See how strong any website's backlink profile is with Ahrefs Domain Rating. Check one site, or compare yours with up to 9 competitors.
Enter a domain to begin
Domain Rating, 0 to 100
Domain Rating by Ahrefs. License
Sorted from strongest to weakest backlink profile.
Grow your authority
DR goes up when trusted websites link to you. Every plan includes high-quality outreach backlinks placed by hand on real sites, every month.
$99/month
2 to 5 outreach backlinks a month
A steady start for new and small websites.
Start Starter$290/month
8 to 10 outreach backlinks a month
Faster authority growth for local businesses.Plus 5 SEO blog posts a month
Start Growth$499/month
20 to 25 outreach backlinks a month
Our strongest link building for busy markets.Plus 15 SEO blog posts a month and a 3-page SEO website
Start AuthorityReading your score
DR is logarithmic, so each step up the scale is harder than the last. What matters most is how you compare with the sites ranking for your keywords.
New sites and sites with few quality backlinks.
Typical for local small businesses that have done some link building.
An established site with a solid backlink profile.
Strong brands, big publishers and popular niche sites.
The biggest sites on the web, like Google, Wikipedia and major news.
Leaderboard
The strongest backlink profiles on the web, updated daily from Ahrefs.
| Rank | Website | Domain Rating |
|---|---|---|
| Loading the top 100... | ||
Domain Rating (DR) is an Ahrefs score from 0 to 100 that estimates the strength of a website's backlink profile. It looks at how many unique websites link to a domain and how strong those linking sites are themselves.
A link from a high-DR site that links out to few other sites passes more value than a link from a weak site that links to thousands. Backlinks are the core of off-page SEO.
DR comes from Ahrefs. DA (Domain Authority) comes from Moz. Both are third-party estimates of link strength, and neither is used directly by Google.
Pick one and use it consistently to compare yourself with competitors. The trend over time is more useful than any single number.
There are no shortcuts that last. These four steps are what we use for clients every month.
Compare your DR with the sites ranking above you to set a realistic target.
Outreach to real sites in your industry and region, not link farms.
Guides, data and local resources that people want to reference.
Consistent monthly link building beats one big burst.
Competitor research
Your Domain Rating means most when you compare it with the businesses ranking above you. This simple process takes about ten minutes.
Enter your website above and note your Domain Rating. This is your starting point.
Search your main keyword on Google, then check the DR of the three sites ranking at the top.
If competitors are far ahead, you will likely need steady link building. If you are close, better pages may be enough.
Set a realistic monthly backlink target and focus on relevant sites, not just high numbers.
Other metrics
Different SEO tools use their own scores. None of them are used by Google, but they help you compare websites.
| Metric | Tool | What it estimates |
|---|---|---|
| Domain Rating (DR) | Ahrefs | The overall strength of a website's backlink profile, on a scale of 0 to 100. |
| URL Rating (UR) | Ahrefs | The backlink strength of one specific page rather than the whole site. |
| Domain Authority (DA) | Moz | How likely a domain is to rank, based mainly on its links. |
| Authority Score (AS) | Semrush | A combined score using links, traffic and spam signals. |
| Trust Flow and Citation Flow | Majestic | The quality and quantity of links pointing to a site. |
Each tool uses its own data, so the same site will have different scores in different tools. Compare like with like.
Myths
False. DR is an Ahrefs metric. Google uses its own signals, but DR is a useful way to estimate link strength.
Not always. Relevance, content quality and local signals often matter more, especially for local searches.
Paid links from unrelated sites can lead to penalties. Relevant, earned links are safer and last longer.
DR can dip when other sites gain links faster or when old links disappear. Watch the trend, not one day.
Relevance, real traffic and editorial placement matter as much as the number.
They can, especially in local search, with strong pages, a good Google profile and steady link building.
When DR matters
DR is most useful as a comparison and a trend. After 9 years and more than 1,500 campaigns, these are the situations where we find it most helpful:
What to avoid
A higher DR is only useful if it helps you rank for searches that bring business.
A DR of 30 and a DA of 30 are not the same thing.
For local businesses, your Google profile and local pages can matter more than DR.
Many of these come from link farms that Google already ignores or penalizes.
How DR moves
Domain Rating is relative and logarithmic, which means each step up the scale is harder than the one before.
Moving from DR 10 to DR 20 usually takes far fewer quality links than moving from DR 50 to DR 60. The scale is built that way on purpose, because it compares every website against every other website in the index. That is why a small local business does not need the DR of a national news site to win its local searches. It only needs to be strong enough to compete with the sites ranking around it.
Not every new link changes your DR either. Links from websites that already have strong backlink profiles of their own carry more weight, and links from many different websites count for more than many links from the same one. A handful of relevant links from established sites in your industry or area often does more than dozens of weak ones.
That is why we track DR alongside the actual list of links built and your Google rankings. DR shows whether your overall authority is growing, while the rankings show whether that authority is turning into visibility for the searches that bring in customers.
Client portal
Clients see their Domain Rating from Ahrefs in our client portal, alongside every outreach backlink we build. Backlink data is updated every week.
Every outreach backlink we build for you each month is listed with clear analytics, and the backlink data is updated every week.
Your keyword rankings and page rankings come straight from Google. We are approved for Google API data, so the numbers are Google's own.
See which of your pages Google has indexed, pulled directly from Google, so you know your important pages can actually be found.
Track how many times your site appears in Google search and how many people click through, month by month.
Watch your website's Domain Rating (DR), provided by Ahrefs, grow as your backlink profile gets stronger.
On the Growth ($290) and Authority ($499) plans, a calendar shows every upcoming article and the exact date it will be posted.
Clear data for every customer, so you can always see what is being done and what it is achieving.
Client portal loginFAQ
Domain Rating is an Ahrefs metric that shows the strength of a website's backlink profile compared with every other site in the Ahrefs database. It runs from 0 to 100 on a logarithmic scale, so moving from 70 to 80 is much harder than moving from 10 to 20.
Yes. You can check the DR of any website and compare up to 10 domains at once for free, with no signup.
It depends on your competitors. A local business does not need DR 70 to rank; it needs a DR close to or above the sites it competes with for its keywords. Compare your site with your top competitors to see where you stand.
DR (Domain Rating) is made by Ahrefs and DA (Domain Authority) is made by Moz. Both estimate the strength of a site's backlink profile on a 0 to 100 scale, but they use different link data and formulas, so the numbers do not match.
Google does not use DR. It is a third-party estimate. But DR is based on backlinks, and quality backlinks are one of the signals Google does use, so a higher DR often goes along with better rankings.
Earn links from relevant, trusted websites that already have links of their own. Outreach, digital PR, guest content and genuinely useful resources all help. Every MarketingFlow SEO plan includes high-quality outreach backlinks every month.
Ahrefs recalculates DR continuously as it crawls the web. Results here are cached for up to 12 hours.
More free tools: SEO audit tool. Learn more: 10 SEO mistakes killing your traffic.
Free SEO review
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