Companies Using QuoVadis

I run the crawler that reads DNS for every domain we visit. A domain counts here when a TXT record contains QuoVadis, in practice QuoVadis= followed by a GUID. Our October 2026 crawl puts that at 7,065 domains, 5,748 matched to a company, 4th in SSL/TLS Certificates. On 15 October 2026 I re-read the DNS of all 7,027 domains in our clean set and opened a TLS connection to a random 1,000.

What the record proves

DigiCert's knowledge base describes the method: QuoVadis supplies a random value of the form QuoVadis= plus a GUID, to publish as a TXT record at the domain or at _dnsauth, valid for 30 days. Under the Baseline Requirements a validation can now be reused for at most 200 days. 6,976 of the 7,027 domains still carried the record and 1,337 had two or more. Four records still use an older format, quovadis-domain-vetting=, with a 2018 date appended.

QuoVadis is also a film, a TV storyline and the name of several unrelated firms, so I checked what the rule matches. Two domains matched for unrelated reasons, a company called quovadis.pro and a German youth centre named Quo Vadis; five more held QuoVadis-related notes rather than codes. That's 7 of 7,027.

Sales signal: a QuoVadis= record marks an organisation that passed a European CA's validation, usually for OV or EV certificates.

How much of it is current

987 of the 1,000 sampled domains answered. 70 (7.09%) served a certificate from the QuoVadis-named intermediate, DigiCert QuoVadis 2G3 TLS RSA4096 SHA384 2023 CA1. 226 (22.9%) served one from any DigiCert CA, including DigiCert's EU intermediate (49), its global G2 CA (36), GeoTrust (28) and EV (21). Let's Encrypt served 432 (43.77%), Google 101, Sectigo 74 and D-Trust 59. A random 50 gave 7 QuoVadis-named certificates.

"QuoVadis survives mostly in DNS. On live certificates, its customers now carry DigiCert's name or have moved to free certificates." - David Thomson, CTO at TechnologyChecker.io

Sales signal: treat these domains as DigiCert's installed base. The 432 on Let's Encrypt have already left it.

The cooperative banks

About 960 QuoVadis domains belong to German Volksbanken and Raiffeisenbanken, found by domain name, LinkedIn match or overlap with D-Trust's cooperative bank list. They are where the QuoVadis name still lives: 62 of the 70 QuoVadis-named certificates in the sample were on bank sites, each issued in the bank's own name. The remaining 53 bank domains that answered served D-Trust. Outside the banks, the QuoVadis intermediate appeared on 8 of 871 answering domains.

Sales signal: the banks buy as a group, so a competing CA faces one tender covering about 960 domains.

Universities, cities and car makers

The rest is institutional. 497 .ac.uk domains carry the record, Cambridge, Imperial, King's College London and Leeds among them, plus 102 .gov.uk domains and 57 Australian .edu.au domains. The Netherlands contributes 1,318 .nl domains, from municipalities to accounting firms, and Switzerland 833 .ch domains. Car makers are portfolios: 82 domains start with audi, most of them Audi country and importer sites from audi.com and audi.de to audi-dubai.com, and 79 carry mercedes or daimler in the name. On the live check, half of the answering .ac.uk domains (30 of 61) and 94 of 130 .ch domains served Let's Encrypt.

"UK universities validated with QuoVadis in large numbers. Today half of their sampled homepages run free certificates." - David Thomson, CTO at TechnologyChecker.io

Sales signal: university and municipal buyers follow sector frameworks. Find the framework before you call the IT department.

Who and where

Germany has 1,526 matched companies, the Netherlands 1,269, the UK 1,074 and Switzerland 811. Banking (14.89%), Financial Services (10.29%) and Accounting (5.49%) lead the industries, and 33.51% of matched companies were founded before 1960. Among the 50 largest, 17 homepages served a DigiCert certificate, including Audi, Deutsche Bank, EDF, Lloyds Banking Group, KBC, Telstra and UWV; none served the QuoVadis-named intermediate.

Sales signal: the large accounts are DigiCert's to lose. Their renewals run through CertCentral, and that's where a competitor has to show up.

No switching to report

We publish no migration table. 133 domains dropped the record since 16 March 2026, 3 of which still carry it on another hostname. Records overlap instead: 414 QuoVadis domains also carry SwissSign records, 188 GlobalSign, and 134 carry an IdenTrust record.

Sales signal: dual records point to buyers who have run CA tenders. Expect them to compare again at renewal.

Who runs it now

QuoVadis's about page says it was founded in 1999, operated in Switzerland, the Netherlands, the UK, Germany, Belgium and Bermuda, and was acquired by DigiCert in 2019. DigiCert's QuoVadis page says it still runs QuoVadis as an EU and Swiss trust service provider, a qualified provider in the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland. QuoVadis publishes no TLS prices; orders go through CertCentral and local sales teams. The certificates show the transition: besides the 2023 QuoVadis intermediate, 5 sampled domains still served certificates from DigiCert QV TLS ICA G1, an older QuoVadis-branded CA, while 49 came from DigiCert G2 TLS EU, a DigiCert-named intermediate issued by DigiCert Ireland. For a QuoVadis customer renewing today, the certificate is likely to carry DigiCert's name rather than QuoVadis's.

Sales signal: QuoVadis still sells qualified certificates (QWACs) and e-signatures under its own name; plain TLS renewals mostly arrive as DigiCert certificates.

Key takeaways

1. 7,065 domains validated with QuoVadis; 7.09% of a random sample serve the QuoVadis-named intermediate and 22.9% any DigiCert CA.

2. Let's Encrypt serves 43.77% of the same sample.

3. About 960 domains are German cooperative banks, 62 of the 70 live QuoVadis certificates.

4. 497 UK university domains carry the record.

5. 86.2% of matched companies are in four countries.

How to use this list

Separate the banks and universities from the rest, then check which issuer each domain serves today. Our certificate authority market share report covers the issuance side. The full list of 7,065 domains, with 5,748 matched companies, is on TechnologyChecker.io.