DNS is the internet's directory, and the entries in it are called records. Each record type answers a different question about your domain — where its website lives, where its email goes, who's allowed to send mail as it, and more. This guide walks through the record types every domain owner eventually runs into, in plain English.

A — the address record

An A record maps a hostname to an IPv4 address, like 203.0.113.10. It's the most fundamental record: when someone visits your website, DNS uses the A record to find the server's IP. A domain's root (apex) and subdomains like www each have their own A record.

AAAA — the IPv6 address record

An AAAA record does the same job as an A record, but for IPv6 addresses. As IPv6 adoption grows, more hosts publish AAAA records so IPv6-only clients can reach them. A domain can have both A and AAAA records side by side.

CNAME — the alias

A CNAME (Canonical Name) record points one hostname at another hostname rather than an IP. It's how www.example.com can be made an alias of example.com, or how a domain points at a hosting platform's address. Two rules trip people up: you can't put a CNAME at the domain's apex, and a name with a CNAME can't carry any other record type alongside it.

MX — the mail exchanger

An MX record names the servers that receive email for your domain, each with a priority number (lower is tried first). If you use a hosted email provider, your MX records point at their servers. Without MX records, a domain can't reliably receive mail. We cover this in depth in MX records explained.

TXT — the text record

TXT records hold free-form text and are the workhorse of email authentication and domain verification. Your SPF policy, DMARC policy, DKIM keys, and the verification tokens services like Google and Microsoft ask you to add all live in TXT records. A domain often has several.

NS — the nameserver record

NS records name the authoritative DNS servers for your domain — the servers that hold all the other records. They're set both at your registrar (in the parent zone) and inside your own zone, and the two should match. Changing your NS records is how you move DNS hosting from one provider to another.

SOA — the start of authority

The SOA record holds administrative metadata for the zone: the primary nameserver, the responsible party's contact, a serial number that increments on every change, and timers that govern how secondary servers sync. Every zone has exactly one SOA record.

CAA — the certificate authority authorization

A CAA record declares which certificate authorities are allowed to issue SSL/TLS certificates for your domain. It's a guard against mis-issuance: if you only use one CA, a CAA record saying so stops any other from issuing a certificate for you.

Look up any record type

The DNS lookup lets you query any single record type or fetch them all at once, with plain-English explanations. To go deeper on the email-related records, see MX records, SPF, and DKIM.