Domain Rating

Domain Rating is Ahrefs' 0 to 100 score for the strength of a domain's backlink profile. It is calculated from Ahrefs' own crawl of the web, and it is not a Google metric. Google has no public domain-level score, and any tool that implies otherwise is describing a third-party estimate.

Three properties decide how to read it:

• Logarithmic. Going from 20 to 30 takes a fraction of the links that going from 70 to 80 takes. A flat line in the seventies is not a stalled site.
• Relative. The scale is normalized against the whole index, so a domain can drop a point without losing a link, because other domains gained.
• Backlinks only. It says nothing about content, traffic, conversions or whether anybody reads the site.

What a good Domain Rating is

There is no threshold that means anything on its own. Most of the web sits in single digits. A new domain starts at 0 and stays there for months, which is normal and not a problem to fix.

The useful reading is the shape of your own line, and the comparison is against the sites you compete with rather than against a number from a blog post. A rating that has moved from 4 to 11 over six months is a site that is working. A rating of 30 that has not moved in a year is a site that stopped.

Why it moves when you did nothing

Four reasons, in rough order of how often they explain it:

1. The index refreshed. Links Ahrefs previously counted were recrawled and some are gone.
2. The scale moved. Other domains gained, so yours slipped a point without losing anything.
3. A big linking page changed. One strong link removed can cost more than ten weak ones added.
4. Real link loss, which is the case people assume first and which is usually the last one to check.

None of those is visible in today's number. All of them are visible in a series, which is the argument for recording it daily rather than looking it up when something feels wrong.

What Domduck records

The ahrefs_dr source, once a day per tracked domain, stored as one numeric reading with a date. Nothing is overwritten, so the series is replayable years later.

History starts the day you add a domain. The free endpoint publishes today's value and nothing else, so nobody can backfill a rating series, including us. That is the single strongest argument for starting one today rather than on the day you need the chart.

The other scores

Domain Authority is Moz's, URL Rating is the per-page version of this one, and OpenPageRank is free and built from the Common Crawl link graph. They disagree with each other constantly, because they crawl different webs. Do not convert between them.