Apex domains cannot have CNAME records.
Question and response
Question
dig greatuniversal.com. NS
Answer
greatuniversal.com. 2 NS ns1.atom.com.
greatuniversal.com. 2 NS ns2.atom.com.
Authority
The response has no authority records.
Additional
. 0 OPT ; payload 1232, xrcode 0, version 0, flags 0