Domain Rating checker

What is Domain Rating?

Domain Rating is Ahrefs’ 0 to 100 score of how strong a website’s backlink profile is. It counts the sites that link to you, weighted by how strong those sites are in turn. It is not a Google metric and Google does not use it.

The scale is logarithmic, which is the part most pages skip. Moving from 10 to 20 takes a handful of decent links. Moving from 70 to 80 takes thousands. A drop of one point at DR 78 is a different event from a drop of one point at DR 8, and a tool that shows you today’s number alone cannot tell you which one you had.

How this checker reads it

Type a domain and Domduck reads five things at once: the Domain Rating from Ahrefs, the popularity rank from the Tranco research list, the registration record from RDAP, the TLS certificate straight from the domain, and the robots.txt policy for eight AI crawlers.

Every reading is written down with the date it was taken, and it stays. That is the whole difference between this and the thirty other free checkers. They answer and forget. The answer here becomes row one of a record, and if you come back in March the reading from August is still there.

What is a good Domain Rating?

There is no threshold that means anything on its own. A DR 30 site in a quiet niche can outrank a DR 70 site that has nothing to say about the query. The number is useful in two places: against your own number last month, and against the specific sites you compete with for a specific search.

Treat any page that tells you to aim for DR 50 with suspicion. It is usually selling links.

Why did my Domain Rating drop?

Four common reasons, in the order they actually happen. A large linking site lost its own rating, so the value it passed you fell with it. A batch of links was removed or the pages holding them went 404. Ahrefs recrawled and dropped links it can no longer see. Or nothing happened to you at all and the scale moved, because the score is relative to every other domain.

You cannot tell those apart from one reading. You can tell them apart from a dated series, which is why the chart matters more than the number.

Domain Rating and Domain Authority are not the same metric

Domain Rating is Ahrefs. Domain Authority is Moz. They use different indexes, different formulas and different scales, so a DR 40 and a DA 40 are not the same claim about the same site. Do not compare one against the other and do not average them.

Domduck reports Domain Rating and an independent authority score from OpenPageRank. It does not report Domain Authority, because it has no Moz data and inventing a substitute would be worse than leaving the column out.

What else lands on the result

The result page for a domain carries its popularity rank, its age, its certificate expiry, its DNS records, its registrar and its AI crawler policy, each with the date Domduck read it. That combination is the reason to use this instead of a rating checker: the market has domain monitors that know nothing about search, and search tools that do not know your certificate expires on Thursday.

Is it free, and what is the catch?

It is free with no account and no email. The catch, stated plainly, is that four of the five columns cost us close to nothing. We read robots.txt, the certificate and the DNS records ourselves, and the popularity rank comes from a file already on our disk. Only the Domain Rating costs a request against somebody else’s budget.

So the free tier has no domain cap, and it never will. Why it is free has the arithmetic.

Checking more than one domain

Paste up to 100 into the bulk Domain Rating checker. The 100 is on the rating alone. Popularity rank, certificate expiry and AI crawler policy have no cap there at any tier, because we measure those ourselves.

Every free tool here