Domain Rating is a score from 0 to 100 made by Ahrefs. It estimates how strong a website’s backlink profile is compared to other sites. It is not a Google metric.
How DR works
DR looks at how many unique sites link to a domain and how strong those sites are themselves. The scale is logarithmic: going from DR 20 to 30 is much easier than from 70 to 80.
DR vs Domain Authority
Domain Authority (DA) is Moz’s version of the same idea, Authority Score is Semrush’s. They use different data, so the numbers differ. None of them is used by Google.
Why DR alone is a bad buying signal
- DR is easy to inflate with cheap links, so high DR doesn’t mean real authority.
- It says nothing about traffic: plenty of DR 50+ sites get almost no visitors.
- It says nothing about relevance to your site.
When we compare sites we look at organic traffic and its trend, topical fit and outbound links first, and use DR as a tiebreaker. Every site on Linkbuilding.com shows DR and organic traffic side by side for that reason.