Domain Authority vs Domain Rating: what authority metrics measure

Domain Authority (DA) and Domain Rating (DR) are scores from two different SEO tool companies. Both try to sum up the strength of a website’s backlinks as one number out of 100. Semrush’s Authority Score and Majestic’s Trust Flow do a similar job in different ways.

Google uses none of them. They are estimates built on each vendor’s own crawl of the web. They are handy for sorting a long list of sites quickly, and misleading when used as the only test of a link.

The main metrics side by side

The descriptions below are how each vendor describes its own metric.

Metric	Vendor	Scope	What it measures	Scale
Domain Rating (DR)	Ahrefs	Whole site	Strength of the backlink profile, based on followed referring domains, their own DR and how many sites each links out to. It ignores traffic, spam and age	0 to 100
URL Rating (UR)	Ahrefs	One page	Link strength of a single page, counting internal and external links	0 to 100
Domain Authority (DA)	Moz	Whole site	A machine-learned prediction of how likely the site is to rank, built from link data	1 to 100
Page Authority (PA)	Moz	One page	The same idea for a single page	1 to 100
Trust Flow (TF)	Majestic	Page or site	Quality, measured as closeness to a hand-reviewed set of trusted sites	0 to 100
Citation Flow (CF)	Majestic	Page or site	Quantity, measured as influence from link volume	0 to 100
Authority Score (AS)	Semrush	Whole site	A compound of link power, organic traffic and checks for spam patterns	0 to 100

Moz also publishes a Spam Score, and Majestic splits Trust Flow by topic as Topical Trust Flow.

DA and DR are not interchangeable

Each vendor runs its own crawler and keeps its own index of links, so each one sees a different slice of the web. Add different formulas and the same site can be DR 60, DA 40 and Authority Score 35 on the same day.

Two rules follow. Compare sites using one tool only. And when a seller quotes “DA 50+”, ask which tool and check it yourself.

What the scores cannot tell you

They are not Google’s numbers. Google has denied using Domain Authority. The Google documentation leaked in 2024 does include a site-level authority field, so Google has its own measure. That shows a site-wide concept exists inside Google. It does not show that any vendor score approximates it.

They correlate weakly with rankings. In Ahrefs’ study of one million keywords, published in January 2025, DR correlated with rankings at 0.131. The number of referring domains to the page did better at 0.255. This is Ahrefs measuring its own metric.

They are logarithmic. Each step up is harder than the last. Going from 70 to 80 takes far more than going from 10 to 20, so a gap of ten points means different things at different levels.

They describe the site, not the page. A link comes from one page. A domain score says nothing about whether that page is indexed, how deep it sits in the site or whether anything links to it. Page-level strength matters more than the domain figure.

Most ignore whether anyone visits. DR, by Ahrefs’ own description, ignores traffic and spam. A site can hold a high score while its search traffic has collapsed.

How authority scores get manipulated

Because buyers pay more for higher numbers, sellers have a reason to raise them. The common methods:

• Expired domain redirects. Pointing an old domain with strong backlinks at a new site transfers the score on paper.
• Links from high-rated sites that link out to very few domains. The DR formula rewards this, so a handful of such links moves the number sharply.
• Spam from high-rated subdomains and profile pages. The parent domain’s score flatters the link.
• Link farms that cross-link. A group of sites raises each other’s numbers.
• Seed-adjacent links for Trust Flow. Links from old directories and university profile pages sit close to trusted seed sites.
• Packaged services. Marketplaces list “DR 70+” services that sell the number itself.

Traffic estimates can be gamed as well, by ranking for junk or misspelled high-volume keywords, by bot visits, or with traffic from countries that have nothing to do with the site’s market. Semrush redesigned Authority Score in 2023 to make it harder to inflate with links alone.

What to use instead

Use a score as the first filter, then look at the site itself. The checks that tell you more than any single number:

• Organic traffic trend over 24 months. A site Google ranks is a site Google trusts. A collapse after a spam update is a warning.
• Relevance of that traffic. Do the keywords the site ranks for match its topic?
• Country match. Does the traffic come from the market the site claims to serve?
• Outbound links. Look at the ratio of sites it links out to against sites linking in, and at what it links to. Outbound anchors to casino, CBD, essay and loan sites on an unrelated blog are a bad sign.
• Signs of selling. Visible “write for us” or “sponsored post” pages.
• Content and authors. Real bylines and articles someone would read.
• Indexation. Are recent posts in Google’s index?
• Brand searches. Does anyone look for the site by name?

Traffic figures are estimates too. They can be badly wrong for small sites and for markets outside English. How to vet a publisher turns this list into a step-by-step check.

For measuring your own progress, track referring domains to the pages you want to rank and compare them with the pages that rank above you. That is closer to what the Ahrefs data supports than chasing a domain score.

Where to go next

Read how search engines evaluate links for what Google is known to measure, and do backlinks still matter for the full set of correlation numbers. The glossary defines each metric in one line.