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A small publisher has one domain doing every job, so the jobs get confused. The moment they differ (a rebrand, a holding company, a network selling someone else’s sites) the difference decides whether your storefront can go live. Only publisher domains are inventory. Your brand domain is never a product’s coverage.

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Registered domain

Set on the account (see Accounts and organizations). It’s verified when it matches an admin’s verified email domain, or when Semicola staff approve it; otherwise it stays pending.

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Brand domain

The brand domain is your buyer-facing identity, so it isn’t taken on assertion. Set it from the Listing page or with set_storefront_operator_domain. Semicola reads the domain’s brand.json for your name and logo. Until it verifies, the Brand domain readiness check (operator_domain) stays partial.

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It matches your registered domain

Once the registered domain is verified, a brand domain equal to it verifies automatically. If it’s still pending, chase the registered domain, not the brand domain.

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It differs

A rebrand, an alias or a holding company. Two things must hold, in order:
  1. Your registered domain is verified. Nothing gets around this.
  2. Published evidence links the two domains. Either domain’s brand.json lists the other in authorized_operators, or both resolve to the same house brand.
A website redirect isn’t ownership proof. Pointing old.com at new.com verifies nothing; the evidence has to be published in brand.json.

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Changing it

  • Setting a new brand domain re-runs verification from scratch.
  • Re-saving the same domain changes nothing, so a profile update can’t un-verify you.
  • Lookups fail closed: if the brand.json lookup fails, the result is “not verified”. Re-save the domain to retry.
Each change is recorded in the storefront’s activity.

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When it stays pending

  1. Is the registered domain verified? Nothing else can succeed first.
  2. Does the brand domain match it? If so, step 1 is the blocker.
  3. If it differs, is the linking evidence published in brand.json?

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Publisher domains

update_business_profile sets publisherDomains (up to 128) along with the rest of your business profile. The Publisher domains readiness check needs a publisher domain on the storefront, and Publisher authorization checks it against the brand registry. When your catalog lists a publisher domain that isn’t yours, Product publisher domains turns partial and names it.

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Public listing domain

Separate from all of the above: the hostname where your public listing is served.
  1. Publish the listing on the marketplace (publish_discovery with visibility: "marketplace").
  2. Save the hostname with save_discovery_hostname (hostname, like listing.example.com; replace an existing one with confirmReplace, or pass null to remove it). It returns the one CNAME record to add at your registrar.
  3. Verify with activate_discovery_hostname. It reads the routing proof the hostname serves at /.well-known/semicola-discovery-registration. Verifying never publishes.
  4. Make it public with publish_discovery and visibility: "public".
This needs the Distribution package on your plan. A scheduled re-check reads every active listing domain’s proof again; after a failure, serving continues until the last pass expires, then public serving stops until you re-verify. Unlisting from the marketplace stops it at once.

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Not available yet

  • Brand-hierarchy evidence from an external registry: linking evidence is brand.json only.
  • Staff review of pending linking evidence, and asking Semi to file that review for you.
  • adagents.json authorization per publisher domain: Publisher authorization checks the brand registry, not each domain’s adagents.json.