No threats detected
All checks passed. This site appears legitimate — but always stay alert for phishing even on trusted domains.
Is thenextweb.com legit or a scam?
Established 17.9-year-old tech news site with clean scans, active Netherlands business registration, and zero scam reports.
Analysis Summary
Website Preview
Automated page render — captured in a safe sandbox. What an ordinary visitor would see when loading the site.
Visual analysis
We capture a fresh screenshot of the live page and ask a vision model to look for scam visual patterns — fake trust badges, countdown timers, overlay pop-ups, and visual clones of legitimate brands.
Visual red flags detected in the screenshot
The page appears to be a legitimate technology news website (The Next Web) with standard UI elements and a typical cookie consent banner.
What our vision model saw
5 signalsStandard cookie consent modal overlaying content
Professional news layout with high-quality editorial photography
Navigation menu contains legitimate tech industry categories
No urgency tactics or fake trust badges visible
Consistent branding for 'TNW' (The Next Web) across the header and modal
Brand Impersonation
medium confidenceThe page mentions or styles itself as OpenAI / ChatGPT, but is hosted on a domain that is not an official OpenAI / ChatGPT property.
Intelligence
The domain has been registered since August 2008 and belongs to a company founded in Amsterdam in 2006. Our antivirus network returned zero detections and the hosting IP shows no abuse history. The page displays standard news content with professional layout and no urgency tactics or fake trust signals. Business registration records confirm active status in the Netherlands with ownership changes documented through 2025. Independent review sites rate the site at 100/100 trust with no malware or phishing flags. The single brand-impersonation note appears to be a false positive triggered by article content about OpenAI rather than any actual impersonation attempt.
Web Research Findings
Our live research agent queries scam-report databases, consumer-review sites, news coverage, and general web search for thenextweb.com, then cross-checks business-registration records and look-alike domain patterns. Everything below is pulled from what it actually found.
- Domain registered August 2008, age 17.9 years; long-established tech news and conference site (thenextweb.com).
- Company founded 2006 in Amsterdam, Netherlands; headquarters Singel 542, Amsterdam; Wikipedia lists owner as Tekpon post-2025 acquisition.
- Financial Times acquired majority stake March 2019; Tekpon acquired 100% of TNW media and events brands December 2025 from FT.
- No scam reports, fraud complaints, or negative Trustpilot/ScamAdviser entries found specifically for thenextweb.com (Trustpilot page exists with limited reviews).
- Site publishes articles on AI, scams, fraud (e.g., OpenAI coverage, global scam economy); no impersonation of OpenAI/ChatGPT detected.
- Reddit mentions are neutral or promotional; isolated older complaints about conference practices (2017 gender/pay transparency) but no ongoing scam activity.
- Gridinsoft rates 100/100 trust with no malware/phishing detections.
- Trustpilotopen
"The Next Web is a company, a website and an annual series of conferences focused on technology and business based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands."
- Gridinsoftopen
"Thenextweb.com has 100/100 trust . No major malware or phishing threats were detected, blacklist detections at the time of review."
Established 2006 in Amsterdam by Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten and Patrick de Laive; acquired by Financial Times (majority stake 2019), then Tekpon acquired 100% of media/events brands Dec 2025; Wikipedia and multiple sources confirm active status.
Our research found no scam reports or consumer complaints for thenextweb.com. Two positive entries were located: a an independent review aggregator review describing the company as a legitimate Amsterdam-based tech media and events business, and a Gridinsoft scan rating the domain 100/100 trust with no malware or phishing detections. Business registration records confirm the company was founded in 2006 and remains active after ownership changes through 2025. No negative entries appear on major review platforms.
Domain Timeline
- Aug 2, 2008Domain registered
First appeared in WHOIS records — 18 years old today.
- Jul 10, 2026Latest security review — Reviewed as safe
This scan re-ran every check and found no active threat signals.
thenextweb.com has operated for years with no threat signals in this review — a long, stable track record, though it is never a guarantee on its own.
Threat Detection
Antivirus Engines
Security Scans
Checked against the major public blocklists used by browsers and security tools — no hits.
Reputation Sources
How this domain rates across independent threat-intelligence and blocklist providers.
Technical Details
domain · encryption · redirects · server reputation · referencedContact Verification
We fetched the page and looked for real-world contact details. Legitimate businesses almost always publish an email on their own domain, a phone number, and a postal address. Scam shops usually don't.
- No contact email found anywhere on the page.
- No phone number listed on the page.
- Page impersonates OpenAI / ChatGPT on a non-official domain.
- Postal address visible on the page.
- Links to 14 social profiles.
Domain & Encryption
Redirect Chain
- 1301http://thenextweb.com/
- 2200https://thenextweb.com/
Server Reputation
Referenced Domains
Outbound domains this page links to or loads resources from. Each links to its own security scan.
What to do
Still, stay alert
No major threat indicators — but a clean scan does not guarantee every page is safe, and phishing emails routinely spoof real domains.
- Double-check the exact URL in your address bar
Confirm you are actually on thenextweb.com and not a lookalike like t-henextweb.com.com or an IDN homoglyph.
- Use a password manager
Password managers only auto-fill on the exact domain they were saved for — they refuse to fill lookalike domains, which is the single best phishing defence.
- OpenDiscuss this site on the forum
If you have first-hand experience with this site — good or bad — share it with the MalwareTips community.
Final Verdict
thenextweb.com is the established website of The Next Web, a legitimate technology news and events company founded in 2006. The domain is 17.9 years old with clean scans across our malware engines and no scam reports found. No payment details or personal information should be entered on any site without verifying the URL first.
Safety FAQ
Common questions about this site, answered directly from the scan data above — so the answers always reflect the latest verdict on this page.
- Our automated security review found no threat indicators on thenextweb.com. The site appears legitimate based on the signals we checked, but always stay alert for phishing emails that spoof real domains.
- thenextweb.com passed our automated security checks with a trust score of 93/100. No antivirus engines or major blacklists flagged the site at the time of the last scan.
- Yes. thenextweb.com presents a valid TLSv1.3 certificate issued by Let's Encrypt · YE2, expiring in 51 days. Note that SSL only encrypts the connection — it does not guarantee that the site itself is trustworthy.
- thenextweb.com is 17.9 years old, registered on 8/2/2008 through NameCheap, Inc.. Scam domains are often freshly registered — a site under 6 months old warrants extra caution.
- No. All 92 antivirus engines in our malware network report thenextweb.com as clean.
- No. thenextweb.com is not currently listed on the major browser blocklist feeds that modern browsers use.
- thenextweb.com resolves to an IP operated by Cloudflare, Inc. in US (usage type: Content Delivery Network). Hosting location alone doesn't make a site good or bad, but unusual geography for a brand's claimed country is one of many signals we weigh.
- Yes. thenextweb.com sits in the global top-100k on Cloudflare Radar, which means it has substantial real-world traffic. That does not automatically make it safe, but established brands almost always rank here and throwaway scam domains almost never do.
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