Domain Rating (DR)

Domain Rating (DR) is a proprietary 0–100 metric from Ahrefs that estimates the strength of a website's backlink profile compared with other sites in Ahrefs' index. It is based on links only and is not used by Google; a higher DR means more and stronger linking domains, not more traffic.

Updated: 2026-10-16 · Glossary: Site metrics

What DR measures

According to Ahrefs' explanation, DR looks at how many unique domains link to a site and how strong those domains are, on a logarithmic scale: moving from 70 to 80 is much harder than from 10 to 20. It does not consider traffic, content quality, spam signals or whether links are nofollow in the same way a search engine might. Moz's Domain Authority and Semrush's Authority Score are similar third-party metrics; see Domain Authority explained.

Why it matters for small sites

DR is widely used as a price filter in guest post marketplaces, which makes it a target for manipulation: links from PBNs can raise DR without bringing a single visitor. For a small site, DR mostly matters when buyers or partners ask for it. A realistic view of target numbers is in What is a good Domain Rating?

How Satelo differs

Satelo does not use Ahrefs DR. Its own Quality Score combines evidence of visitors (Tranco, Chrome UX Report, verified plugin pageviews), open link graphs (Open PageRank, Majestic Million, Common Crawl) and domain age, multiplied by content and technical health, so a site with real readers but few links is not stuck at zero. The score sets the recommended article price in satellites and helps match sites of a similar level. Check any domain free at satelo.io/check/.

Related terms

• Satelo Quality Score: The Satelo Quality Score is a 0–100 rating of a website built mostly from open data: popularity lists, open link graphs, domain age, plus a crawl of the site's content and technical health.
• Tranco list: Tranco is a free, research-oriented ranking of the most popular one million domains on the web.
• PBN (private blog network): A PBN (private blog network) is a group of websites controlled by one person or company and used mainly to link to a “money site” in order to raise its search rankings.
• Guest post: A guest post is an article written by someone outside the site and published on that site under the author's or a partner's name.

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