The Landlords of the Web: 297 Million CNAME Records Show Half the Internet Is Served by Platforms, a Fifth Is Parked, and the Dominant CDN Is Invisible
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.