Free tool
Domain Rating (DR) Checker
Look up the domain rating of any site in one step.
How it works
What is the Domain Rating (DR) Checker?
The Domain Rating (DR) Checker is a free tool that looks up a website's Domain Rating, the 0 to 100 score Ahrefs gives the strength of a site's backlink profile. It returns the number and a band from Low to Exceptional Authority, so you can see at a glance how a site compares with the ones it competes against.
How to use the Domain Rating (DR) Checker
- Enter the domain, such as example.com. Any path is ignored, because Domain Rating describes the whole site.
- Press Check domain rating.
- Read the score and its band: Low Authority up to 25, Good up to 50, Strong up to 75 and Exceptional above that.
What is Domain Rating?
Domain Rating is Ahrefs' 0 to 100 score for the strength of a website's backlink profile. Ahrefs calculates it from how many unique domains link to the site with followed links, the DR of those domains, and how many other sites each of them links to. A link from a site that links out to few others counts for more.
The scale is logarithmic, so the gaps widen as you climb. Moving from DR 20 to 30 takes far less than moving from 70 to 80.
Is Domain Rating a Google ranking factor?
No. Domain Rating is a third-party metric built from Ahrefs' own crawl, and Google does not use it. Google has said it has no site-wide authority score of this kind, and pages outrank sites with a far higher DR all the time.
DR also says nothing about traffic, relevance or link quality, and nothing about any single page. It is a site-wide number, while each URL has its own link profile.
How should you use Domain Rating?
Use DR to compare sites, not to grade one. It works for screening link prospects, sizing up competitors and watching your own trend over months. It makes a poor KPI, because it moves when Ahrefs refreshes its index and when other sites gain links, not only when you do.
Pair it with a number that measures outcomes, such as organic traffic or leads. Two sites with the same DR can be very different businesses.
Where does this checker's score come from?
The score comes from Ahrefs' free Domain Rating endpoint, and the card says so with a "Domain Rating by Ahrefs" line under the number. The tool sends the hostname you entered, so www.example.com and blog.example.com are looked up as written.
If Ahrefs returns no score, the checker can fall back to Open PageRank, a separate 0 to 10 metric that it multiplies by 10. The card then reads "Domain authority from Open PageRank" and notes that it is not Ahrefs DR. Treat that number as its own scale and do not compare it with a DR figure from Ahrefs.
Domain Rating vs Domain Authority vs Authority Score: which should I use?
Use whichever one your team already tracks, and compare sites only on the same metric. Domain Rating is Ahrefs', Domain Authority is Moz's and Authority Score is Semrush's. All three run from 0 to 100 and are built from each company's own link index, so the same site gets three different numbers and none of them is the true one.
Moz also publishes Page Authority, which is what a DA PA checker shows next to Domain Authority: the same idea scored for a single URL. Ahrefs' page-level counterpart is URL Rating. A page-level score is the better guide when you are judging one link, because a strong domain can still have a weak page.
What do the Low, Good, Strong and Exceptional bands mean?
The bands are fixed cut-offs on the score: 25 and below is Low Authority, above 25 up to 50 Good, above 50 up to 75 Strong and above 75 Exceptional. They describe the number, not your market, so read them against the sites you compete with rather than as a grade.
A new local business in the Low band can still win its local searches if its rivals sit there too. A software site in the Strong band can still struggle against competitors in the 80s. When a lower-DR page outranks you, the reason is often on the page itself, which the On-Page SEO Checker helps you compare.
Questions
- What is a good Domain Rating?
- A good Domain Rating is one close to or above the sites that rank for your target searches. If they sit between 35 and 50, that is your bar. The Keyword Rank Checker shows where your own site ranks for those searches. DR 60 is unremarkable for a large software brand and very high for a local business.
- What is the difference between Domain Rating and Domain Authority?
- Domain Rating is Ahrefs' score and Domain Authority is Moz's. Both run from 0 to 100 and both are built from links, but on different link indexes and formulas, so the same site often gets different numbers. Google uses neither.
- How do I increase my Domain Rating?
- You increase Domain Rating by earning followed links from domains that have not linked to you before, ideally ones with a strong DR of their own. More links from a site that already links to you add little. Buying links breaks Google's spam policies, whatever it does to DR.
- How is Domain Rating calculated?
- Ahrefs calculates Domain Rating from the unique domains with followed links to a site, weighting each by its own DR and sharing that weight across all the sites it links to. The result is placed on a logarithmic 0 to 100 scale.
- Why is my Domain Rating dropping?
- Domain Rating can drop without you losing links, because it is relative to every other site in Ahrefs' index. If other sites gain links faster, or Ahrefs recrawls and drops linking domains that have died, your score falls.
- Is this Domain Rating checker free?
- Yes, this Domain Rating checker is free and needs no sign-up. Enter any domain and you get its score and band in one step.
- Is Domain Rating the same as PageRank?
- No. PageRank is Google's own link algorithm, and Google stopped showing public PageRank scores years ago. Domain Rating is a separate score that Ahrefs computes from its own crawl of the web, so it can track similar ideas but is not a reading of Google's data.
- Do nofollow links count toward Domain Rating?
- No. Domain Rating counts only followed links from unique referring domains. Nofollow links can still send visitors and help people find you, but they do not move this score.
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