Free DNS Propagation Checker

Nothing actually propagates

The name is misleading and it causes most of the confusion around it. There is no push, no replication and no queue draining out across the internet. The moment you save a record, your authoritative nameservers serve the new answer to anyone who asks. Every one of them, immediately.

What you are waiting for is the opposite: resolvers that already asked, cached the answer, and will not ask again until that cached copy expires. DNS propagation is cache expiry with a misleading name, and that single reframing answers most of the questions people bring to a tool like this one.

It also tells you what the tool can and cannot show you. Six public resolvers agreeing means those six have the new answer. It says nothing about the specific corporate resolver your customer sits behind.

The TTL that governs your change is the old record's

This is the part that costs people a day. The TTL a resolver honours is the one attached to the answer it already cached, which is the value that was on the record before you edited it. Dropping the TTL to 300 at the same time you change the record does nothing for anyone who cached the old one.

The sequence that works:

1. Lower the TTL to 300 and change nothing else.
2. Wait one full old TTL period. If it was 3600, wait an hour.
3. Make the real change. It now clears in about five minutes.
4. Raise the TTL back to 3600 once you are happy.

The trap: negative caching

If you query a hostname before the record exists, you do not get nothing back. You get NXDOMAIN, and NXDOMAIN is cached too. Per RFC 2308 the lifetime of that cached negative answer is the minimum of the zone's SOA minimum field and the SOA record's own TTL, which is a value you did not choose and probably have never looked at.

That is why "I created the record ten minutes ago and this checker still says it does not exist" is so common, and why impatiently checking a hostname before you have configured it makes the wait longer rather than shorter. Look up the SOA for your zone to see what you are dealing with: on Cloudflare-hosted zones it is typically 1800 seconds, but plenty of providers ship 3600 or higher.

Practical rule: create the record first, then check.

Record changes are minutes. Nameserver changes are up to 48 hours.

The "DNS takes 24 to 48 hours" advice is not folklore, it is just about a different operation. Changing an A or CNAME record is bounded by that record's TTL, usually an hour or less. Changing your nameservers at the registrar is bounded by the parent zone's delegation TTL, which you do not control.

Measured against a .com TLD server:

example.com.  172800  IN  NS  hera.ns.cloudflare.com.

172800 seconds is exactly 48 hours. That number is where the advice comes from, and it applies only when you move nameservers. Quoting it to a customer who just edited a CNAME teaches them to wait two days for something that resolved in four minutes.

When resolvers disagree

Differences between the six resolvers here are cache state, not geography. All six run global anycast networks, so your query lands at whichever point of presence is closest and reads that node's cache. A split result means some nodes refreshed and others have not yet, which is normal mid-change and resolves on its own.

You cannot force a third-party resolver to drop an entry, though Cloudflare and Google both publish public cache-purge pages that work for a single name. Your own machine is a different matter: a local DNS flush clears the OS and browser caches that are often the real reason you still see the old site while everyone else has moved on.

If a hostname is resolving consistently and the site still does not load, the problem has moved up a layer. The custom domain debugging runbook walks the DNS, HTTP routing and certificate layers in order.

Domainee is a custom domains API for SaaS with a native MCP server, 50 domains and 100 GB free. It watches DNS for every customer hostname and fires a webhook the moment the right record appears, which is the production version of refreshing this page.

From the command line

Keyless, no signup:

curl -s "https://api.domainee.dev/v1/tools/dns-propagation-checker?host=example.com&type=A" | jq

type accepts A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, TXT and NS, and defaults to A. The response includes a consistent boolean plus per-resolver answers. Rate limits are per IP and there is no uptime commitment, so it fits scripts and audits rather than a production dependency.