Look up any record. See whether it has propagated.

Record types

• A / AAAA: the IPv4 and IPv6 addresses a name points to. Each address links to a reverse lookup.
• MX: the servers that receive mail for the domain, in priority order (lower first).
• NS: the name servers that hold the zone. If these are wrong, nothing else matters.
• TXT: free text, used for SPF, DMARC, DKIM, domain verification (Google, Microsoft, Apple) and more.
• CNAME: an alias to another name. A name with a CNAME cannot have other records.
• SOA: the zone's start of authority: primary server, contact, serial number and timers. The serial changes on every edit, which makes it a quick way to see whether a change has landed.
• CAA: which certificate authorities may issue certificates for the domain.
• SRV: service locations, used by Microsoft 365 for Teams federation and by other services, in the form _service._proto.domain.
• PTR: reverse lookup, mapping an IP address back to a name. Mail servers without a matching PTR are often rejected.

Propagation

DNS does not push changes anywhere. When you edit a record, only your authoritative name servers know about it; every other resolver on the internet keeps serving its cached copy until that copy's TTL runs out. "Propagation" is just caches expiring, which is why a change can be visible from one network and not another.

Tick the propagation box and the tool finds the zone's NS records, then queries each of those servers directly and compares their answers. If the authoritative servers agree with each other but public resolvers still show the old value, you are waiting on TTL. If the authoritative servers disagree with each other, the change has not replicated between them, or the domain's NS records point at a server that no longer hosts the zone, which is a common leftover after moving providers.

Common questions