3 review — either it was not accepted or it was not detected automatically.

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Changing your operator domain

Rebrands happen, and so do accounts registered under the wrong domain. Setting a new operator domain re-runs verification against it from scratch, so expect the readiness check to return to pending until the new domain resolves. Two properties worth knowing:

• Re-saving the same operator domain does not re-run anything. An operator domain already verified — including one a Scope3 admin attested manually — keeps its verification when you update other parts of your business profile. A profile update cannot silently un-verify you.
• Evidence lookups fail closed. If the registry or brand.json lookup times out, the result is “not verified”, never “verified”. A pending check after a change may simply mean the lookup has not completed against fresh evidence yet — re-save the domain to retry.

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When it stays pending

Work down this list; each step is a different owner.

1. Is your account’s registered domain approved? Nothing else can succeed first. Needs a member email matching the domain, or Scope3 attestation.
2. Does your operator domain match the registered domain? If yes and it is still pending, the blocker is step 1.
3. If it differs, is the linking evidence published? Check that the AAO registry resolves both domains into one ownership chain, or that one domain’s brand.json names the other. Redirects do not count.
4. Evidence published and still pending? It is with Scope3 for review. Your agent can file that for you — ask it to, rather than waiting.

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