What's your Domain Rating?
Enter any domain to see its Ahrefs Domain Rating, a 0-100 read on backlink authority. Free, instant, no login.
Data: Domain Rating by Ahrefs · 0-100 scale
A quick score for backlink authority.
In plain English: Domain Rating (DR) is Ahrefs' way of summing up how strong a website's backlinks are on a single 0-100 scale. The more high-quality sites link to you, and the stronger those sites are, the higher your DR. Here's what it does and doesn't tell you.
What DR actually measures
Domain Rating is Ahrefs' 0-100 score of how strong and trustworthy a site's backlink profile is, compared to every other site in their database. It's a relative benchmark, not an absolute grade. A DR 60 site simply has a stronger link profile than most DR 40 sites.
It's logarithmic
The scale gets steeper as it climbs. Moving from DR 20 to 21 is fairly easy; moving from 70 to 71 is dramatically harder and takes far more high-quality links. So don't expect a straight line: early gains come quickly, top-end gains are earned slowly.
What DR is NOT
It is not a Google ranking factor. Google doesn't use Ahrefs' score. It's also not your traffic, and it's not Moz's Domain Authority (DA), which is a different company's metric. Treat DR as a useful third-party benchmark, not gospel.
Why it's worth tracking
Higher DR generally correlates with ranking power and the link equity you can pass to your own pages. It's handy for benchmarking against competitors, vetting link & PR opportunities (is this publication actually authoritative?), and tracking your authority growth over time.
DR isn't an AI-visibility score, but they share one root cause.
A high Domain Rating doesn't mean ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity will mention you, DR only measures backlinks. But the thing that raises DR and the thing that gets you cited by AI are the same thing: earned editorial mentions in publications the whole web already trusts. Those placements feed both Google's link graph and the training data and live sources AI assistants pull from. So as you build authority, you're improving on two fronts at once, not picking between SEO and GEO.
Curious how AI sees you today? Run the free AI Visibility Checker to see whether assistants already mention your brand, then come back and benchmark your DR against the competitors that do.
DR goes up when the right sites link to you.
There's no shortcut and no button to press. The only durable way to raise Domain Rating is to earn high-quality backlinks from authoritative, relevant websites: the kind that editors place because your insight is worth citing, not the kind you buy. That's exactly what digital PR and earned media deliver: real mentions and links from publications people, search engines, and AI assistants already trust. Cheap link schemes move the number briefly and put you at risk; earned links compound and stick.
Pick the path that fits where you are.
The same earned authority that lifts your Domain Rating is what gets you cited by AI. Whether you want the links, the AI citations, or the in-house capability, here's how we help.
Earned Media Booster
Reactive digital PR: we pitch your expertise to journalists on HARO, Qwoted and Featured, earning high-authority backlinks and brand mentions from DR 40-90 publications.
Earn the links → Done-for-you · Authority + AIEarned Media Engine
We make you the story: original research, proprietary data, and interactive tools that journalists cover and AI systems cite by name. The most direct path to getting named in ChatGPT and Perplexity.
Get cited by AI → Done-with-you · In-houseEarned Media OS
A guided, done-with-you cohort for founders that builds earned-media capability inside your own team. Not a course, not a retainer, you own the system forever.
Build it in-house →Keep going with the rest of the toolkit.
AI Visibility Checker
Find out if AI assistants like Claude, ChatGPT, and Perplexity would mention your brand. Enter your brand and industry - get an instant score and 3 specific ways to improve.
Open tool → Free AI Visibilityllms.txt Generator
Generate an llms.txt file so AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity can find and cite the right pages on your site.
Open tool → Free Digital PR · Earned MediaLink Worthiness Scorer
Paste a headline or content idea and get a 0-100 score on how likely it is to earn editorial backlinks - across the 10 newsworthiness signals journalists respond to, plus specific fixes.
Open tool →Earn the links that move the number.
Earned media and digital PR are how you earn links from sites like Forbes, MSN, and Mashable. Those placements raise Domain Rating and get you cited by AI. See how we do it.
Real editorial links · Earned, never bought