Alcohol & Tobacco Filtering

How Alcohol & Tobacco Domains Are Detected

This category covers online retailers, brand and marketing sites, and promotional content for alcohol, tobacco, cigars, and vaping products. Because these are legal but age-restricted goods, the goal is accurate classification for policy enforcement rather than prohibition — the same category that a K-12 network blocks entirely may be left open on a corporate guest network.

Commerce detection identifies age-gated retail: age-verification prompts, cart flows for age-restricted goods, product schemas for spirits, beer, wine, cigarettes, cigars, and vape hardware, and the shipping-restriction language specific to the trade. Brand and marketing sites are recognized from their promotional structure even when they do not sell directly.

Reputation and infrastructure layers add context: alcohol and vape retailers cluster on specialized payment and compliance providers, and continuous re-scanning keeps pace with the fast-moving vaping market, where brands and storefronts appear and disappear quickly. Legitimate discussion — news, health education, addiction resources — is scored separately from commerce and promotion.

Deployment Options

DNS-based filtering offers the broadest coverage with minimal setup: point resolvers at the API or load the RPZ feed to protect every device, capturing requests from all applications rather than browsers alone.

Web-proxy integration through ICAP or ECAP adds inline inspection for HTTPS traffic under SSL inspection, catching age-restricted commerce on shared platforms whose parent domain is not itself classified.

Developers building parental controls, campus filtering, or wellness tools can use the real-time API for sub-10ms lookups, with batch endpoints for pre-loading classification data.

• DNS RPZ feeds updated every 15 minutes
• ICAP/ECAP support for web proxy integration
• REST API with sub-10ms response times
• SDKs for Python, Node.js, Go, Java, and C#

// Check alcohol, tobacco, and vaping content classification
curl -X GET "https://api.webfilteringdb.com/v1/lookup" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -d '{"domain": "example-domain.com"}'

// Response
{
  "domain": "example-domain.com",
  "categories": ["alcohol_tobacco"],
  "subcategory": "age_restricted_sales",
  "confidence": 0.98,
  "action": "block"
}

# BIND RPZ configuration for alcohol, tobacco, and vaping content blocking
zone "rpz.webfilteringdb.com" {
    type slave;
    masters { 198.51.100.1; };
    file "rpz-alcohol_tobacco.db";
};

# Response policy zone applied to all queries
options {
    response-policy {
        zone "rpz.webfilteringdb.com"
            policy nxdomain;
    };
};