DNS Records Lookup — Bulk A/MX/TXT/NS/AAAA Scraper

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🎯 What this scrapes

Feed this Actor a list of domains and the DNS record types you care about, and it comes back with one dataset row per domain — every requested record type decoded into a readable string (MX, not 15; NOERROR, not 0), grouped together so you get a full DNS snapshot in a single glance.

• Any domain — apex, subdomain, or a mix
• Standard record types: A, AAAA, MX, TXT, NS, CNAME, SOA, CAA
• Two independent DNS-over-HTTPS resolvers (Cloudflare + Google), so a query survives either resolver having a bad day

🔥 Features

• 🌐 Two-resolver fallback — every lookup tries your chosen primary resolver first (Cloudflare or Google) and automatically retries on the other if it errors, times out, or returns something unparsable.
• 🧱 Per-domain and per-type fault isolation — one domain's problem never blocks the rest of the batch, and one record type failing never blows up the whole row.
• 🔁 Retries with backoff on 408 / 429 / 503 before falling back to the other resolver.
• 🧊 Clean, typed dataset rows — Pydantic-validated, decoded type/status strings, ISO-8601 timestamps.
• 📡 Concurrent per-domain fan-out — every requested record type for a domain is queried in parallel.
• 💰 Pay-Per-Event pricing — you pay only for rows that land. No data, no charge beyond the small actor-start fee.

💡 Use cases

• Domain portfolio monitoring — run daily against a list of domains you manage and catch unexpected DNS changes.
• MX record auditing — verify mail routing configuration across a list of client domains.
• SPF/DKIM/DMARC visibility — pull TXT records in bulk to check email-authentication posture across a portfolio.
• Migration verification — confirm A/AAAA/NS records point where you expect after a DNS cutover.
• Security research — bulk-resolve a domain list gathered from another source (e.g. a WHOIS or subdomain-enumeration Actor) and get structured DNS data back.

⚙️ How to use it

1. Click Try for free at the top of the page.
2. Paste one or more domains into the domains field — one per line.
3. Optionally adjust recordTypes (defaults to A, AAAA, MX, TXT, NS) and pick a resolver preference.
4. Click Start. Rows stream into the dataset as each domain resolves.
5. Export from Storage → Dataset as JSON, CSV, or Excel — or call the Apify API directly.

For recurring monitoring, use Apify Schedules (cron syntax) so the dataset refreshes on your preferred cadence.

📥 Input

Field	Type	Required	Default	Notes
domains	array	yes	["github.com", "cloudflare.com"]	Domains to look up. One per line.
recordTypes	array	no	["A", "AAAA", "MX", "TXT", "NS"]	DNS record types to query for every domain. Uppercased automatically.
resolver	string	no	"cloudflare"	Primary resolver — cloudflare or google. The other is used as an automatic fallback.
proxyConfiguration	object	no	{"useApifyProxy": false}	Standard Apify Proxy field. Not required for this target's traffic pattern.

Example input

{
  "domains": [
    "github.com",
    "cloudflare.com"
  ],
  "recordTypes": ["A", "AAAA", "MX", "TXT", "NS"],
  "resolver": "cloudflare"
}

📤 Output

One dataset row per domain, with records grouped by type:

{
  "domain": "github.com",
  "resolver_used": "cloudflare",
  "records": [
    {
      "type": "MX",
      "status": "NOERROR",
      "ttl": 300,
      "data": "0 github-com.mail.protection.outlook.com"
    }
  ],
  "record_types_queried": ["A", "AAAA", "MX", "TXT", "NS"],
  "record_types_failed": [],
  "queried_at": "2026-09-05T12:00:00+00:00"
}

• records — every decoded answer across every queried type for this domain.
• record_types_failed — types where both resolvers failed for this domain (a clean NXDOMAIN or empty answer is not a failure and doesn't appear here).

💰 Pricing

Pay-Per-Event — you're charged only when the Actor actually does something:

Event	Price	When
Actor start	$0.20	Once per run
Result	$0.001	Once per domain row written to the dataset ($1.20 / 1,000 results incl. the flat start fee)

No results, no result charge — only the small warm-up fee applies.

🚧 Limitations

• No zone-transfer (AXFR) and no DNSSEC validation surfacing beyond what the upstream resolver already returns — this is a lookup tool, not a DNS security auditor.
• No WHOIS lookups and no reverse-DNS (PTR) bulk mode in v1.
• Very large domain lists run sequentially domain-by-domain to keep memory bounded and stream rows as they resolve, so total run time scales roughly linearly with domain count.

❓ FAQ

Does this need an API key? No — both upstream resolvers (Cloudflare, Google) are public, keyless DNS-over-HTTPS APIs.

What happens if a domain doesn't exist? You still get a row. records will be empty for that domain and record_types_failed stays empty too — an NXDOMAIN is a valid answer, not an error.

What happens if a DNS resolver is temporarily down? We retry with backoff, then fall back to the other resolver automatically. Only if both resolvers fail for a given record type does it show up in record_types_failed.

Can I query custom record types? Yes — any DNS record type name is accepted in recordTypes; numeric types outside the common set decode as TYPE<n> rather than crashing the row.

🙋 Your feedback

Found a domain or record type this Actor doesn't handle well? Leave a review or open an issue from the Actor's Apify Store page — we read every one and ship fixes fast.