Trust Flow and Citation Flow are Majestic's two backlink scores, each on a 0 to 100 logarithmic scale. Citation Flow measures link quantity: how much raw link volume points at a page or domain. Trust Flow measures link quality: how close those links sit to a hand-picked set of trusted seed sites. Reading them together tells you more than either alone.
Why Majestic split the score in two
Every other vendor compresses backlink strength into one number. Moz has Domain Authority, Ahrefs has Domain Rating, Semrush has Authority Score. Majestic deliberately publishes two, and the reason is the most useful idea in backlink metrics.
A single score can't distinguish between two very different sites:
- Site A has 4,000 links, almost all from directories, comment sections and expired-domain blogs.
- Site B has 400 links, mostly from established publications in its industry.
On a volume-driven score, Site A can look stronger. Majestic gives Site A a high Citation Flow and a low Trust Flow, and the gap between those two numbers is the finding.
What each score actually measures
Citation Flow is quantity-first. It propagates a value through Majestic's link graph based on how many links point at a URL, how many links point at those linking URLs, and so on. It makes no judgement about whether any of them are any good. A link from a scraped content farm counts.
Trust Flow is quality-first. Majestic's Flow Metrics glossary says it "collated many trusted seed sites based on a manual review of the web", and Trust Flow reflects how few clicks away from that seed set a given page sits. Trust decays with distance: a site linked directly by a trusted seed inherits a lot, while a site five hops away inherits very little. Because the seeds were reviewed by hand, Trust Flow is much harder to manufacture than a volume metric.
Both scores are logarithmic, which matters when you compare sites. The distance from Trust Flow 10 to 20 is nothing like the distance from 50 to 60. It's the same curve that governs Domain Authority and Domain Rating.
What is a good Trust Flow score?
A good Trust Flow score is one that matches or beats the sites already ranking for your target queries. As a rough rule of thumb, most small business sites sit between 10 and 25, scores above 40 belong to genuinely well-linked domains, and anything under 10 has few links from trusted neighbourhoods.
| Trust Flow | Typical reading |
|---|---|
| Under 10 | New site, or links mostly from untrusted places |
| 10 to 20 | Normal for a small, working site |
| 20 to 40 | Solid profile with some links from established sites |
| 40 and above | Well-linked domain, often a known brand or publisher |
These bands are a convention SEOs use, not a rule Majestic publishes. Because the scale is logarithmic, moving from 15 to 25 takes far less than moving from 40 to 50. The useful benchmark is always your competitors: check the Trust Flow of the five pages ranking above you, and treat their median as the target.
How to check Trust Flow online for free
You can check Trust Flow online for free with Majestic's own tools. Its free backlink checker shows headline metrics, including referring domain counts, Trust Flow and Citation Flow, for any domain. Majestic's own guide to monitoring Trust Flow says a free login "can yield more data than available to unregistered guests", though daily lookups are lower than on paid plans.
Step by step:
- Open Majestic's free backlink checker and enter the domain (use the root domain, such as
example.com, unless you want one specific URL). - Read Trust Flow and Citation Flow from the summary, and divide one by the other to get the TF/CF ratio.
- Create a free account to see more of the data, including the Topical Trust Flow categories behind the score.
- For quick checks while you browse, install Majestic's Chrome or Firefox plugin, which shows the key metrics for the page you are on.
- To track your own site over time, record the numbers in a spreadsheet once a month. Majestic suggests exactly this for free users.
Majestic notes that most free users can see the links to their own sites, since most people only run one or two. Bulk checks and full Topical Trust Flow breakdowns across many domains need a subscription. For the no-cost options at Ahrefs, Moz and Semrush as well, see how to check domain rating for free.
The TF/CF ratio: the actual reason to use Majestic
Divide Trust Flow by Citation Flow. That single number is one of the fastest spam sniff-tests available.
| TF/CF ratio | Typical reading |
|---|---|
| Around 1.0 or above | Healthy: trust roughly keeps pace with volume |
| 0.5 to 1.0 | Normal for most working sites |
| Below 0.5 | Investigate: a lot of volume from untrusted neighbourhoods |
| Below 0.3 | Strong warning sign of a manufactured profile |
Two honest caveats before you lean on this.
The thresholds are industry convention, not Majestic's official rule. Majestic publishes the metrics; the ratio bands are a heuristic SEOs settled on because they work in practice. Treat them as a trigger to look closer, never as a scoring system.
A low ratio isn't always spam. Sites that attract huge volumes of forum, aggregator and social links (tools, generators, viral content) accumulate Citation Flow faster than Trust Flow through no fault of their own. The ratio flags a pattern. You still have to interpret it.
Where the ratio is genuinely decisive is the reverse case: a site being sold to you as high-authority, showing Citation Flow 45 and Trust Flow 8. That gap is the signature of a bought or built profile, and it lines up almost perfectly with what a high Moz Spam Score is detecting from an entirely different direction.
Topical Trust Flow: the part almost nobody uses
This is Majestic's genuinely distinctive feature, and it's more useful than the headline numbers.
Majestic doesn't just calculate one Trust Flow. It calculates Trust Flow per topic category, using a taxonomy of subjects, and shows you the top categories a site's trust comes from. So a domain doesn't just have "Trust Flow 34". It has Trust Flow 34 in Business/Marketing and Advertising, or in Recreation/Autos, or in Adult.
Why that matters more than the raw score:
- It answers the relevance question directly. A DR 50 site tells you nothing about topic. A site whose Topical Trust Flow is concentrated in your subject area is a genuinely relevant link prospect.
- It exposes mismatched profiles. A supposedly clean marketing blog whose top Topical Trust Flow categories are gambling and pharmaceuticals has a history it isn't advertising.
- It's how you find real partners. Filtering prospects by topical category surfaces sites whose trust is in your niche, which is a much better signal than an undifferentiated authority score.
Relevance beats raw authority for link value, and Topical Trust Flow is the closest thing any vendor offers to measuring it.
How Flow Metrics compare to DA, DR and Authority Score
| Metric | Vendor | Measures | Splits quality from quantity? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Trust Flow | Majestic | Proximity to trusted seed sites | Yes, paired with Citation Flow |
| Citation Flow | Majestic | Raw link volume through the graph | Yes |
| Domain Rating | Ahrefs | Weighted dofollow referring domains | No |
| Domain Authority | Moz | Modelled likelihood of ranking | No |
| Authority Score | Semrush | Links, estimated traffic and spam signals | Partly, since traffic is an input |
None of them is a Google ranking factor. All are vendor estimates built on partial crawls of the web, and they routinely disagree about the same domain because each one indexed a different subset of it. Majestic's contribution isn't a more accurate number. It's a more legible one, because it shows you its two components separately instead of blending them.
Using Flow Metrics in practice
Vetting a link prospect. Check Trust Flow for the floor, the TF/CF ratio for the spam test, and Topical Trust Flow for relevance. If all three read well, open the site and look at it; no metric substitutes for that. The checklist on how to vet a link swap partner covers the manual checks.
Tracking your own progress. Watch Trust Flow, not Citation Flow. Citation Flow rises with any links at all, including worthless ones, which makes it easy to feel like you're winning while nothing improves. Trust Flow only moves when you earn links from sites that are themselves trusted.
Deciding what to build next. If your Citation Flow is climbing and your Trust Flow is flat, you're accumulating volume without quality, which is the usual sign of directory submissions and low-effort placements. Shift to fewer, better links from real sites in your subject area. A one-for-one exchange with a site owner in your niche is one of the cleanest ways to do that, because you can inspect the site's Topical Trust Flow before agreeing to anything. Backlinkster handles the matching, and each swap is verified by API.
Frequently asked questions
What is a good Trust Flow score? It's relative to your competition, not an absolute. Check the Trust Flow of the sites currently ranking for the queries you care about; if they sit around 20, then 20 is your benchmark. As a rough orientation, most functioning small business sites land somewhere in the 10 to 25 range, and anything above 40 is a genuinely well-linked domain.
What do Trust Flow and Citation Flow mean? Citation Flow is Majestic's 0 to 100 score for how much link volume points at a site. Trust Flow is its 0 to 100 score for how close those links are to a manually reviewed set of trusted seed sites. One counts links, the other judges them.
What is a good TF/CF ratio? Around 1.0 or higher is healthy, 0.5 to 1.0 is normal, and below 0.5 is worth investigating. These are industry heuristics rather than Majestic's official guidance, so use them to decide what to inspect, not to score sites automatically.
Is Trust Flow a Google ranking factor? No. Trust Flow and Citation Flow are Majestic's own metrics, computed from Majestic's crawl index. Google has no access to them. The same applies to Domain Authority, Domain Rating and Authority Score.
Can Trust Flow be faked? It's harder to fake than volume metrics because it depends on proximity to a manually reviewed seed set, but it can be inflated, typically by acquiring a few links from trusted-adjacent sites or by buying an expired domain that still carries historic trust. Always cross-check Trust Flow against estimated organic traffic and the site's actual content.
Why is my Citation Flow so much higher than my Trust Flow? Usually because a large share of your links come from places trusted sites don't link to: directories, low-quality blogs, scraped aggregators or site-wide footer placements. It can also happen legitimately on sites that attract heavy forum and social linking. Look at your top referring domains and the answer will normally be obvious.
Do I need a paid Majestic account to check Trust Flow? No. Majestic's free backlink checker shows Trust Flow and Citation Flow for any domain, and a free login shows more than guest access. Bulk checks and full Topical Trust Flow breakdowns need a subscription.
The bottom line
Citation Flow counts your links. Trust Flow judges them. Almost all the value in Majestic's metrics comes from reading the two together: a healthy site keeps them roughly in step, and a manufactured profile shows a wide gap. Add Topical Trust Flow to check whether a site's trust is in your subject, and you have a sharper prospecting filter than any single 0 to 100 authority score can give you. Just remember that all of it is a vendor's estimate, and none of it is what Google actually sees.
Related: Domain Authority vs Domain Rating · What is Spam Score in SEO? · What is domain authority? · How to vet a link swap partner · Check domain rating and DA for free