What Is Domain Rating (DR)?
Domain Rating (DR) is a metric that scores the overall strength of a website’s backlink profile on a scale of 0 to 100. The higher the score, the more (and stronger) backlinks a site has pointing to it from across the web.
DR is a proprietary Ahrefs metric, but it’s become an informal industry shorthand for “how authoritative does this site look.” SEOs use it to size up link-building prospects, benchmark competitors, and get a rough read on how hard it might be to compete with a given domain.
How Ahrefs Calculates It
DR runs on a logarithmic scale, not a linear one. That means the jump from DR 20 to DR 21 is far easier to make than the jump from DR 75 to DR 76 — the closer a site gets to 100, the harder each additional point becomes to earn.
The score is driven mainly by:
- The number of unique referring domains linking to the site
- The DR of those referring domains (higher-DR links pass more value)
- How many other sites each referring domain links out to (link equity gets diluted the more it’s split)
- Nofollow links, which don’t pass DR at all
DR vs UR
Domain Rating measures the whole domain. URL Rating (UR) measures a single page. A site can have a high DR overall while an individual page on it still has a low UR if that specific page has few backlinks of its own.
What Counts as a “Good” DR Score
There’s no universal cutoff, since it depends entirely on your niche and competitors. A new site typically starts at DR 0-10. Established small business sites often sit in the 20-40 range. Major publishers and well-linked brands can push past 70-80. The useful comparison isn’t an absolute number — it’s your DR relative to the sites currently ranking for the keywords you’re targeting.
