Apex domains cannot have CNAME records.
Question and response
Question
dig americanpayroll.org. NS
Answer
americanpayroll.org. 5 NS olga.ns.cloudflare.com.
americanpayroll.org. 5 NS andy.ns.cloudflare.com.
Authority
The response has no authority records.
Additional
. 0 OPT ; payload 1232, xrcode 0, version 0, flags 0