> RFC 1034, published in 1987, defines much of the behavior of the DNS protocol, and should give us an answer on whether the order of CNAME records matters. Section 4.3.1 contains the following text:

> If recursive service is requested and available, the recursive response to a query will be one of the following:

> - The answer to the query, possibly preface by one or more CNAME RRs that specify aliases encountered on the way to an answer.

> While "possibly preface" can be interpreted as a requirement for CNAME records to appear before everything else, it does not use normative key words, such as MUST and SHOULD that modern RFCs use to express requirements. This isn’t a flaw in RFC 1034, but simply a result of its age. RFC 2119, which standardized these key words, was published in 1997, 10 years after RFC 1034.

It's pretty clear that CNAME is at the beginning.

The "possibly" does not refer to the order but rather to the presence.

If they are present, they are are first.