Technical
DNS Lookup
See the records a resolver returns for a domain
Enter a domain and get the records one resolver returns for it right now: A and AAAA addresses, MX hosts with priorities, NS delegation, TXT entries including SPF and DMARC, CNAME targets, and the TTL on each answer.
Get early accessWhat it returns
- A and AAAA records with the addresses returned, MX records with their priorities, and the nameservers the zone is delegated to.
- TXT records in full, with SPF, DMARC and provider verification strings pulled out of the list instead of left as one wall of raw text.
- CNAME targets followed one step at a time, so a chain of aliases is visible rather than collapsed into a single final address.
- The TTL on every answer and which resolver answered, because both of those decide how much the result can be trusted and for how long.
When this matters
You repoint a domain at a new host, the site comes up for you within minutes, and a colleague two countries away still sees the old server the next morning. Nothing is wrong and nothing needs fixing: their resolver is still inside the TTL of the record it cached before the change, and a TTL somebody set to a day years ago is now the length of the outage. Checking the records from outside your own machine, and against the authoritative nameservers, is how you tell a propagation delay apart from an edit that never saved.
How to answer this today
Site audit meets this from the other side. It resolves and fetches your site to crawl it, so the symptoms a DNS mistake causes (a host that does not resolve, a www version answering differently from the bare domain, a subdomain nothing can reach) land in the crawl with the full rule set applied to whatever is behind them. What it will not show you is the records themselves, which is the one thing a lookup is for.
Site auditWhy this is harder than it looks
One resolver, one moment
Recursive resolvers cache independently, so two of them can hold different answers for the same name at the same time and neither is lying. A single lookup is one resolver's view at one instant. Treating it as the state of the internet is how a change gets rolled back while it was working.
Propagation is caching, not distribution
A changed record does not travel anywhere. Old answers expire, at a rate fixed by the TTL that was in place before the edit, which is why a change can be live for you and invisible elsewhere for hours. Querying the authoritative nameservers and comparing that against a cached answer is the only way to see which you are looking at.
Aliases hide the real answer
A CNAME pointing at another CNAME pointing at a provider's hostname is completely normal and makes a flat list of addresses misleading. Following the chain record by record shows where control actually sits, which is usually a different company than the one the domain belongs to.
Rate limits
Lookups are small and trivial to loop, which is exactly why they get abused: an unmetered query service becomes somebody's reconnaissance tool and a way to push traffic at authoritative nameservers on another domain's behalf. A per-visitor limit keeps this a lookup.