Domain Rating (DR)

third-party SEO metric

01 Definition

Domain Rating (DR) meaning: Ahrefs' 0 to 100 score of a website's overall backlink profile strength.

Domain Rating is an Ahrefs metric, scored 0 to 100 on a logarithmic scale, that rates the strength of a site's backlink profile relative to others in Ahrefs' index. It considers linking domains and their own authority. DR is proprietary to Ahrefs and is not a factor Google uses to rank pages.

Also called

DR

Why it matters

How Domain Rating (DR) fits the work

It offers a quick way to compare the relative link authority of sites, useful for vetting link prospects and benchmarking competitors.

In context

The competitor's site held a Domain Rating of 74, while the client sat at 51, marking a clear link authority gap.

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Practical note

DR reflects only backlinks, not content, traffic, or relevance, and it can be inflated with low-quality links. Never treat it as an official Google ranking signal.