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