Although PawSD aspires to be a replacement for DNS, there are inevitably cases where it's necessary to use both at the same time. Therefore, there are standard mechanisms for transferring data from PawSD into DNS-centric software and vice versa.

To allow DNS-based software (such as every Internetworked programme written in the last 40 years) to access information from PawSD zones, there is a suggested standard way to present zones and services as DNS zones, and to map common Internet-oriented PawSD tags to their equivalent DNS records.

A PawSD-enabled DNS resolver should present this information as subdomains of pawsd.alt.:

• [keyhex].[keytype].pawsd.alt.: reasonable default records selected via an unspecified algorithm from some or all of the services in the zone identified by the keytype (e.g. ed25519) and key hexadecimal
• [zone].name.pawsd.alt.: as above, except that the zone is selected by searching for one with a self-proposed or local name similar (how?) to the given zone name
• [service].[keyhex].[keytype].pawsd.alt. where [service] is an ASCII-encoded non-negative integer: records from the service with the given index (starting at 0) of the given zone
• [service].[zone].name.pawsd.alt.: as above but selecting both the zone and service by similar names