DNS Lookup - A, MX, TXT, NS & More

How the DNS Lookup Works

1. 01Enter a domain name; full URLs are accepted and reduced to their hostname automatically.
2. 02Pick a record type such as A, MX, or TXT, or use the query-all button to fetch all eight common types in parallel.
3. 03The query is sent over DNS-over-HTTPS to Google Public DNS and answers arrive as structured JSON.
4. 04Read the results table with name, TTL, and data per record; MX rows are sorted by priority and TXT strings are joined for readability.

Reading DNS Records Like an Administrator

Each record type answers a different question. A and AAAA records map a name to IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, and are the first thing to check when a site points at the wrong server. CNAME shows that a name is an alias for another name, common for www hosts and CDN endpoints; a name with a CNAME cannot carry most other records. MX records route email, and their priority numbers matter: mail is delivered to the lowest number first, with higher values as fallbacks. TXT records carry machine-readable policies, most importantly SPF, DKIM, and DMARC entries that decide whether the world trusts your outgoing email, plus site-verification strings for services like Search Console. NS shows which nameservers are authoritative, SOA exposes zone metadata including the serial number that increments on every change, and CAA whitelists which certificate authorities may issue TLS certificates for the domain. The TTL column is your propagation clock: resolvers cache each answer for that many seconds, so a change to a record with TTL 86400 can take a day to be seen everywhere. Before any migration, lower TTLs in advance, make the change, verify the new values here, and then restore longer TTLs for performance.

When to Use the DNS Lookup

Use it whenever DNS is the suspect: a freshly deployed site shows the old server, email bounces and you need to see MX and SPF records, a TLS certificate will not issue and CAA might be the reason, or a domain transfer requires confirming nameserver changes propagated. It is also the quickest way to verify TXT records after adding site-verification or DMARC entries, and to inspect any public domain's setup when debugging integrations. Since it runs over standard HTTPS, it works from corporate and public networks where classic DNS tools are blocked.

Common Use Cases

• ·Verifying that a deployed website's A and AAAA records point at the new server.
• ·Checking MX priorities and SPF, DKIM, and DMARC TXT records when email fails.
• ·Confirming nameserver changes after a domain transfer with an NS lookup.
• ·Auditing a domain's crawl setup together with its robots.txt rules. → Robots.txt Tester

Expert Tips

• ✻Lower TTLs a day before planned DNS changes so the switch propagates in minutes instead of hours.
• ✻Use the query-all button before and after a migration to capture a full snapshot you can compare.
• ✻If email deliverability drops, read the TXT records first: a malformed SPF entry silently fails many receivers.

Frequently Asked Questions