Several addresses accumulated around the sites I operated: Pages hosts, primary domains, www aliases and Korean project domains. I repeatedly needed to ask which address pointed to which site.

A search-ownership discussion also contained a TXT record name with a repeated domain string. That record alone does not prove the cause of every failed verification. It does explain why a friendly label stopped being sufficient evidence for me.

If I were entrusting someone with my domain

The address in my campaign should lead to the intended experience. A correct-looking address can still point to the wrong project or an old screen. I check where the visitor actually arrives.

Five separate checks

  1. Do the registrar nameservers point to the intended DNS operator?
  2. Are the DNS record name and target correct?
  3. Is the hostname registered in the Pages project's Custom domains?
  4. Is its TLS certificate ready?
  5. Do the final URL and canonical follow one explicit primary-address policy?

DNS is only part of the connection

For Pages, a DNS target and a project-domain association are separate checks. Cloudflare documents that a manually created CNAME without the matching Pages association can cause a 522 response. Apex and subdomain requirements should also be checked separately.

Make internationalized addresses comparable

Record the human-readable domain alongside its ASCII DNS representation. Compare complete hostnames rather than labels. Internationalized domains are compatible with a multilingual site; the operational record simply needs an unambiguous representation.

Explore the implementation

Read-only example using your own address variables

Resolve-DnsName $siteAlias -Type CNAME
Resolve-DnsName $siteHost -Type TXT
curl.exe -I $siteUrl
curl.exe -IL $siteAliasUrl

A small connection ledger

For each hostname, record its DNS target, Pages project, certificate state, redirect destination and verification date. Save the previous value before a bounded change. Do not turn one hostname repair into a cleanup of the entire zone.

Success requires the intended content, final address and HTTPS behavior—not merely a DNS answer. Compare ownership verification against the exact record currently issued by the relevant service.