A Record Lookup

Find the IPv4 address associated with any domain.

Perform A Lookup

What is a A record?

An A record (Address record) maps a hostname to an IPv4 address. It is the most fundamental and most widely-used DNS record type — every website, every API endpoint, and every mail server that needs to be reachable by IPv4 has at least one A record behind it. When a browser resolves example.com, the authoritative nameservers return the A record (something like 93.184.216.34), and the browser opens a TCP connection to that IP.

A records are stored at a specific hostname in the zone. The apex record (often called the "root" or "@" record) is set at the bare domain — example.com itself — and subdomain A records live at subdomain.example.com. Modern DNS providers let you set multiple A records at the same hostname for load-balancing: the resolver returns all of them, and the client picks one (usually the first returned, sometimes randomly or round-robin depending on the OS resolver).

TTL (time-to-live, in seconds) tells every caching resolver between you and the authoritative server how long to keep the answer before asking again. A short TTL (300 seconds, five minutes) makes changes propagate quickly but increases query load. A long TTL (86400 seconds, 24 hours) is efficient but means IP changes take up to a day to roll out globally. 300–3600 is a reasonable range for sites that change occasionally; 86400 is common for stable infrastructure hostnames.

Unlike CNAMEs, A records can coexist with any other record type at the same hostname — you can publish A, MX, TXT, and SRV records all at example.com without conflict.

How to read the results

The result panel shows each IPv4 address returned by the authoritative nameserver, alongside its TTL. A single A record is the common case for small sites. Multiple A records at the same hostname indicate load balancing or failover: the resolver returns all of them, and the client attempts connections in the order returned (or shuffles, depending on the resolver).

If the TTL is low (under 60 seconds), the site operator is likely running a blue/green deployment or fronting a geo-routed CDN. If the TTL is very high (86400+), the hostname points to stable infrastructure that rarely moves.

To compare the authoritative answer with what your local resolver sees, query a public resolver directly: dig @8.8.8.8 example.com A or dig @1.1.1.1 example.com A. If the answers differ, either your local resolver has a stale cache, or the domain uses geo-routed DNS (common for large CDNs — the answer depends on the resolver's location).

If no A records are returned, the hostname may only publish an AAAA (IPv6) record, or it may use a CNAME that redirects to another hostname where the A record lives.

Common issues

No A records returned but the site loads. The hostname likely uses a CNAME that delegates to another domain, or only publishes an AAAA record for IPv6-only reachability. Try the CNAME or AAAA lookup to see the full picture.
Old IP still returned after a DNS change. DNS caches persist for the record TTL. If you just changed the IP, wait out the TTL or flush your resolver cache (sudo dscacheutil -flushcache on macOS, ipconfig /flushdns on Windows, sudo systemd-resolve --flush-caches on Linux). Browsers also cache DNS independently — restart the browser if it still resolves to the old IP.
Different answers from different resolvers. Geo-routed DNS (used by Cloudflare, AWS Route 53 latency routing, Akamai) returns different IPs depending on where the query originates. This is expected behaviour for large CDNs — the "correct" answer depends on the resolver's location.
A record points to a private/RFC1918 IP. Private ranges (10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12, 192.168.0.0/16) are unroutable from the public internet. A public A record pointing into private space is almost always a misconfiguration — either the record was copied from internal DNS by mistake, or an internal-facing hostname was mis-promoted to the public zone.
A record present but the site times out. DNS is resolving correctly but something further down the stack is broken — the host firewall, the web server, the TLS cert, or a Cloudflare "origin unreachable" error. Test with curl -v https://example.com to see where the connection actually fails.

Other DNS Lookups

AAAA Find the IPv6 address associated with any domain. CNAME Find the canonical name (alias target) for any hostname. MX See which mail servers accept email for a domain. TXT See all TXT records — SPF, DKIM, DMARC, domain verification, and more. NS See which nameservers are authoritative for a domain. SOA Check the Start of Authority record — serial, refresh, retry, expiry. All DNS record types

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