The Hidden SaaS Map: What 840 GB of DNS TXT Records Reveal About Who Owns the Internet's Apex
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.