The brand website must serve a certificate that verifies
The requirementstatement
The brand website must present a valid TLS chain — not expired, not self-signed, and issued for the hostname actually submitted.
- Severityseverity
- BlockingBLOCKINGBreaking this rule gets the submission rejected. There is no partial credit.
- When it bitesphase
- Gates approvalapprovalGet this wrong and the brand or campaign is refused at registration.
- What is checkedobject
- brand.website TLS chain
- Where it liveslayer
- WebsiteWEBSITE
- How Ekas settles itdetectability
- DeterministicDETERMINISTIC
- Settled in code from the values you submitted. No model involved, no judgement call, same answer every time.
- What the fix involvesfailureClass
- Fix the websiteTERMINAL_WEBSITE
- The fix lives on your site. No amount of rewording the form clears it.
- Who requires itauthorities
- BandwidthTCRTwilioPlivo
- When it appliesapplicabilityText
- Applies to every 10DLC registration.
Why this rule existsrationale
A vetting crawler stops at a certificate error and never reads a word of the site, so the rejection arrives as "the website could not be verified" rather than as anything about a certificate. Browsers hide this: the people who work at the business have been clicking through the warning for months, and a certificate valid for the bare domain but not for the www form fails only for whoever submitted the other one.
How to fix itremediation
Reissue the certificate for the exact hostname in brand.website, covering both the www and bare-domain forms, and renew before expiry. Done when an external SSL checker — not your own browser — reports a complete, valid chain for the URL you are about to submit.
Common mistakespitfalls
- A certificate valid for acmecoffee.com and not for www.acmecoffee.com fails whenever the submitted URL uses the other form. Submit the form the certificate actually covers.
- An expired intermediate is invisible in Chrome, which caches the issuer, and fatal to a strict crawler that does not. Test from outside your own network.
Provider rejection codescodes
The code you get back when this rule is what failed, and whether that provider lets you resubmit.
| Provider | Code | Resubmit |
|---|---|---|
| Bandwidth | 1103 | Yes |
| Bandwidth/DCA | 2103 | Yes |
Notesnotes
Absorbs BRD-128, which states the same certificate requirement from the brand-record side. Severity divergence in the catalog: website-evidence-012 and CARR-008 grade a TLS failure HIGH; Bandwidth, Plivo and Twilio grade it BLOCKING. Strictest kept.
Rules you will hit next
Other website rules at the same severity. A registration is judged as a whole, not rule by rule.
WEB-001A brand website URL is requiredBlockingBLOCKINGWEB-009The website must resolve and return contentBlockingBLOCKINGWEB-012A parked or for-sale domain is not a websiteBlockingBLOCKINGWEB-013A pre-launch placeholder is not a websiteBlockingBLOCKINGWEB-014Staging, admin and internal hosts must not be the brand websiteBlockingBLOCKINGWEB-016The website must be machine-crawlableBlockingBLOCKING
WEB-073 is one of 93 website rules in the 915-rule 10DLC registry. Free to cite under CC BY 4.0.