Domain Rating (DR): what domain authority shows
Domain Rating (DR) is Ahrefs' 0–100 score for the strength of a website's backlink profile: how many unique domains link to it and how strong those linking domains are themselves. The higher the DR, the more "weight" a site carries as a link source in the Ahrefs index. It is a third-party metric: Google does not use it, and a site's DR is not the same thing as its traffic or rankings.
Below: how Ahrefs calculates Domain Rating, how DR differs from DA, Trust Flow and Open PageRank, how to check a domain's DR for free, and why a higher DR does not guarantee better rankings.
What is Domain Rating in simple terms
Think of every website as a voter and every link as a vote. DR answers one question: "how strongly have other domains voted for this one?" Three things matter:
- How many different domains link to you. A hundred links from one site count for DR almost the same as a single link: Ahrefs counts domains, not links.
- How strong those linking domains are. A link from a high-DR domain is worth more than a link from a brand-new blog.
- How many sites the linking domain links out to. If a domain hands out links to thousands of sites, each of them gets only a small share of its strength.
DR applies to the whole domain. For individual pages Ahrefs has a separate metric, URL Rating (UR). "Website DR", "site DR" and "domain DR" all mean the same thing.
How Ahrefs calculates Domain Rating
Ahrefs publishes the general principle, not the exact formula. The logic goes like this:
- Find every unique domain with at least one dofollow link to your site. Nofollow links do not count toward DR.
- Take the DR of each of those domains.
- Account for how many unique domains each linking site links to: its "strength" is split among everyone it links to.
- Add up these contributions into a "raw" score.
- Map the raw score onto the 0–100 scale.
Why the scale is logarithmic
The DR scale is non-linear: going from 10 to 20 is far easier than going from 60 to 70. Near the top, every extra point takes many times more strong referring domains. So "+5 DR" for a young site and "+5 DR" for a major portal are not comparable in effort or cost.
Why DR can drop without losing links
The scale is relative: it is recalculated across the entire Ahrefs link graph. If the rest of the web gains links faster than you do, your DR can go down even though you have not lost a single referring domain. Another common reason is that a linking domain has weakened itself or started linking out to more sites.
Ahrefs Rank (AR) vs DR
Ahrefs Rank is a domain's position in a ranking of every domain in the Ahrefs index by backlink strength. Unlike DR, lower is better: the strongest domain has AR 1. DR is handier for comparing yourself with competitors; AR shows where a site stands among millions of others.
DR vs DA vs Trust Flow vs Open PageRank
Every SEO tool has its own "domain authority" metric. They mean roughly the same thing, but they are built on different link databases and different formulas, so you cannot convert one into another.
| Metric | Tool | Scale | What it is based on |
|---|---|---|---|
| DR (Domain Rating) | Ahrefs | 0–100 | Unique referring domains with dofollow links, and their own DR |
| DA (Domain Authority) | Moz | 1–100 | A machine-learning model on Moz link data that predicts a domain's ability to rank |
| Trust Flow / Citation Flow | Majestic | 0–100 | TF: closeness to a hand-picked set of trusted sites; CF: the volume of link equity |
| Authority Score | Semrush | 0–100 | Backlink profile plus estimated organic traffic and spam signals |
| Open PageRank (OPR) | Open PageRank | 0–10 | Open data on links between domains; the idea is close to the original PageRank |
The practical takeaway: only compare sites using the same metric. "DR 40 vs DA 25" tells you nothing — they are different rulers. If metrics from different tools disagree sharply (high DR, low TF), take a look at the links themselves: the profile may have been built on sites that link to anyone and everyone.
Open PageRank in PromoPilot
Besides DR, the platform shows the domain's PageRank from Open PageRank and the number of referring domains in the project header. OPR updates once a month and keeps history, so "Pulse" shows the domain's month-by-month trend with cascade launches marked on it. Keep in mind that over recent months OPR has been declining for a large share of domains across the web, so a small dip is not necessarily about your site.
How to check a website's DR for free
| Method | What you get |
|---|---|
| Ahrefs Website Authority Checker | A free DR check for any domain, plus the number of backlinks and referring domains. The number of checks is limited. |
| SEO Radar quick scan | Domain Rating and Open PageRank (0–10) with the year-over-year change, alongside an estimate of your pages' growth potential. |
| A project in your PromoPilot dashboard | A DR chip in the project header and on the dashboard; when it grows, an arrow with the increase appears next to it. |
| SEO Audit report | A Domain Rating card and the change since the previous audit of the same site. |
What is a good Domain Rating?
There is no universal benchmark. A meaningful reference point is the DR of the sites already in the top 10 for your keywords. If every competitor sits at DR 15–25, a site with DR 20 is not behind; if the leaders are at DR 60+, closing the gap will take a long time — mostly through content and targeted links to the right pages.
A rough scale to get a sense of magnitude:
- 0–10 — a new site or one with almost no external links;
- 10–30 — a small business with a few dozen referring domains;
- 30–50 — a noticeable backlink profile within its niche;
- 50–70 — strong industry sites and media outlets;
- 70+ — major portals, news publishers, platforms.
Why DR does not equal Google rankings
DR describes only the domain's link equity. It ignores how well a page matches the query, its technical health, user behavior, location and the type of search results. That is why a DR 70 site can get almost no traffic while a DR 12 site ranks first for niche queries.
The search data shows it too. In our study of 2,754 Google SERPs for queries we analyze in SEO Radar, a domain with DR below 20 made the top 3 in 35.8% of cases, and the highest-DR domain ranked first in only 15.6% of SERPs. There is no DR threshold that "unlocks" the top results.
Rankings depend on a specific page, not on the domain on average. It is more useful to find the pages that are already close to the top and strengthen those — that is how a link cascade works — and it is more honest to judge results by rankings, impressions and clicks in "Pulse" than by DR.
How to increase Domain Rating
- Grow the number of different referring domains, not the number of links from the same site.
- Prioritize linking sites that have authority of their own and a moderate number of outbound links.
- Keep an eye on indexing: a link that search crawlers have not found will not be counted by metric tools either.
- Do not buy "DR boost" packages: links from spammy sites inflate the number, not your rankings, and put the domain at risk.
- Think in months: it takes time for links to appear, for the Ahrefs crawler to find them and for the scale to be recalculated.
In PromoPilot, the DR of publishing sites also feeds into the backlink profile strength calculation: a post on a strong domain contributes more than the same post on a weak one.
Common DR myths
- "DR is a Google ranking factor." No. It is a third-party metric; Google does not know it exists.
- "High DR means traffic." It does not. DR describes links, not demand, content or relevance to the query.
- "DR didn't move, so the promotion didn't work." For a domain with hundreds of referring domains, one campaign may not shift the whole number but can noticeably lift a specific page.
- "Every tool has the same DR." Only Ahrefs has DR; Moz has DA, Majestic has TF and CF, Semrush has Authority Score.