DNS Propagation Checker

Changed a DNS record and waiting for it to take effect? This asks four independent public resolvers the same question at the same moment and shows you where they still disagree — with the TTL that tells you how much longer the old answer will stick around.

Queries run over DNS-over-HTTPS from your browser. Nothing is sent to our servers and nothing is stored.

Propagation is not what most people think it is

Nothing spreads. When you change a record, your authoritative nameserver has the new answer immediately — it is correct from the instant you hit save. What takes time is the old answer expiring out of every resolver that already cached it.

That is why the TTL is the only number that matters. A record with a TTL of 3600 means a resolver that fetched the old value will keep serving it for up to an hour, no matter how many times you check. There is no queue, no propagation wave moving across the map, and nothing you can do to hurry it along.

Lower the TTL before you make the change, not after. Drop it to 300 a day ahead, make your change, confirm it, then put the TTL back up. Lowering it afterwards does nothing — the resolvers already cached the old record along with its old, long TTL.

How to read the result

All four agree

The change has expired out of these four caches. It does not prove every resolver on earth has caught up, but these four are among the most widely used, and if they have all moved it is a strong signal.

They disagree

At least one resolver is still serving a cached copy of the old answer. Check the TTL column: the largest remaining value is roughly how long before that resolver refetches. Waiting is the only remedy.

They disagree, but on an A or AAAA record

Be careful here — this is where propagation checkers routinely mislead people. Large sites answer differently on purpose. A CDN returns whichever edge server is nearest to whoever asked, so Google in the United States and AliDNS in China will give different addresses forever, and neither is stale. If the domain sits behind Cloudflare, Fastly, Akamai or similar, differing A records are the system working rather than a change still rolling out. We flag this when we see it.

What this can’t tell you

It is four resolvers, not a world map. Only Google, Cloudflare, dns.sb and AliDNS serve DNS in JSON with the cross-origin headers a browser needs. Quad9, AdGuard, OpenDNS, Mullvad and the others either refuse cross-origin requests or do not answer in JSON at all, so no browser-based checker can reach them — including the ones showing you fifty flags on a map.
Nothing about your own ISP’s resolver, which is the one that actually decides what you see. If the four below agree and your machine still shows the old answer, your router or ISP resolver is holding the cache. Flushing locally will not clear theirs.
Nothing about the authoritative answer. These are recursive resolvers reporting what they have cached. To see what your nameservers are actually publishing right now, query them directly.
TTL is cache age, not configuration. The values below count down from whenever each resolver last fetched the record, so they differ from each other and from what you set. That is normal and is not a disagreement.

Common situations

What you see	What it usually means
All four match your new value	Done. Any remaining problem is local caching.
Some show the old value	Normal. Wait out the TTL shown against those resolvers.
All four show the old value	Either the TTL has not expired anywhere yet, or the change was not saved at the authoritative nameserver.
Different A records everywhere, forever	GeoDNS or a CDN. Not a propagation problem.
One resolver returns nothing	Usually a temporary failure. Re-run before concluding anything.

Related checks

Once the record has propagated, confirm it says what you meant it to say.

DNS Checker DMARC Checker WHOIS Lookup

Frequently asked questions

How long does DNS propagation take?

Up to the TTL that was on the old record, and no longer. If that was 3600, an hour. If it was 86400, a day. The commonly quoted “24 to 48 hours” comes from an era of long default TTLs and slow zone transfers; it is rarely true now unless your TTL really is that long.

Why does my computer still show the old address?

Three caches sit between you and the internet: your browser, your operating system, and your router or ISP resolver. All three have to expire independently. Flushing your OS cache does nothing about the other two.

Can I force propagation?

No. Nobody can, including your registrar and your host. Anyone offering to speed it up is selling you something that does not exist.

Why do the TTL numbers keep changing when I re-check?

Because they are counting down. Each resolver reports the remaining life of its cached copy, so the number falls every second until it hits zero and the record is refetched.

I changed nameservers, not a record. Is this different?

Yes, and slower. Nameserver delegation lives at the registry rather than in your zone, and those NS records usually carry a TTL of a day or two. Check the NS type above to watch that change.