Your website address: A, AAAA and www

Published September 9, 2026. Updated September 9, 2026.

When someone opens your site, their resolver looks up an address record for the name: an A record (IPv4) and/or an AAAA record (IPv6). This applies both to your bare domain (the apex, e.g. example.com) and to www.example.com.

Why it matters

If the name a visitor types has no address record on the nameservers that answer, the site is unreachable for them - the most visible DNS failure there is. Having both www and the apex resolve (to the same place) means visitors reach you whichever they type. Publishing AAAA as well as A serves the growing share of IPv6 clients.

www as a CNAME

www is very often a CNAME pointing at the apex or at your host/CDN, so it inherits the right address automatically. That is fine and common. The apex itself usually cannot be a CNAME (a limitation of DNS), so it carries A/AAAA directly - some providers offer "CNAME flattening" or ALIAS records to work around that.

What the report checks

That www and the apex have A/AAAA (or, for www, a CNAME that resolves), that every nameserver agrees on the answer, and, when www is a CNAME, it follows the target and shows it. A name with no address on some servers is a warning; none anywhere is an error.

How to fix it

Add the missing records at your DNS provider:

Apex example.com: an A record to your server's IPv4, and ideally an AAAA to its IPv6.
www: either the same A/AAAA, or a CNAME to example.com (or to your host's supplied hostname).

Make sure every nameserver has the change (they should, once it propagates) so answers do not disagree.

How to verify

dig example.com A +short
dig example.com AAAA +short
dig www.example.com A +short

Each should return an address (or, for www, a CNAME then an address).