Domain is delegated

The parent zone is what makes a domain findable at all. .com does not hold your records; it holds a set of NS records naming the servers that do, and hands that referral to any resolver that asks. This check reads the referral from a registry server directly, with recursion off, so the answer is the parent's own words rather than a resolver's summary of them.

There are two ways it fails and they usually mean different things. NXDOMAIN from the registry is what a name that does not exist at that level looks like — never registered, or registered once and since expired, redeemed and released. Some registries answer the same way for a name that is registered but has no nameservers yet, so before concluding a name is free, check the registration checks in this report: they read the registry's own registration record and know which of the two this is. An answer that arrives normally but carries no NS records is that undelegated state in a different voice: the name exists, somebody is paying for it, and no nameservers have been set at the registrar. That state is where a domain sits between being bought and being configured, and it is also what a registry hold or an inactive status produces.

Nothing else in this report survives a failure here. Every other check queries a nameserver the parent never named, so a pass on any of them is a statement about a server nobody would ever be told to ask.

If the registry returned NXDOMAIN, start with the registration rather than with DNS — the registration checks in this report say whether the name exists at the registry at all. A name that has been released is registrable by anyone, including by somebody watching for it to drop.

If the name is registered but undelegated, set the nameservers in the registrar's control panel. The change reaches the registry within minutes, and the registry republishes its zone on its own schedule — usually minutes to an hour for a gTLD, sometimes longer for a ccTLD.

If you have just changed nameservers or registrar, allow for the delegation TTL before concluding anything is broken. Parent-side NS records for gTLDs are typically served with a TTL of a day or two, and a resolver holding the old set will keep using it until that expires.