A studio can disappear. Its domain can live forever.

A website footer can preserve history for a very long time.

A studio builds a site in 2014. Its name appears at the bottom of the page. Years later, our crawler finds that signature and follows the link.

But the studio is gone.

The company closed. The team merged into another business. The domain expired or was sold.

The footer is still telling the truth about who made the website.

The domain it points to is telling an entirely different story.

We found roughly eighty cases like this while reviewing the No Man Site register.

That discovery has changed how we maintain it.

The evidence can be right and the destination wrong

This is a peculiar problem because neither side is necessarily incorrect.

Suppose a website still says that it was built by Studio X.

That attribution may be completely genuine.

But Studio X may have stopped trading years ago. Its old domain may now contain advertising, gambling content, an essay service or an unrelated business.

Names including postlight.com, aneventapart.com, smashingideas.com, wildfish.com and gbh.london appeared during this review among domains whose present use no longer matched the studio identity represented by older web signatures.

The historical relationship did not suddenly become false.

What changed was the meaning of the domain.

That matters to us because No Man Site is trying to describe both the work studios have done and the organisations that exist behind those names.

Those are related questions, but they are not the same question.

So the register now checks for time

We have added a recurring review designed specifically for this problem.

On the 27th of every month, the system looks for cases where what we know about a studio no longer appears to match what exists on its domain today.

It happens four days before the monthly ranking snapshot.

The system does not automatically delete anything it finds.

That is important.

Studios redesign their websites. They pivot. They change language. They work in gambling, pharmaceuticals, finance or other industries that can look suspicious out of context. A homepage can temporarily redirect. A legitimate company can use words associated with spam without being spam.

So the automated part has one job: find the disagreement.

The decision comes afterwards.

History stays history

We also made a deliberate choice not to rewrite old rankings.

If a studio genuinely occupied a position in the September ranking, that September snapshot remains unchanged even if the studio closes in October.

Snapshots are not recalculated.

This gives the register two different kinds of truth.

There is the current state: what exists now.

And there is the historical state: what the web looked like when a particular snapshot was taken.

Over time, that distinction becomes increasingly important.

A studio can close.

A team can be acquired.

A brand can disappear.

A domain can be sold.

But the websites that studio made may remain online for another decade, still carrying its name.

No Man Site should be able to remember that history without pretending the organisation still exists in the same form today.

The web does not clean up after itself

This is one of the reasons building a long-lived register is harder than building a directory.

The web is full of traces.

Old footers remain. Links survive. Companies vanish. Domains change hands. Names are reused. Pages disappear while copies of their work remain everywhere else.

A crawler can find those traces.

It cannot assume that every trace describes the present.

The monthly domain review is our way of beginning to separate the two.

We still keep the old evidence.

We are simply getting better at knowing whether it describes then or now.