Domain Rating (DR)

What Is Domain Rating?

Domain Rating complements Moz’s Domain Authority as a second perspective on your domain’s backlink strength. Since Ahrefs and Moz use different crawlers and algorithms, comparing both values is worthwhile. In practical link building, the DR value helps when selecting potential link sources and estimating how powerful a backlink from a specific domain really is.

Domain Rating (DR) is Ahrefs’ equivalent of Moz’s Domain Authority — a metric for evaluating the backlink strength of a domain on a scale of 0 to 100. DR is calculated based on the link profile and is intended to predict how well a domain will rank in search results. Unlike Domain Authority, DR focuses more heavily on the raw strength of the backlink profile rather than technical SEO or on-page factors. For link analysis, DR is a widely used benchmark metric.

Technically, Domain Rating is based on the same logic as DA, but uses Ahrefs’ own algorithms and crawl data. Ahrefs crawls significantly more of the web than many competitors and updates DR values daily. A DR-50 on Ahrefs can easily differ from the DA score on Moz — both systems have different methods and different crawl perspectives. For precise competitive analysis, it’s useful to consider multiple metrics rather than relying on just one.

In practice, Domain Rating is often used for link profile analysis and broken link building: you identify high-quality websites with a high DR, find broken links, and offer suitable replacement content. Metrics like DR also play a role in link cost negotiations (for paid links). However, be aware that Domain Rating, like DA, is a rough guide — not all links from DR-80 sites are valuable, and not all links from DR-30 sites are worthless.