What Is Domain Rating (DR)? How Ahrefs DR Works

Domain Rating (DR) is an Ahrefs metric that scores the strength of a website's backlink profile on a scale from 0 to 100, compared with every other site in Ahrefs' database. It is not a Google ranking factor: Google ranks pages using its own link analysis and many other signals, so a lower DR site can and often does outrank a higher DR site.

This guide is for e-commerce and Shopify teams who see DR in pitches, agency reports and link offers and want to know what it actually measures. You'll get Ahrefs' own explanation of how DR is calculated, why it moves when nothing on your site changed, how it compares with Moz DA and Semrush Authority Score, when it is useful, when it misleads, and a step-by-step way to use it in competitor research without turning it into a vanity goal.

What is Domain Rating in SEO?

Ahrefs describes Domain Rating as a measure that shows the strength of a website's backlink profile compared with the other sites in its database, on a 100-point scale. Three details in that definition matter more than the number itself.

• It is an Ahrefs metric. Ahrefs calculates DR from its own crawl of the web. Other tools have their own scores (Moz has Domain Authority, Semrush has Authority Score), and the numbers are not interchangeable.
• It is about links only. Ahrefs' DR explainer by Tim Soulo calls it a metric based purely on links. Content quality, traffic, conversion rate and technical health do not feed into it.
• It is relative. Ahrefs' help center says DR is only meaningful when you compare similar sites, and that one site's gain can push other sites down the scale.

DR also works at the domain level. Its page level counterpart is URL Rating (UR), which scores the link strength of a single URL. Ahrefs' help documentation notes that DR correlates with Google rankings reasonably well, but less well than UR does, which makes sense: Google ranks pages, not whole websites.

If you came here for Moz's score, our guide to what DA means covers Domain Authority in detail. This post stays focused on Ahrefs' DR.

How Ahrefs calculates Domain Rating

Ahrefs publishes a simplified version of the method. In its DR explainer (Tim Soulo, May 2022) and its help center, the process looks like this:

1. Find linking domains. Ahrefs finds every domain with at least one followed link to the target site.
2. Weigh each linking domain by its own DR. A link from a higher DR domain passes more value.
3. Split that value across everything the linker links to. Each source domain divides its rating equally among the unique domains it links out to. A site that links to five domains passes far more to each one than a site that links to 50,000.
4. Repeat across the whole database. These calculations run repeatedly to produce a rating for every domain.
5. Scale the result to 0 to 100. The raw value is converted to the 0 to 100 range.

Ahrefs itself calls this a severely oversimplified explanation, so treat the steps as a mental model, not a formula you can reproduce. The chart below uses that simplified "rating divided by linked domains" idea with the examples Ahrefs gives in its own documentation.

The point is not the exact numbers. It is the shape: a small, focused site that links to only a few domains can pass more DR than a giant publisher that links to hundreds of thousands. Ahrefs' help center makes exactly this point, saying a DR 10 domain linking to three domains can influence your DR more than a DR 80 domain linking to a million.

Rules that surprise most store owners

• Only followed links count. Ahrefs states that if a site links to you only with nofollow links, it won't increase your DR. See our guide to dofollow backlinks for how link attributes work.
• Only the first link from each domain counts. Ten links from the same blog move DR no more than one.
• The scale is logarithmic. Ahrefs says going from DR 70 to 71 is much harder than going from DR 20 to 21.
• Internal links don't count. DR is calculated from other domains linking to you, so internal linking helps your pages rank but does not change DR.

Why your DR changes when nothing changed

Because DR is relative, your score can drop even if you didn't lose a single backlink. Ahrefs' help center explains that DR increases for other sites can push yours down the scale. The most common reasons a store's DR moves are:

Use the anchor text analyzer to spot patterns in a link profile that look manufactured, such as dozens of exact match commercial anchors.

Is Domain Rating a Google ranking factor?

No. DR is calculated by Ahrefs, and Google does not use third party scores from SEO tools. What Google does say is that links still matter in its own way. Its ranking systems guide (last updated December 2025) states that how PageRank works has evolved a lot and that it continues to be part of Google's core ranking systems. The same guide says site-wide signals are used, but that good site-wide signals do not mean all content from a site will always rank highly.

So DR and Google are measuring overlapping things (who links to whom) in different ways, with different crawls, and Google combines link signals with relevance, content quality, page experience and many other systems. That is why a focused category page on a DR 30 Shopify store can outrank a thin page on a DR 80 marketplace for a specific product query.

Links still pay off, which is why DR is tempting

Ahrefs' own search traffic study (Tim Soulo, December 2023, about 14 billion pages) shows how few pages earn any search traffic at all. The same study notes that only a tiny fraction of pages with no referring domains get meaningful traffic: about 1 in every 6,671.

The lesson is not "raise your DR." It is "earn links to the pages you need to rank," because a page with zero referring domains rarely gets traffic, no matter what the domain's DR says.

DR vs DA vs Authority Score

Every major SEO tool has its own domain score. They are built from different crawls and different formulas, so a site can be DR 45, DA 38 and Authority Score 30 at the same time. Compare like with like.

Two practical rules follow. First, never compare one tool's score against another tool's score. Second, when an agency or link seller quotes a number, ask which tool and when it was checked, because the same site can look very different across tools.

What is a good Domain Rating?

Ahrefs does not publish a "good" DR benchmark, and for good reason: the number only means something next to the sites you compete with. Ahrefs' own advice in its DR explainer is to compare yourself with competitors that have a similar DR, and that a DR 20 site should not chase keywords that DR 80 sites rank for.

For an e-commerce store, a useful definition of "good" is:

• Close enough to the stores ranking for your money keywords. If the top results for your category terms are DR 25 to 40 specialty stores, you don't need DR 70 to compete.
• Trending up as a byproduct of real links. Ahrefs says both DR and search traffic tend to grow naturally when you focus on quality content and backlinks.
• Backed by pages that earn links. A healthy profile has links pointing to guides, tools, research and product or category pages, not only the homepage.

When DR is useful (and when it misleads)

DR and AI search

Links are not the whole story in AI answers either. A June 2025 Ahrefs analysis by Patrick Stox compared the 50 most-mentioned domains in Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity against Ahrefs Rank, a link-based ranking of sites, and found weak or no correlation for each, with the author cautioning that the sample was small. Brand mentions, clear answers and being present where people discuss your category matter alongside links. Our guides on unlinked brand mentions and how to appear in ChatGPT cover that side.

How to check and use DR, step by step

Here is a practical workflow for using DR in competitor research without letting it set your strategy.

1. Check your DR in Ahrefs. Use Ahrefs Site Explorer, or Ahrefs' free website authority checker for a quick look. Note the date, since DR moves.
2. List the stores ranking for your money keywords. Take your top 10 category and product keywords and record who holds positions 1 to 5. Ignore marketplaces and giant retailers you can't realistically displace on head terms.
3. Record DR and referring domains for each. DR alone hides a lot. A DR 40 site with 300 referring domains is a different competitor from a DR 40 site with 3,000.
4. Find your realistic battles. Keywords where the ranking pages belong to sites near your DR, and where those pages have few referring domains themselves, are your best targets.
5. Look at which pages earn their links. In each competitor's best by links report, note the formats that attract links: buying guides, size charts, calculators, original research.
6. Build or improve linkable pages. Create the better version for your niche and connect it to your category pages with internal links. Check them with the internal link checker.
7. Earn links with outreach and PR, not purchases. Our guide to link building covers methods that stay inside Google's spam policies.
8. Measure revenue, not DR. Track rankings, organic sessions and organic revenue for the pages you built links to. DR is a side effect to glance at quarterly.

How to raise DR the right way

If DR is a byproduct of good links, then raising it is really about earning links from many relevant, independent domains. Approaches that work well for e-commerce brands:

• Publish genuinely useful resources. Fit guides, care instructions, comparison tables and calculators get cited by bloggers and forums in a way product pages rarely do.
• Turn brand mentions into links. Search for articles that already name your brand or products without linking, and ask politely for a link.
• Give journalists something to quote. Original data from your own store (with customer privacy protected) or expert commentary from your founder can earn editorial links.
• Work your supplier and partner network. Manufacturers, stockists and collaborators often list partners. These links are relevant and legitimate when they reflect a real relationship.
• Fix lost and broken links. Redirect old URLs that still have backlinks so their value reaches a live page. The 404 redirect helper makes the mapping faster.

What to avoid: paid guest post packages sold by DR tier, private blog networks, link exchanges at scale and sitewide footer links. These fit the examples in Google's link spam policy, and when Google ignores or acts on them you are left with a higher DR number and no ranking benefit.

Put DR in its place

DR is a fast, useful way to compare link profiles, and Ahrefs is open about what it measures: followed links from unique domains, weighted by the linker's own strength and how many sites it links to. It is not what Google uses, it can drop when nothing changed, and it says nothing about whether a given page deserves to rank. Use it to pick realistic battles, then spend your effort on pages that earn links and convert. If you want a second opinion on where your store stands against the competitors that actually rank for your keywords, talk to our team.