How authoritative is a domain — and how do you stack up against competitors? A 0–100 domain-rank score from live backlink data (Ahrefs-DR-style) for up to 10 domains at once, sorted strongest-first.
Since 2026-07-05 our tracker has taken 55 snapshots of 9 live sites. The strongest profile — 2,985 links from 489 referring domains — also carried 235 broken links. Another site had 51 backlinks and 64 broken ones: more dead than alive. Two domains, including our own, had zero referring domains at all.
That is the whole argument of this page in one table. An authority number summarises the live part of a profile; it says nothing about how much of it is rotting, and nothing about whether the count is 51 links from 43 sites or 3 000 from 489. Two profiles with the same score can be different animals.
What this measurement is and is not. Nine client sites, one provider's crawl, latest snapshot per domain as of 2026-08-16. It shows the kinds of profile that hide behind a number, not the distribution across the web. Your own profile will look different; the point is to read its shape, not its score.
Every "authority" metric — DA, DR, Authority Score — is a vendor's model of how strong a backlink profile looks, on a 0–100 logarithmic scale. Google has stated repeatedly that it uses no such site-wide score.
That does not make it useless. It makes it a comparison tool: useful for ranking prospects against each other, worthless as a target to optimise.
Each vendor crawls its own slice of the web and applies its own formula. This checker reads a 0–1 000 provider scale and shows it as 0–100, so it will not match Moz or Ahrefs digit for digit — and they do not match each other. Compare within one tool. Never compare across tools.
The practical rule: pick one source, measure yourself and the sites currently ranking for your keywords in that source, and read the gap. The gap transfers between tools; the absolute number does not.
Moving 20 → 30 is ordinary work. Moving 70 → 80 takes a different order of magnitude of links, because the scale compresses at the top.
Compare yourself to the sites currently ranking for your keywords, not to the leader of your industry. If the top-10 sits at 35 and you are at 30, the keyword is reachable. If it sits at 80, no amount of content alone will do it.
Answer engines lean on pages that are already trusted, and links remain the oldest trust signal on the web. A page can score perfectly on structure and still go uncited if nothing points at it.
We see this on our own site: the page for this very topic scores 100/100 on our GEO signals, has zero referring domains, and is not among the AI Overview's sources for its own query. Form is necessary; it is not sufficient. Check the other half with the AI Overview checker.
Only relative to your competition. If the pages ranking for your keywords sit at 30, then 35 is strong; if they sit at 75, then 60 is weak. There is no universal good number.
No. DA and DR are third-party models built by SEO vendors from backlink data. Google has said it has no equivalent site-wide authority score.
Each vendor has its own crawl and its own formula. This tool reads a 0–1 000 provider scale and shows it as 0–100, so it will not match Moz DA or Ahrefs DR digit for digit — none of them match each other either. Compare within one tool, never across tools.
Yes. In August 2026 one site we monitor had 51 backlinks and 64 broken ones — more dead links than live. Another had nearly 3 000 links, 235 of them broken. Authority scores are built on the live part; a profile that is mostly rot looks bigger than it is.
Earn links from sites that are themselves linked to — one relevant donor with real traffic moves the number more than dozens of directories. The score follows the link profile; it cannot be optimised directly.
Indirectly. Answer engines lean on pages that are already trusted, and links are the oldest trust signal on the web. A page can be perfectly structured and still uncited if nothing points at it — we see exactly that on our own site: 100/100 on form, zero referring domains, not cited.
Domain authority is a 0-100 score that estimates how strong a website's backlink profile is relative to the rest of the web — the higher the number, the more, and more trusted, sites link to it. It's a third-party proxy (not a Google ranking factor), but the same well-linked, authoritative sites that rank in search are also the ones AI engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity tend to cite, so a stronger profile tends to help on both fronts. Checking yours side by side with your rivals shows at a glance whether you're playing in the same league for the queries you want to win.
No. Domain authority is a third-party metric — Google has repeatedly said it uses no single 'domain authority' score. It's still a useful proxy for competitive backlink strength, which correlates with the ability to rank and be cited.
It's relative, not absolute — a good score is one at or above the sites you compete with for your target queries. A local rival might sit at 20-30 while a national publisher clears 80, so always judge yours against the specific domains in your niche.
Earn links from more unique, high-authority domains — a handful of quality editorial or digital-PR links moves the score far more than many low-value ones. Because the scale is logarithmic, gains get progressively harder as you climb.
Each tool computes authority from its own backlink index and formula, so Ahrefs' DR, Moz's DA, and this checker won't match exactly. Use one tool consistently and watch the trend rather than comparing absolute numbers across tools.
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