Website IPv6 Test

Enter any domain to check whether that website supports IPv6 — not your own connection. We read the site's public DNS records live and report whether its web host, nameservers, and mail servers are reachable over IPv6.

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What this test actually measures

IPv6 support for a website is not a single switch — it is three independent layers, and a domain can pass one and fail the others. This tool checks each separately instead of collapsing them into one misleading yes/no:

Web layer — AAAA records. An AAAA record maps a hostname to an IPv6 address, exactly as an A record does for IPv4. Without one, an IPv6-only client has no address to connect to. We check the hostname you entered and its counterpart (apex ↔ www), because these are separate DNS names that are very often configured inconsistently.
DNS layer — nameservers with AAAA. Name resolution happens before the first HTTP request. If every authoritative nameserver for the zone is IPv4-only, an IPv6-only resolver cannot resolve the domain at all, no matter how many AAAA records the zone contains.
Mail layer — MX hosts with AAAA. Mail is a separate service on the same domain. We resolve the zone's MX hosts and check whether they publish AAAA records, which is what decides whether an IPv6-only mail server can deliver to them.

We also flag AAAA records that are not globally routable. Addresses outside 2000::/3 — unique local addresses in fc00::/7, documentation addresses in 2001:db8::/32, or link-local fe80::/10 — are sometimes published by mistake. They look like working IPv6 in a DNS dump but no internet client can reach them, so we count them as a failure rather than a pass.

What this test does not do

Being explicit matters more than looking impressive. This check reads authoritative DNS over DNS-over-HTTPS; it does not open an IPv6-only TCP connection to the target and fetch the page. A hosting platform can publish an AAAA record that points at a listener which is firewalled or misconfigured, and DNS alone cannot see that. It also does not measure latency, check TLS certificates, or evaluate whether IPv6 and IPv4 serve identical content. For an end-to-end fetch test you need a client that is genuinely IPv6-only — see the command-line section below.

How to read your result

Full IPv6	The site publishes routable AAAA records and every nameserver is reachable over IPv6. An IPv6-only client can resolve and connect end to end.
Mostly ready	The website answers over IPv6 and at least one nameserver does, but not all of them. This usually works, because resolvers try multiple nameservers, but it leaves a fragile dependency on the IPv4-only ones.
Web only	AAAA records exist for the site, but no nameserver has one. A strictly IPv6-only resolver cannot look the name up, so the AAAA records are effectively unreachable for the clients they were meant to serve.
DNS only	The nameservers speak IPv6 but the website itself publishes no AAAA record. IPv6-only visitors need NAT64/DNS64 translation to reach the site.
No IPv6	Neither the site nor its nameservers publish routable AAAA records. The domain is IPv4-only.

Why website IPv6 support matters

IPv4 address space ran out at the regional registry level years ago — APNIC, RIPE NCC, and LACNIC have all exhausted their general IPv4 pools, which is why new networks increasingly hand subscribers a shared IPv4 address behind carrier-grade NAT or deploy IPv6-only access with NAT64 translation. Mobile carriers in particular run large IPv6-only networks. A site without AAAA records is reachable from those networks only through a translator that the carrier operates, which adds a hop, a point of failure, and a place where the original client address can be obscured.

There is no ranking penalty for lacking IPv6, and no visitor sees an error today. The real argument is operational: dual-stack removes a dependency on someone else's translation layer, and it is far cheaper to enable before you need it than during an incident.

How to add IPv6 to your website

Confirm your host supports it. Most CDNs and managed platforms (Cloudflare, Fastly, GitHub Pages, Netlify, Vercel, AWS CloudFront) serve over IPv6 by default or with one toggle. If you run your own server, your provider must assign you a routed IPv6 prefix.
Publish AAAA for both names. Add AAAA records for the apex domain and for www. Re-run this test on both; a pass on one and a fail on the other is the single most common half-finished deployment.
Make sure the server listens. Bind your web server to the IPv6 address (listen [::]:443 ssl; in nginx) and open IPv6 in the firewall — ip6tables and nftables rules are separate from IPv4 ones, which is where most "AAAA exists but nothing responds" failures come from.
Check your DNS provider. If your registrar's nameservers are IPv4-only, moving to a provider with dual-stack nameservers is usually a free change.
Handle IPv6 in logs and access rules. Anything that stores, rate-limits, or blocks by IP needs to accept 128-bit addresses and, typically, treat a /64 rather than a single address as one client.

Testing IPv6 from the command line

To verify the DNS layer yourself:

dig AAAA example.com +short — lists the site's IPv6 addresses.
dig NS example.com +short then dig AAAA <nameserver> +short — checks the DNS layer.
curl -6 -sI https://example.com — forces curl to use IPv6 only; this is the end-to-end check DNS alone cannot give you, and it fails if the AAAA record points somewhere that is not actually listening.
ping6 example.com — quick reachability check, though many hosts drop ICMP.

Note that curl -6 only works if your own connection has IPv6. Run the IPv6 connectivity test first to confirm that, otherwise a failure tells you about your network rather than the site's.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I check if a website supports IPv6?

Enter the domain above. The check looks up the AAAA records published for the hostname (and its www or apex counterpart), because an AAAA record is what tells an IPv6-only client which address to connect to. If a site publishes at least one globally routable AAAA record (inside 2000::/3), it is reachable over IPv6. If it only publishes A records, IPv6-only clients need a translation layer such as NAT64/DNS64 to reach it.

Why does the test also check nameservers?

DNS resolution happens before any web request. If a domain publishes AAAA records for its website but every authoritative nameserver is IPv4-only, a strictly IPv6-only resolver cannot look the domain up in the first place. Checking nameservers separately is how you tell a genuinely IPv6-ready domain from one that only looks ready at the web layer.

Does a missing AAAA record mean the site is broken?

No. The IPv4 internet still carries most traffic and every dual-stack client falls back to IPv4 automatically. A missing AAAA record only means IPv6-only clients cannot reach the site directly. It is a readiness gap, not an outage.

Why does my site show IPv6 for www but not the bare domain?

This is one of the most common misconfigurations. The www hostname and the apex (bare) domain are separate DNS names and need their own AAAA records. Adding AAAA to only one of them means half your visitors — whichever form they type or whichever your links use — never get IPv6.

Can this test tell me if IPv6 is faster for a site?

No. This is a reachability and configuration check based on public DNS records, not a latency benchmark. Performance depends on routing between your network and the site, which varies by location and provider.

Sources

Related tools

Test your own connection with the IPv6 test, compare the protocols in IPv4 vs IPv6, read why IPv4 addresses ran out, or look up the network operator behind any address the test returns.