CNAME flattening
CNAME
flattening speeds up CNAME
resolution and allows you to use a CNAME
record at your root/apex domain (example.com
).
With CNAME
flattening, Cloudflare finds the IP address that a CNAME
points to. This process could involve a single lookup or multiple (if your CNAME
points to another CNAME
). Cloudflare then returns the final IP address instead of a CNAME
record, helping DNS queries resolve up to 30% faster.
For more details on the steps involved in CNAME
flattening, review the CNAME flattening diagram and refer to the Cloudflare blog post ↗.
CNAME
flattening happens by default in some cases. Refer to Setup for details.-
If a
CNAME
target is being used to verify a domain for a third-party service, turning on CNAME flattening for all CNAME records may cause the verification to fail since theCNAME
record itself will not be returned directly.