2.1 Targets

Reputations are computed for websites, or targets, which are identified primarily by their DNS names. If a DNS name is not available for a target, an IPv4 or IPv6 address may be used instead. WOT also supports Internationalized Domain Names (IDN), which must be encoded to an ASCII representation as described in RFC 3490. For example:

ääkkönen.fi = xn--kknen-fraa0m.fi

2.2 Reputations

Reputations are measured for targets in several components. For each {target, component} pair, the system computes two values: a reputation estimate and the confidence in the reputation. Together, these indicate the amount of trust in the target in the given component.

Components

Reputation components are identified by numbers. These are the current components and their definitions:

Note: components 1 and 2 are deprecated. The API will continue returning data for these components to preserve compatibility, but the components should not be used in new applications. Those interested in the type of information that was included in the deprecated components are encouraged to look into categories below.

Reputation and confidence values

The reputation r ∊ {0, ..., 100} is the estimate of the collective trust for the target in the given component. The higher the value, the more the community trusts the website. These are the definitions for the reputation values:

WOT uses this visual representation to indicate reputations:

confidence

The confidence c ∊ {0, ..., 100} indicates the estimated reliability of the reputation r for the {target, component} pair. Again, the higher the value, the more reliable the system considers the reputation estimate.

You should use the confidence value to determine whether an action based on a poor reputation is warranted. For example, the WOT add-on requires a confidence value of ≥ 10 before it presents a warning about a website. Using a higher confidence threshold will result in fewer false positives, but also means your application will catch fewer poorly rated sites. You are encouraged to experiment with different confidence thresholds to see which suits your application the best.

Categories

In addition to reputations, the rating system also computes categories for websites based on votes from users and third parties. Category data aims to explain the reason behind a poor reputation, and you can use the information to more specifically determine what type of action to take when coming across a poorly rated site. The current categories are as follows:

The following categories provide additional information about child safety:

For each category, the reputation system also computes a confidence value c ∊ {0, ..., 100}, similarly to reputations. The higher the value, the more reliable the category assignment can be considered. If you use categories to determine the severity of a poor reputation, you may want to use a lower confidence threshold for the category data.

2.3 Third-party blacklists

If a website is included in a third-party blacklist and it's possible that this blacklisting affects its reputation, the API will return information about the type of blacklist the site was found in, and when the site was last added there. Here are the current blacklist types:

Note that if a site appears on multiple third-party blacklists of the same type, the latest time it was added to either one of them will be returned.

Requests (updated May 2020)

The API consists of a number of interfaces, all of which are called using normal HTTP GET requests to scorecard.api.mywot.com and return a response in JSON format if successful. HTTP status codes are used for returning error information and parameters are passed using standard URL conventions. The request format is as follows:

https://scorecard.api.mywot.com/v3/targets?t=target1&t=target2&t=target3

TLS encryption can be used with all interfaces if requests are made from a secure web page to the reputation API, for example.