A new website with few established backlinks may have a Domain Rating close to zero. A major publication with years of accumulated references may sit in the 80s or 90s. That is a meaningful difference, even though Google does not use Ahrefs’ score to decide where a page ranks.
The useful question is what the number tells you about the website you are looking at. It can reveal a substantial difference in backlink strength, help you compare competitors and give you somewhere to begin an investigation. It cannot tell you whether a particular article is accurate, whether a paid placement is worth buying or whether your page will outrank another.
My view: dismissing these scores entirely loses useful information. I would take the difference between a barely linked new website and an established publisher seriously. I would then examine the links, audience and relevant pages before deciding what that difference means for the work.
What DA, DR and Trust Flow measure
These are scores produced by SEO software companies using their own data and methods. Their names sound similar, but they answer somewhat different questions.
| Metric | What it describes | How to read it |
|---|---|---|
| DR Ahrefs · 0–100 | The relative strength of a domain’s backlink profile. | A comparison of link profiles within Ahrefs’ index, rather than a score for content quality. |
| DA Moz · 1–100 | A model estimating a domain’s likelihood of ranking, using Moz’s link data and other inputs. | A comparative prediction, rather than a measurement supplied by Google. |
| TF Majestic · 0–100 | A link-based quality score built around connections to manually reviewed trusted seed sites. | Evidence about the link network, rather than a certification of the publisher’s reliability. |
Ahrefs explains DR in terms of linking domains and their strength, while Moz describes DA as a predictive metric. Majestic’s Trust Flow starts from its reviewed seed sites. Their datasets and calculations differ, so DA 40 and DR 40 are not interchangeable.
Google has its own systems. Its ranking-systems guide includes link analysis and PageRank, alongside many other methods of assessing results. None of these third-party scores is Google’s published assessment of your website.
A large difference can tell you something
When a new site has very low DR, the reasonable starting interpretation is that it has little backlink strength recorded in Ahrefs’ index. It may still contain excellent work. An established publisher’s much higher score can reflect the references it has accumulated across the web, without guaranteeing the quality of every page it publishes.
A limited recorded link profile
Few established referring websites can leave a new domain near the bottom of the scale. This says little about the expertise of the people behind it.
Look next: Has Ahrefs discovered its links? Who has referenced the business, and which pages can already answer a useful search?
These ranges illustrate possible situations. They are not measured averages, quality grades or thresholds for ranking.
DR uses a logarithmic scale: a move from 70 to 80 is much harder than a move from 10 to 20. It is also relative to other sites in the index. Treating each extra point as an equal gain in authority would give a misleading impression of progress.
For planning, compare your site with businesses competing for the same searches. A local specialist does not need to resemble a national newspaper’s entire backlink profile to publish a useful answer for its customers.
DR is widely used, with survey evidence behind it
In Aira’s 2022 State of Link Building survey, 67% of respondents used DR to assess link authority or quality, compared with 42% using DA. The report drew on 270 practitioners across agencies, in-house teams and freelance work.
Respondents could use more than one metric. Percentages are not market shares.
The current Editorial.Link report points in the same direction. Among 518 respondents, 64.1% selected Ahrefs’ DR/UR when asked to choose one metric family; 11.6% chose Moz’s DA/PA. The pairing matters: this question did not measure DR alone.
These surveys support describing DR as more commonly used among the link-building practitioners surveyed. They do not establish global software usage. Editorial.Link’s separate question about the “best” SEO tool measures preference, and its sample was recruited through outreach, ads and email. Popularity also does not make one score a more accurate forecast for your website.
Research supports comparison, with limits
Two different questions often get mixed together: whether the tools broadly agree about websites, and whether a score predicts a page’s ranking. Evidence for one does not establish the other.
Do the tools agree?
A 2023 journal study by Reyes-Lillo, Morales-Vargas and Rovira compared 3,151 domains drawn from 61 queries. Pairwise correlations between Moz, Ahrefs and Semrush scores exceeded 0.9.
This shows strong agreement in how the tools ordered that sample. It does not show that any of them reproduced Google’s assessment.
Does DR predict rankings?
Ahrefs’ January 2025 study examined the top 20 results for one million high-volume US keywords. DR had a Spearman correlation of 0.131 with ranking, compared with 0.255 for referring-domain count.
That is a small positive association for DR. A higher score alone is a weak basis for forecasting a particular position.
A newer Collaborator study of 40,000 marketplace websites found weaker agreement between metrics overall: no pair exceeded 0.7. Its selected commercial inventory differs from the academic sample, and the tools can change over time. The studies are a reason to inspect the population and method before treating a coefficient as a universal property of DA or DR.
For everyday work, the distinction is practical. A large gap can help identify a competitor with a much more established link profile. A small gap does not explain why one page wins a particular search.
Authority scores can be manipulated
A high score can also reflect links arranged to inflate the metric. Some operators use private blog networks (PBNs): groups of websites they control and use to place links. These can create the appearance of support from multiple publishers, even when the links were arranged by one operator and serve little purpose beyond boosting a target website’s metrics or rankings.
Ahrefs has acknowledged that link spam can inflate DR. In its explanation, it notes that low-quality backlinks can increase the score, while also saying it has closed many previously exploited loopholes. That is a useful reason to inspect the underlying links; it is not evidence that every PBN will raise a score, or that DA and DR respond identically.
A higher score does not establish an authoritative website. A link placed on a controlled network is not the same evidence of recognition as an independent publisher choosing to reference useful work. The number can rise without a corresponding improvement in expertise, readership or editorial credibility.
When assessing a high-DA or high-DR website, read its recent articles and inspect its referring sites. Unrelated topics, repetitive content and pages built around commercial outbound links deserve closer attention. These are reasons to investigate, rather than proof of a PBN on their own. Google’s link-spam policy also covers links created primarily to manipulate rankings, regardless of whether an SEO tool awards the site a higher score.
Use the score to decide what to inspect
| What you see | What to check next |
|---|---|
| Competitors have much higher DR | Compare relevant referring sites and the pages attracting links. Check whether the ranking pages actually serve the same intent as yours. |
| A publisher offers a high-DR placement | Read its recent work, inspect the proposed page and assess audience relevance, outbound links and sponsorship terms. |
| Your score rises without more enquiries | Review the new links, referral visits, search visibility and conversions. The score is an intermediate observation, not the business result. |
| Your score falls | Check lost links, index or calculation changes and actual search performance before assuming Google has penalised the site. |
A link from a relevant specialist publication may be more useful to your business than an unrelated placement on a higher-scoring domain. Read the page and understand why a reader would follow the link. My backlink guide covers that assessment, along with outreach and monitoring tools.
Keep comparisons consistent: the same metric, the same scope and a recorded date. Avoid setting a target such as “reach DR 50” without explaining what stronger visibility, useful coverage or customer activity the work is meant to achieve.
A high score does not guarantee an AI citation
The same caution applies to AI search. Surfer analysed roughly five million citation-source URLs across 20,000 prompts and found little relationship between citation likelihood and the authority measures it tested. Those were Common Crawl PageRank, Harmonic Centrality and a Domain Score supplied through DataForSEO, rather than Moz DA or Ahrefs DR.
We should not present that study as proof that DR is irrelevant to AI search, or promise that raising DR will produce citations. Use authority scores as part of understanding a site’s wider link profile, then measure the outcomes you actually want: relevant search visits, enquiries, brand mentions or source citations.
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SEO consultant working across search strategy, technical SEO, content and international growth. I help businesses become easier to find, understand and trust, including through AI search.
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