What is Domain Rating (DR)?
Domain Rating, or DR, is the number Ahrefs gives a whole website for the strength of the links pointing at it. It’s the score people mean when they call a site “DR 70”. Here’s how Ahrefs works it out, what it leaves out, and how to tell whether yours is good.
How Ahrefs calculates DR
DR looks at the quantity and quality of external backlinks to a website. In Ahrefs’ own simple terms, it:
- counts how many unique domains link to the site,
- weighs how strong each of those linking domains is,
- accounts for how many other unique domains each of them links to,
- calculates a raw score, and
- scales that score onto a 100-point range.
Step three matters more than people expect. Each linking domain splits its rating equally among all the domains it links to, so Ahrefs says a DR 10 site that links to three domains can influence your DR more than a DR 80 site that links to a million.
What DR ignores
- Link spam, traffic and domain age. Ahrefs says DR doesn’t take any of them into account.
- Your internal links. DR only counts links from other sites. Internal links show up in page-level URL Rating instead.
- Your content. DR knows nothing about whether your pages are any good.
So a high DR says a site has strong links. It doesn’t say the site is trustworthy, popular or relevant to you.
What is a good DR?
Ahrefs’ rule of thumb: your DR is good if it’s higher than or comparable to similar sites. It’s relative by definition, so 30, 50 or 70 isn’t good or bad on its own.
For a sense of the range, SERP DR’s public list puts google.com and youtube.com at DR 99 and wikipedia.org at 97, and it shows my own site, bushe.co, at 66 (checked October 6, 2026). None of those numbers helps you much. What helps is the DR of the sites ranking for the searches you want, set against yours.
Why DR changes when you do nothing
Because DR is relative, other sites move it. Ahrefs’ explanation: when a DR 100 site gains more links, it can’t become DR 101, so other sites get pushed down the scale. You can drop a point without losing a link. You can also lose links you never hear about, when pages that linked to you are deleted or edited.
What DR is good for
Ahrefs calls DR a great metric for choosing websites to build links from, and that’s where it earns its keep. Ahrefs also warns against judging a site on its domain score alone. Before you chase a link, ask:
- Does the site get real search traffic, and is it about your topic?
- Does it publish good content, and does it have good links of its own?
- Does it link out to a lot of websites? Fewer is usually better.
- Will it still be around in a year or five?
DR also tracks rankings reasonably well. Ahrefs found the two correlate across more than 200,000 domains, though it says page-level UR correlates better. Google, for its part, has consistently denied using “domain authority” as a ranking factor.
How to check and track your DR
Ahrefs shows DR in its own reports and in a free website authority checker. To watch it over time, SERP DR keeps a public DR page and an embeddable badge for any domain; it’s the badge on my homepage. Its paid plan costs $4 a month to monitor up to 12 domains (October 2026 pricing). It updates DR weekly, sends email notifications, and lists your backlinks and referring domains.
Frequently asked questions
Is Domain Rating the same as Domain Authority?
No. DR is Ahrefs’ score and DA is Moz’s. Both rate a site’s links on a 100-point scale, but they come from different link indexes and different formulas, so the numbers rarely match.
Does Domain Rating affect Google rankings?
Not directly. Google doesn’t use Ahrefs’ DR. Ahrefs found that DR correlates with rankings, which makes it a handy estimate, but it’s the links behind the score that matter to Google, not the score itself.
How do I increase my Domain Rating?
Earn links from more unique websites. Ahrefs says new referring domains are the only way to raise DR, and links from strong sites that link out sparingly count the most.
Can a new website have a high DR?
Rarely, because DR comes from links other sites have to give you, and a new site has few. A new site can still rank for specific searches when its pages are the best answer; strong pages matter more than the domain score.
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