Zone Not Authoritative

Severity: High

What does this mean?

The zone imported from your DNS provider is not the zone the internet actually uses. DNS Watchdog compared the nameservers your provider assigns to this zone against the delegation published in public DNS, and none of them match — or the domain does not resolve at all. Queries for this domain are answered by a different set of nameservers (or by nobody), so the records in this zone are not what the internet sees.

For subdomain zones this check understands implicit delegation: a zone like internal.example.com with no NS delegation of its own is still considered live when the parent domain is served by the same nameservers, because those servers answer for the subdomain directly.

Why this is a problem

• The inventory, scans, and grades for this zone describe records the internet never resolves — real exposure may be going unmonitored
• The domain may be served from another DNS provider or an old account that is not being watched or maintained
• Changes made in this zone silently have no effect, which can hide outages and misconfigurations
• If the domain's registration or real delegation has lapsed, the domain may be at risk of takeover

What you should do

• Check the domain's delegation at the registrar (or parent zone) and confirm which nameservers it points to
• If this provider should be serving the domain, update the registrar's nameserver settings to the nameservers assigned to this zone
• If the domain is deliberately served elsewhere, connect that DNS provider to DNS Watchdog so the live zone is monitored, and consider removing the unused zone
• If the domain no longer resolves at all (NXDOMAIN), verify the domain registration has not expired