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Why would DNS caching skew results?

I don’t think Cloudflare is using DNS queries to compile the stats considering they have visibility into the full http requests for sites they proxy.

Edit: Another comment mentions DNS queries. Did I miss something about how they’re compiling the stats?

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The heading says “Generative AI services popularity - Top 10 services based on 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver traffic”

1.1.1.1 will see the query regardless of caching by upstream servers. Downstream and client caching probably averages out quite nicely with enough volume.

If the TTL of one domain’s records are all shorter than the TTLs of another domain’s, what would make downstream and client caching cancel out? Do clients not respect TTLs these days?

(In this particular case, I don’t think the TTLs are actually different, but asking in general)

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