Free Domain Rating (DR) Checker

What is Domain Rating?

Domain Rating (DR) is Ahrefs’ 0-to-100 score for how strong a website’s backlink profile is compared with every other site in the Ahrefs index. It is driven by referring domains — the count of unique websites linking to you — weighted by how strong those linking sites are themselves. Links from many strong, independent sites push DR up; a thousand more links from one site you already have barely move it.

The scale is logarithmic, not linear. Going from DR 20 to DR 30 takes a fraction of the effort it takes to go from DR 60 to DR 70, because the web’s link authority is concentrated at the top. That is why a young startup can climb quickly at first and then feel the curve flatten. It is normal, and it is why the first few referring domains you earn are worth so much.

One caveat worth keeping in front of you: DR is a third-party metric and Google does not use it. It is a useful proxy for authority, a fast way to compare two sites, and a good trend line for your own link building. It is not a ranking factor. Treat a rising DR as evidence your link building is working, not as the goal.

What is a good Domain Rating?

There is no absolute threshold, and Ahrefs says so itself: because DR is relative, “it’s not possible to say that a Domain Rating of 30 is good, or 50, or 60, or 70.” The only test that means anything is whether your DR is comparable to the sites you compete with for the same searches. So instead of inventing bands, here are real numbers you can re-check in the box above.

All figures measured with this checker on 25 August 2026. DR is relative and moves, so re-check rather than quoting these a year from now.

Two things fall out of that table. First, every startup directory worth submitting to sat between DR 50 and DR 91 — so a directory advertising a “high DR backlink” at DR 20 is not offering you much. Second, the gap between a household-name platform and a good niche site is only about 20 points, because the scale is logarithmic: DR 97 is not twice DR 50, it is orders of magnitude more link authority.

How many referring domains do you need to hit a given DR?

Nobody can answer that honestly, including us. Ahrefs does not publish a mapping from referring domains to DR and could not produce a stable one, because the score depends on how strong the linking domains are and how many other sites each of them links out to. Ten links from focused, strong domains can beat a thousand from weak ones.

What Ahrefs does publish is the mechanism, and it is worth understanding because it changes how you pick link targets. A linking domain splits its rating across every domain it links to. Ahrefs’ own example: a DR 10 domain that links to three other domains can influence your DR more than a DR 80 domain that links to a million. And nofollow links are ignored entirely — they contribute nothing to DR, which is why checking the rel attribute on a link you just earned matters more than the DR of the site that gave it to you.

How does DR compare to Moz DA, Semrush Authority Score and Ubersuggest?

They measure different things and will disagree, which is expected rather than a bug. DR describes a backlink profile. Moz’s DA predicts ranking likelihood. Semrush’s Authority Score folds estimated organic traffic and spam detection into the number. None of them is Google’s.

Where they disagree most is on sites with unusual shapes. A brand-new site with a handful of very strong links can score respectably on DR and poorly on Semrush’s Authority Score, because it has no organic traffic yet and traffic is one of the eight weighted inputs. A site with a large but low-quality link profile can look fine on raw link counts and get marked down by Semrush’s spam signals. Pick one metric, use it consistently, and compare like with like — mixing DR and DA in the same spreadsheet is how founders end up convinced they are winning or losing when nothing has changed.

Why did my DR drop when I did not lose any links?

Almost always because someone else gained links, not because you lost them. Ahrefs’ own explanation: when a DR 100 website gets more backlinks it cannot be made DR 101, so every other site is pushed down the scale instead. Your absolute link profile is unchanged; your position relative to the web moved.

The other three causes Ahrefs lists are all real and all worth checking before you panic: you lost high-quality dofollow links, a dofollow link you had was switched to nofollow (which makes it invisible to DR entirely), or one of your referring domains dropped in DR and therefore passes less. A single-point drop is noise. A five-point drop is worth opening your referring domains report for.

How do I increase my Domain Rating?

Earn dofollow links from more unique, quality domains — that is the only lever, and everything else is a tactic for pulling it. Publish content worth citing, get listed in relevant directories, write guest posts, pursue digital PR. Each new authoritative domain that links to you adds to the score; each additional link from a domain that already links to you adds close to nothing.

Two practical rules that follow from how DR is calculated. Prefer focused linking sites over famous ones that link to everything, because rating is split across outbound domains. And verify every link you earn, because a nofollow link contributes exactly zero to DR no matter how strong the site is. A verified listing on Launchory is one concrete, founder-friendly way to add a dofollow backlink from a real, indexable page — and you can confirm it yourself with our dofollow checker rather than taking our word for it. If you are working through this systematically, our guide to getting backlinks for a new website and the list of best startup directories are the two places to start.

How this checker works

You enter a domain, we ask the Ahrefs free Domain Rating API, and you get the score back — usually in under two seconds. Unlike most of our founder tools, this one is not browser-only: the request goes to our own API route so the Ahrefs key stays server-side and never reaches your browser. We keep each domain’s score in an in-memory cache for 24 hours and rate-limit to 10 checks per minute per visitor, which is what makes it possible to offer with no account and no email.

Enter a bare domain — yourstartup.com — rather than a full URL. The checker strips https://, a leading www. and any path for you, but DR is a domain-level metric, so a specific page URL will only ever return the score for its domain. For page-level authority you want Ahrefs’ URL Rating, which is not available on the free API.

Frequently asked questions