Domain Rating (DR)

How Ahrefs calculates DR

In Ahrefs' words, DR "shows the strength of a website's backlink profile compared to the others in our database on a 100-point scale" (Ahrefs Help Center). It is built from the domains that link to the site, and each linking domain passes on a share of its own rating: "The source domain splits its rating equally amongst the domains it links to." That is why, Ahrefs explains, "a DR-10 domain which links to three other domains can influence your DR more than a DR-80 domain which links to a million other domains."

The scale is logarithmic: "the gap between DR 75 and DR 76 is much bigger than between DR 20 and DR 21" (Ahrefs SEO glossary). Because the score is relative, it can fall without a single lost link. Ahrefs' example: a DR 100 site that gains links cannot become DR 101, so other sites are pushed down the scale instead.

DR is not a Google ranking factor

Ahrefs says it plainly: "DR is not a Google ranking factor. Google doesn't use Ahrefs' Domain Rating." When Ahrefs measured it in 2025, DR had a 0.131 correlation with Google rankings, "a small positive correlation, and far from definitive" (Ahrefs, What Is a Good Domain Rating?).

Page-level link strength tells you more. Ahrefs' help center notes that DR "doesn't do this as well as our URL Rating (UR)", and across 44,589 keywords Ahrefs found UR correlated with rankings more strongly than any other factor it measured (Ahrefs). Studies do not all agree: Backlinko's analysis of 11.8 million results found a site's overall link authority, measured with DR, correlated with rankings more strongly than UR did (Backlinko). Both are correlations with a tool's own index, not Google's data.

What counts as a good DR

There is no absolute answer. Ahrefs calls DR "a relative metric by definition": your DR is good "if it's higher than or comparable to similar sites". Most domains on the web sit between DR 0 and 10. For one industry benchmark, Ahrefs pulled the DR of 600 SaaS companies: the median was 62, the top quarter started at 77 and the top 10% at 86 (Ahrefs).

Compare yourself with the sites you compete with for the same queries, not with a universal threshold. The Moz equivalent is Domain Authority; the page-level Ahrefs score is URL Rating.

DR, URL Rating and the other authority scores

URL Rating (UR) is the page-level version of DR. Ahrefs defines it as the strength of a page's link profile on a 100-point scale; the scale is logarithmic, and both internal and external links count. Put a domain into Site Explorer and the UR you see is the homepage's (Ahrefs Help Center, September 2026).

Domain Authority (DA) is Moz's score. In Moz's words, it "predicts how likely a website is to rank on search engine results pages (SERPs) compared to competitors", on a scale from 1 to 100, and it "is not a direct ranking factor" (Moz, March 2025). See Domain Authority.

Authority Score is Semrush's composite metric, which reflects "backlink quality, referring domain diversity, organic traffic to linking pages, and spam signals" (Semrush).

The three come from different link indexes and formulas, so the numbers are not interchangeable: a site can be DR 60 and DA 40 at the same time. Compare scores from the same tool only.

DR and the price of links

DR is the number link sellers quote, and it drives prices. Through a vendor, BuzzStream's 2026 study of 257,267 sites puts a guest post at about $200 on a DR 0 to 9 site and about $3,000 on DR 80+ (Link Pricing Index). The same study found an average DR of just 24 across the marketplace, almost 80% of the sites under DR 40, and just over 4% above DR 70 (BuzzStream).

BuzzStream finds organic traffic the steadier predictor of price, because traffic is harder to fake than DR: $229 for a site under 100 visits a month, $3,210 for one above 100,000.

Why a high DR is not proof of quality

A site can raise its DR with links built for that purpose, and many sites listed for sale have the score without the audience: 39.6% of the guest-post sites BuzzStream analysed had an estimated organic traffic of zero (BuzzStream). Ahrefs' own advice is never to judge a site on "site-wide authority" alone, and to ask whether it gets organic traffic, whether it is topically relevant, and whether it links out to a lot of websites (Ahrefs Help Center).

Before you trust a link prospect, check its traffic trend and topic, then the page the link would sit on. The free Link Strength Score combines a site's DR with topical relevance and anchor safety, and the checks below go further.

How to check a site beyond its DR

DR is a first filter. Before you trust a site as a link source, look at five things the score does not show:

Traffic against DR. Pull the domain's estimated organic traffic and its trend. A high DR with flat or negligible traffic is the classic sign of a manufactured profile, and a curve that fell off a cliff suggests the site has lost Google's trust.

Who links to it. Sort its referring domains by quality. A profile made of irrelevant, low-quality or expired-domain links is a manufactured DR; editorial links from sites you recognize are real authority.

Anchors. A spike of exact-match commercial anchors pointing at the domain suggests links sold at scale. The patterns are covered in anchor text ratios.

Outbound links on the page. If the page your link would sit on already links out to many unrelated commercial sites, your link is one of many in a monetized post.

Relevance and content. Does the site genuinely cover your subject, and does it read like something a person would want to read? A relevant site with a modest DR is often a better host than a generic one with a high score. The full process is in how to vet a link seller before you pay.

How to check a site's DR

Ahrefs' free Website Authority Checker shows the DR of any domain without an account. With an Ahrefs account, Batch Analysis returns DR for a whole list of competitors at once. Whatever the tool, compare like with like: Moz's Domain Authority and Semrush's Authority Score use their own link indexes and formulas, and the numbers are not interchangeable.