Apex domains cannot have CNAME records.
Question and response
Question
dig sae.org. NS
Answer
sae.org. 2 NS ns-1110.awsdns-10.org.
sae.org. 2 NS ns-740.awsdns-28.net.
sae.org. 2 NS ns-419.awsdns-52.com.
sae.org. 2 NS ns-1714.awsdns-22.co.uk.
Authority
The response has no authority records.
Additional
. 0 OPT ; payload 1232, xrcode 0, version 0, flags 0