Free Domain Rating Checker

Ahrefs calculates Domain Rating from your backlink profile alone — it ignores on-page content, traffic and keywords. What matters is how many unique websites link to you, how strong those linking sites are, and how many other sites they link out to. A single link from a DR 90 site can move your score more than hundreds of links from weak or spammy domains.

Because the scale is logarithmic, DR gets exponentially harder to grow as it rises. Going from DR 20 to 30 might take a handful of good links; going from 70 to 80 can take years of sustained link building.

• The number of unique referring domains — not the total number of links
• The Domain Rating of each linking site
• How many other sites each of those domains links out to
• Only dofollow links pass this strength

There is no shortcut — DR follows real, editorially given links. The safest, most durable ways to grow it:

• Earn links from relevant, higher-DR websites in your niche
• Publish genuinely link-worthy assets: original data, free tools and in-depth guides
• Turn unlinked brand mentions into real backlinks
• Clean up or disavow spammy links that add nothing
• Be patient and consistent — DR is logarithmic and rewards steady effort

No. Domain Rating is Ahrefs' own metric, not something Google uses to rank pages. Google has repeatedly said it has no single domain authority score. DR is a useful proxy for backlink strength and a quick way to size up competitors, but a focused page on a lower-DR site can and does outrank higher-DR sites on relevant, well-optimized content. Treat DR as a benchmark, not a guarantee.

Ahrefs recalculates Domain Rating as it recrawls the web — for most sites that means every few days. New links take time to be discovered and counted, so DR reacts slowly to changes. This checker caches each domain's score briefly to stay fast and within Ahrefs' rate limits, so a very recent change may take a little while to appear.