Look up A, AAAA, MX, TXT and NS records for a domain.
A DNS lookup asks the internet's address book what a domain name points to. Every time you load a website, send an email or connect an app to an API, your device runs the same query in the background — this tool just shows you the answer directly, for any domain, without waiting for a cache to expire.
Enter a domain above to see its A, AAAA, MX, TXT and NS records side by side. The sections below explain what each record type does and how to use them to diagnose a problem.
A domain's DNS zone holds several kinds of record, each answering a different question. These are the five this tool queries, and what they are normally used for:
If a record type comes back empty, that is usually normal rather than broken. Plenty of domains have no AAAA record because the owner hasn't enabled IPv6, and a domain that doesn't receive email has no reason to publish MX records.
Two results are worth paying attention to. NXDOMAIN means the domain itself does not exist in DNS at all — check for a typo, or an expired registration. SERVFAIL means a name server was reached but could not give a valid answer, which often points at a broken DNSSEC signature or a misconfigured zone rather than anything wrong on your side.
Remember that you are seeing the answer from our resolver's point of view. DNS is cached at every layer between a domain's authoritative servers and your laptop, so a change made minutes ago may be visible here and not yet at home, or the other way round.
Every DNS record carries a TTL — time to live — which tells resolvers how many seconds they may keep using a cached copy before asking again. If a record had a TTL of 3600 when you changed it, resolvers that had already cached the old value can legitimately keep serving it for another hour.
The practical trick is to lower the TTL before a planned migration, not after. Drop it to 300 seconds a day ahead of the change, make the change, confirm it, then raise the TTL back up. Lowering the TTL after you have already made the change does nothing for anyone holding the old cached answer.
A DNS lookup is a query that translates a human-readable domain name into the technical records behind it — most importantly the IP address a browser should connect to. It is the step that happens before any web page can load.
That normally means the domain is not set up to receive email. Many domains are used only for a website, and publishing MX records for them would serve no purpose. It is only a problem if you expect mail to arrive at that domain.
An A record points a name directly at an IP address. A CNAME points a name at another name, and the resolver then has to look that one up too. A CNAME is convenient when the target IP changes often, but it cannot be used at the root of a domain in standard DNS.
It depends on the TTL that was set on the old record, not on any global schedule. Once the TTL has elapsed, resolvers fetch the new value. Common TTLs range from five minutes to 24 hours, so a change can be visible almost immediately in one place and take a day somewhere else.
Because each tool queries from its own resolver, in its own location, with its own cache. Some domains also return different answers depending on where the query comes from, which is how geographic load balancing works. Differences are expected, not a sign of a fault.