Vendor lookup costs

Google Workspace and the SPF lookup limit

One lookup. Google flattened this record, and most advice you will find still says four.

For years include:_spf.google.com contained three further includes, _netblocks, _netblocks2 and _netblocks3, and cost four DNS lookups. Nearly every guide, calculator and vendor knowledge base still says so.

It is no longer true. The record is now a flat list of ip4 and ip6 ranges with no nested includes at all, so it costs exactly one lookup. You can see it for yourself in the expanded record above.

This matters if you have been budgeting around the old number. Three lookups you thought were spent are not, which may mean the vendor you were about to move to a subdomain can stay where it is.

It also means Google Workspace is almost never the reason a record is over the limit, despite being the first include people suspect. Expand the whole record before removing anything.

What to do

• Leave it alone. One lookup is as cheap as an include gets.
• Re-check any advice that told you Google costs four. If a checker or consultant is still quoting that, whatever else they concluded about your record was computed from a stale number.
• Look at the rest of the record instead. The expensive vendors are usually the ones fanning out to every region they operate in.

Check your own record

These numbers are what the include costs on its own. What matters is the total across your whole record, because the ten term limit applies to the evaluation, not to any one vendor.

Expand _spf.google.com and you will find nothing nested inside it at all: the record is a flat list of addresses. Its single lookup is the include: that reaches it.

Check your own domain to see what the whole record costs and get a replacement that fits.

Related

• Microsoft 365 — 1 lookup
• Zoho — 5 lookups
• Every vendor we measure