Control Cloudflare Gateway DNS caching with a maximum TTL setting

You can now set a maximum time-to-live (TTL) for DNS responses returned by Gateway. When an upstream DNS record has a TTL that exceeds the configured maximum, Gateway caps it to your specified value. This ensures that DNS policy changes - such as blocking a newly identified malicious domain - take effect faster across all clients.

Traffic settings, showing a numeric input field that accepts values between 60 and 36,000 seconds" loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="2170" height="294">

The setting is available at two levels:

• Account level - In Traffic Policies > Traffic Settings, under Proxy and inspection. This sets the default cap for all DNS locations.
• Per-location - Each DNS location can inherit the account setting, disable the cap, or override it with a custom value.

Two new fields are also available in DNS logs: upstream_record_ttls (the original TTL from the upstream response) and applied_max_ttl (the cap Gateway applied). These appear in the DNS logs column picker and in Logpush datasets.

For more information, refer to Maximum DNS TTL.