Questions worth asking before you spend
The answers below describe what OptimuSEO does and, where it matters more, what OptimuSEO declines to do. Anything the platform cannot establish is reported as unknown rather than guessed.
Buying
Does OptimuSEO buy domains on its own?
No. OptimuSEO research runs shortlist candidates and record why each passed or failed, but a purchase always needs a person to confirm the exact domain and a spend ceiling. Automation chooses what to consider, never what to charge.
Which registrars can complete a purchase?
NameSilo, because it registers against the account default contact. Namecheap and GoDaddy require a full registrant contact set on every order, so within the console they quote prices and set nameservers while stating plainly why they cannot complete a sale. You learn this before attempting a purchase rather than during one.
What happens when a registrar charge succeeds but setup fails?
OptimuSEO writes the order before the registrar is called, because a charge cannot be undone by a database rollback. If the Cloudflare zone or the portfolio entry fails afterwards, the order appears in the ledger marked bought-but-not-parked with the reason attached. Finish setup retries the zone, the nameservers and the portfolio entry — it does not buy anything again.
Can a mis-click buy an expensive domain?
The purchase dialog requires the exact domain typed back and carries a spend ceiling it refuses to exceed. Buying from a shortlist re-checks price and availability first, and the confirm button stays disabled until that returns — a price recorded by a research run days ago is not a safe basis for spending.
Measurement
Where do Domain Authority and Spam Score come from?
From the Moz Links API, which is the only source for them — no registrar, registry or DNS provider publishes these. Without it configured, those gates are reported as unknown rather than passed, and the candidate is marked unjudged.
Does a research run cost money every time?
No. Runs use registrar availability checks, which are free, and never spend metrics quota automatically. One broad run could otherwise consume a month's allowance on names nobody had looked at. You select the candidates worth measuring, and anything measured before is reused at no cost.
Can it find aged domains that are still available?
Yes, and this is the case worth understanding. A generated name that is registrable but carries authority from a previous life is a dropped domain. The gates judge it on the history it actually has rather than on where the name came from, so a genuine find is not discarded for being produced by a generator.
Why would a measured candidate still say "could not judge"?
Because another gate remains unmeasurable. A dropped domain holds no registration, so it has no age to read however good its authority — if a minimum age is set, that gate stays unknown. OptimuSEO names the blocking gate rather than leaving the verdict unexplained.
How is a shortlist different from a recommendation?
A shortlist is a set of candidates that passed the gates that could be evaluated, with the evidence attached. OptimuSEO does not rank them by predicted value, because it has no basis for that prediction. The score shown is how much of the rule set was checkable and passed — confidence in the decision, not a quality rating for the domain.
What stops research spending a month of quota in one run?
Runs never call the metrics provider. They read measurements already stored, which is free, and leave anything unmeasured as unknown. Spending is an explicit action on candidates you select, and OptimuSEO refuses a request larger than the remaining monthly budget before making it rather than discovering the limit from an error.
How does OptimuSEO handle a data source going down?
The affected figure is marked unavailable with the reason, and anything depending on it is marked unjudged. OptimuSEO does not fall back to a cached value without saying so, and never substitutes a zero — a zero is a measurement, and an outage is not.
Can two teams use different thresholds?
Yes. Gates belong to a rule set, not to the workspace, so OptimuSEO can run an aged-authority rule and a fresh-brand rule side by side. Where a rule sits below the agreed standard, the run report names the gap rather than accepting it silently.
Operations
Can I bring domains I already own?
Yes. Import pulls every zone from a connected Cloudflare account. It fills only the fields Cloudflare actually knows and leaves purchase cost and dates empty rather than inventing them — an imported domain shows "not recorded" until somebody records it.
Where are account passwords kept?
OptimuSEO encrypts social and registrar logins with AES-256-GCM and decryptable on demand, because they have to be pasted into other sites. Your own sign-in password is hashed and never recoverable. The two are different problems and are handled differently.
Does it run on a schedule?
Research runs on a daily schedule you control, and shortlists. It never buys on a schedule. Expiry and certificate checks refresh from the registry and the TLS handshake rather than from anything self-reported.
What does it not do?
It does not automate judgement. It cannot tell whether a name is worth real money to your business, whether a placement is worth its price, or whether a page is good. It makes sure that when you decide, you are looking at measured facts rather than plausible ones.
Still deciding?
The standards page lists every gate and the step it comes from, so you can judge the method before trusting the output.