July 18, 2026
21 min read
We re-classified 18 billion DNS TXT queries across ten full crawls (April 2025 - July 2026) and turned the SaaS verification-token census into a time series. Anthropic tokens grew 625x to 131,812 apexes. The Dan.com shutdown moved five million marketplace tokens. Microsoft 365's domain share is flat while Google's climbs. And across every major vendor, only 19-29% of token disappearances are deliberate cleanup - the rest is domain death. For SaaS analysts, security teams, and Internet measurement researchers.
July 11, 2026
17 min read
Two CNAME-typed crawls of 1.9 billion hostnames, 32 days apart: 169 million cross-domain aliases followed by name. 7.5% of the alias layer rewires or disappears in one month, parking lost 1.54M aliases, one Chinese registrar generated 13% of all new aliases — and the three biggest 'migrations' were platforms re-pointing their own chains, dragging half a million customer domains along. For DNS operators, measurement researchers, and anyone who builds on someone else's CNAME.
June 20, 2026
24 min read
A CNAME record is a forwarding address — it names who actually serves a hostname. We pointed a CNAME-typed crawl at 1.86 billion names and found 297 million aliases. Of the 169 million that point outward, 41% land on site builders and managed hosts, 20% on domain-parking lots, and only 6% on CDNs — because Cloudflare, which fronts a quarter of the web, flattens its CNAMEs into A/AAAA and barely appears. The alias map is a rental map: the web is served by a short list of platforms, and the record type you query decides which half you can see.
May 02, 2026
21 min read
We classified every TXT record from a 17 April 2026 DNS crawl — 840 GB of raw JSONL (56 GB after xz compression) — and built a vendor census from the verification tokens domains leak into DNS. 40.2 million unique apexes carry at least one tracked SaaS verification token. Google's 26.0 million-apex footprint is 3.4x Microsoft 365's 7.6 million. Domain marketplaces (AfterNic + dan.com + 4.cn + Aliyun + west.cn + 17ex + Sedo + DomainEasy) collectively touch 5.0 million apexes — more than Atlassian, Stripe, Adobe, Apple, and DocuSign verification tokens combined. Zoho's 1.23 million is the single largest non-Google, non-Microsoft SaaS verification footprint we measure. The TXT layer is the closest thing the public Internet has to a SaaS census.