Domain Rating checker
Get the Domain Rating by Ahrefs for your website, a client site or a competitor.
Domain Rating by Ahrefs
- Checked target
- Checked
Compare the sites you actually compete with
One Domain Rating has little context on its own. The research command lists the domains that rank for the same keywords as yours, with a Domain Rating next to each one.
See the research commandRead the Domain Rating
The number is Domain Rating by Ahrefs, from 0 to 100. Higher means a stronger backlink profile: more unique websites link to the domain, and those websites have strong links of their own.
The scale is logarithmic. Each step up is harder than the one before it, so climbing from 10 to 20 is far easier than climbing from 70 to 80. Read a gap of 10 points near the top as a much bigger difference than the same gap near the bottom.
How Domain Rating is worked out
Ahrefs crawls the web and records which sites link to which. For a domain, it counts the unique websites that send it at least one followed link. Each linking site passes on part of its own strength, shared out between all the sites it links to. Many links from one site count as one, and nofollow links do not count.
That makes DR a measure of links, and only links. It knows nothing about the content, the traffic or the topic of a site, and it does not look at the links to any single page.
Domain Rating vs Domain Authority
This page shows Ahrefs Domain Rating, not Moz Domain Authority. The two get mixed up because they answer a similar question with similar names.
| Domain Rating (DR) | Domain Authority (DA) | |
|---|---|---|
| Made by | Ahrefs | Moz |
| Scale | 0 to 100, logarithmic | 1 to 100, logarithmic |
| Built from | Ahrefs' link index: unique linking domains and their strength | Moz's link index, with a model trained to predict how well a site ranks |
| Shown here | Yes | No |
| Used by Google | No | No |
The same site can score 45 on one and 30 on the other, so a DR and a DA can never be compared. Pick one score and use it for every site you compare.
Compare sites in the same market
A DR of 30 can be strong for a local plumber and weak for a national news site. The useful comparison is with the sites that rank for the searches you want. Check the domains on the first page for your main keyword with the SERP checker, and you see the range you are competing in.
What Domain Rating cannot tell you
Google does not use DR. It is a summary of links, which Google does look at, but Google ranks pages for searches, not domains by a score. A lower-DR site with the better page for a search can and often does outrank a higher-DR site. Use DR to judge a backlink profile or to decide which link prospects deserve a look, not to predict one page's position.
Check Domain Rating with your AI agent
With SEO Skill, Domain Rating comes free next to research results. When your agent runs seo research for competitors or backlinks with your DataForSEO or Ahrefs key, every row with a domain gets a Domain Rating column, with no Ahrefs key needed for that part. Ask:
Find the sites that compete with example.com in Google and sort them by Domain RatingAdd the hosted MCP server to your agent and sign in with Google:
Run it in a terminal, then sign in with Google.
Or run it on your machine
Installs the CLI, signs you in and adds the skill to your agents. Crawls and Bing run this way.