Domain Authority vs Domain Rating: What's the Difference?

Domain Authority (DA) is Moz's 0–100 score. Domain Rating (DR) is Ahrefs' 0–100 score. Both estimate how strong a site's backlink profile is, neither is used by Google, and they routinely disagree about the same website because they're built from different link indexes using different formulas.

The difference in one line

DR measures link power. DA predicts ranking.

That sounds like a distinction without a difference, and it isn't. Ahrefs built DR as a fairly direct calculation of how much link equity points at a domain. Moz built DA as a machine-learning model whose entire purpose is to guess how likely a site is to rank in a Google search result — which means it factors in signals beyond raw link count, including patterns Moz associates with spam.

Two different questions, two different answers, both plotted on a 0–100 scale that makes them look interchangeable. Each vendor documents its own metric — Moz on Domain Authority and Ahrefs on Domain Rating — and both are explicit that the score is their estimate, not Google's.

Side by side

	Domain Authority (DA)	Domain Rating (DR)
Made by	Moz	Ahrefs
Scale	0–100, logarithmic	0–100, logarithmic
Built from	Moz's Link Explorer index	Ahrefs' own crawl index
Core question	"How likely is this site to rank?"	"How strong is this site's link profile?"
Link types counted	Broad model, includes quality and spam patterns	Unique dofollow referring domains, weighted by their own DR
Dilution	Modelled	Explicit — a linking site's power is split across the domains it links out to
Free check	Limited monthly lookups	Limited free tools
Used by Google	No	No

The dilution mechanic in DR is the one worth understanding, because it explains a lot of otherwise confusing behaviour: a link from a DR 80 site that links out to 200,000 domains passes far less than a link from a DR 50 site that links out to 400. Raw DR of the linking site is a poor proxy for the value of the link.

Why they disagree about your site

It's normal to see DR 45 and DA 22 on the same domain. Four reasons:

Different indexes. Moz and Ahrefs run separate crawlers finding overlapping but distinct sets of links. Neither has the whole web. A backlink discovered by one and missed by the other simply doesn't exist as far as the other's score is concerned.

Different treatment of nofollow. DR counts dofollow links. A site whose profile is heavy on nofollow mentions — social, forums, news comments — will look weaker in DR than in a model that gives those some weight.

DA is tuned against real SERPs. Because Moz recalibrates DA to predict actual ranking outcomes, a site can lose DA without losing a single link, purely because the model was retrained. DR moves mainly when the link profile moves.

Different sensitivity to spam. A profile stuffed with low-quality links can inflate DR — it's counting links — while DA's model may recognise the pattern and decline to reward it. When DR is high and DA is comparatively low, low-quality links are a common explanation, and worth checking against what makes a backlink bad.

Both scores are logarithmic

This is the practical fact that changes how you plan, and it applies equally to both.

Getting from 0 to 20 is a handful of decent links. Getting from 20 to 30 is real work over a few months. Getting from 70 to 80 is a scale of effort most sites will never reach — the kind of link profile national publications have.

Two consequences:

Don't compare gaps as if they were linear. The distance between DR 30 and DR 40 is nothing like the distance between DR 60 and DR 70.
Expect early progress to look fast and then flatten. That's the curve behaving normally, not your link building failing. How to improve domain rating in six months sets realistic expectations for what each stage actually takes.

Neither one is a Google ranking factor

Worth stating plainly, because a lot of money changes hands on the assumption otherwise: DA and DR are third-party estimates produced by SEO tool vendors. Google does not receive them, read them, or rank by them. Google representatives have said so consistently for years.

There's a nuance worth knowing. Internal Google documentation that surfaced publicly in 2024 referenced site-level quality signals of Google's own, which suggests Google does hold some notion of site-wide trust. That is not evidence that DA or DR are those signals — they're outside estimates built from a partial view of the web, and their correlation with Google's internal assessment is unknown and unmeasurable.

So the correct posture is: useful as a comparative proxy, worthless as a target. Optimising for the score itself is optimising for a vendor's approximation of the thing you actually want.

Which should you use, and when

Vetting a potential link partner → look at both, then look past both. Agreement between the two is a mild positive signal. Disagreement is informative — a DR far above DA often means an inflated profile. But the scores are the first filter, not the decision. What actually determines whether a link helps is topical relevance, whether the site gets real search traffic, whether the page your link sits on is indexed, and whether the site links out to everyone. How to vet a link swap partner works through the full checklist.

Benchmarking your own progress → pick one and stay with it. The absolute number matters far less than the trend. Switching tools mid-campaign makes your own history unreadable. Checking DR and DA for free covers the no-cost options if you're not paying for either tool.

Reporting to a client or a boss → use it, but frame it. It's a legible number and there's nothing wrong with tracking it. Say what it is: a third-party estimate of link profile strength, moving in the right direction. Presenting it as a Google score is where credibility gets lost.

Deciding what to work on next → use neither. Organic traffic, rankings for the queries you care about, and referring-domain count give you more actionable information than either composite score.

The other scores you'll see

Semrush Authority Score — combines link data with estimated organic traffic and a spam assessment. Because traffic is an input, it can diverge sharply from both DA and DR.
Majestic Trust Flow and Citation Flow — deliberately split into two numbers: quantity of links versus quality of the neighbourhood they come from. A large gap between them is a useful spam indicator.

All of them are estimates of the same unobservable thing. More scores don't get you closer to it.

What actually moves either number

Both scores are built on links, so both respond to the same thing: more referring domains, from more relevant sites, than you had last quarter. Not more links — more domains. The tenth link from a site you're already linked from moves nothing.

That's the whole mechanism, and it's why the scores are slow. There's no configuration change, no on-page fix, and no tool setting that raises them. Increasing domain authority without buying links covers the legitimate routes; a straightforward one is a direct exchange, where Backlinkster matches you with a site owner in a related niche, each of you places the other's link inside real content, and both placements are verified live by code rather than taken on trust.

Frequently asked questions

Is DA or DR more accurate? Neither is authoritative, because there's no ground truth to check them against. DR is a cleaner measure of raw link strength; DA is better calibrated to actual ranking outcomes. Read them together and treat a large gap between them as a signal in itself.

What's a good DA or DR score? It's entirely relative to your competition. Check the sites currently ranking for your target queries — if they sit at DR 30, then 30 is your bar. Chasing an absolute number like "DA 50" without reference to your niche is a target with no meaning.

Does Google use Domain Authority? No. DA is a Moz metric and Google has no access to it. The same is true of DR, Authority Score, and Trust Flow — all are vendor estimates, none is a ranking factor.

Why did my DA drop when I didn't lose any links? Most often because Moz retrained or recalibrated the model, which shifts scores across the whole index. It can also happen when Moz's crawl drops links it previously counted. A drop with no corresponding change in traffic or rankings is usually a scoring artefact, not a problem.

Can DA or DR be faked? The scores can be inflated with bulk low-quality links, which is exactly why some sellers advertise a high DR alongside a site that gets no search traffic. Always cross-check any authority score against estimated organic traffic — a high score with near-zero traffic is the clearest tell there is.

Should I refuse a link from a low-DR site? Not automatically. A DR 15 site in your exact niche with a real audience is usually worth more than a DR 60 general site that links out indiscriminately. Relevance and genuine traffic beat the score.

The bottom line

DA and DR answer different questions with the same-looking number: DA guesses at ranking likelihood, DR measures link power. Both are logarithmic, both are built from partial crawls of the web, and neither is visible to Google. Use them as a rough comparative filter when sizing up a site, track one consistently to watch your own trend, and make actual decisions on relevance, traffic, and referring domains — the inputs the scores are trying to approximate in the first place.