White-label your hosted social experience

Set a brand-owned domain for the hosted social experience in your Business Account, for production and QA, and learn what changes once it goes live.

White-labelling moves your hosted social experience from its default Genuin address, such as yourbrand.begenuin.com, to a hostname on your own domain, such as community.yourbrand.com. Genuin no longer appears in the URL, so visitors meet the experience as part of your website or app rather than a separate tool.

You add one CNAME record at your DNS provider and enter the hostname in your Business Account. Genuin validates the record, issues the TLS certificate, and switches your links to the new domain.

A white-labelled domain makes the hosted social experience part of your O&O. Visitors stay on your domain, with your branding and navigation, and the data from their visits stays with you. Sponsorships, memberships, and commerce run there without sending anyone off your brand. For where this fits in Onsite, see Onsite: what it does and where to start.

Add your domain in your Business Account

Before you start, point your hostname at your default domain with a CNAME record. For the record's values and the steps at common DNS providers, see Point your domain to your hosted social experience.

Use a subdomain of your domain, such as community.yourbrand.com. Enter it with lowercase letters, digits, hyphens, and dots, and a top-level domain of 2 to 6 letters, without https://, a path, or a trailing slash.

Note

Getting Started steps unlock in order, and each finished step is marked as done. Publish Brand Community opens once you finish the Launch Community Media Network steps, and the white-label step comes after Brand Community.

Step 1: White-label setup lives in the Getting Started onboarding checklist.

In the checklist, expand Publish Brand Community and click White label Settings. The page opens on Set up white label domain, with a short DNS guide, Steps to White-Label Your Subdomain.

Step 2: White label Settings opens with a short guide to the CNAME record.

Under For Production Environment, note the Current Domain. It's the default domain your CNAME record points to.
Enter your hostname in White Label URL and click Save.

Step 4: Enter the hostname under For Production Environment and click Save.

(Optional) Under For QA Environment, enter a second hostname in White Label URL and click Save.
Click Continue to move to the next onboarding step, or Skip for now to come back later.

Business Account confirms the save, notifies the brand's admins, and marks the onboarding step complete.

Note

Make sure the CNAME record resolves before you rely on the new domain. A wrong or missing record delays the switch and leaves the hostname unreachable; fix the record at your DNS provider and wait for the next validation.

Wait for validation

Genuin checks the CNAME record every 4 hours. Once the record resolves to your default domain, Genuin enables the domain. The TLS certificate for your hostname is issued automatically the first time a browser requests it.

For example, if you save community.yourbrand.com and the record already resolves, the domain goes live within 4 hours. Open https://community.yourbrand.com: it redirects to /home, and the padlock shows a certificate for your hostname.

If the hostname still shows an error 24 hours after your record resolved, send the hostname to support@begenuin.com.

White-label the QA environment

Your hosted social experience has a QA copy at <subdomain>.test.begenuin.com, shown as Current Domain under For QA Environment. To white-label it too, point a second hostname, such as community-test.yourbrand.com, at the QA domain and save it under For QA Environment.

The production and QA hostnames must differ. If you use both environments, map both before you go live.

What changes once the domain is live

Share links for communities, videos, and profiles use your hostname: /community/<handle>, /video/<id>, and /profile/<nickname>. Links shared before the switch keep working, because the default domain redirects them to your hostname.
Emails that Genuin sends for the brand, including invitations, link to your hostname.
Sign-in works on your hostname, because Genuin adds it to the allowed origins for authentication. To sign members in with your own identity provider, see Set up single sign-on with your identity provider.
Search and link previews use your hostname in the sitemap and in og:url. Submit the new domain's sitemap to the search engines; a sitemap submitted for the default domain doesn't carry over. Learn more in Optimize your social experience for search and LLM discovery.
Embeds and SDKs don't change. They identify your brand by API key, not by hostname. Learn more in Embed your social experience on your website.
The default domain redirects every page to the same page on your hostname, so promote only the white-label hostname.

Fix common errors

Symptom	Cause	Fix
Invalid URL format when you save	The value has a scheme, a path, uppercase letters, or a top-level domain longer than 6 letters	Enter the bare hostname, such as community.yourbrand.com
The save fails because the URL already exists	Another brand registered the same hostname	Pick a different hostname, or contact support if the hostname is yours
The hostname shows an error more than 4 hours after the record resolved	Validation hasn't run yet, or the record's target differs from your default domain	Compare the target with Current Domain character by character, then wait for the next check
The browser warns about the certificate	The certificate is issued on the first request after Genuin enables the domain	Reload after a minute; if the warning persists, contact support

Configure what comes next

After white-labelling, most teams move on to:

Onsite feed placements. Learn more in Build a placement with styles, sections, and variables.
Monetization settings. Learn more in Activate monetization and see your first revenue.
Outbound communications, the next item under Publish Brand Community in the checklist.
A final check before launch. Learn more in Launch your first community.

Limitations

Subdomains only. An apex domain such as yourbrand.com can't carry a CNAME record. Genuin configures one by request through support@begenuin.com.
One production hostname and one QA hostname. Business Account has no edit or delete control for a saved hostname; to change one, contact support.
Validation runs every 4 hours, so a correct record can take up to 4 hours to go live after you save.
One live hostname. Once the white-label hostname is live, the default domain redirects to it. To switch back, contact support@begenuin.com.
No self-serve robots.txt or sitemap settings for the new domain. Requests go through support.