Domain Rating Checker

What this Domain Rating checker shows

This checker is built for the switch to DR4, so it shows what changed and what it means:

• Old and new scores side by side. Your DR3 score, your DR4 score and the difference between them, for as long as both exist. The difference compares two scoring models. It doesn't measure links you gained or lost.
• Context for the number. Every result shows where your site sits next to familiar sites, from Wikipedia down to a typical new website.
• Subdomains next to their main domain. Enter blog.yoursite.com and you get its own score plus the score for yoursite.com, since DR4 rates them separately.
• Up to 10 domains at once. Your site and your competitors in one table, sorted by DR4, with the old DR3 marked on each bar.
• Scores straight from the source. From the company that created Domain Rating, cached for up to 12 hours. No signup, no email.

What is Domain Rating (DR)?

Domain Rating (DR) is a score from the SEO software company Ahrefs that rates how strong a website's backlinks are compared to every other site in its database, on a scale from 0 to 100. It's a score for links. It isn't a traffic estimate, and it doesn't score content, design or how old a domain is. (DR4 does use each linking site's estimated search traffic to weigh its links.)

Here's the simple version of how it works. Every site that links to you passes along part of its own rating. That share is split evenly across every site it links to, so the fewer sites it links to, the more each one gets:

Because DR compares you to everyone else, your score can drop when other sites gain links faster than you do, even if you lost nothing.

What changed in DR4

DR4 was announced on November 5, 2026, and it becomes the default score on December 1, 2026. Four changes matter most.

The subdomain change, in one picture

Is the new score closer to how sites rank in Google? Across 10 million sites, DR4 lined up more closely with the number of top 10 Google rankings overall, while DR3 still did better for main domains alone:

Correlation with the number of top 10 Google rankings (1.0 would be a perfect match), from the DR4 announcement. Correlation shows a pattern, not cause.

Why did my Domain Rating drop?

A lower score under DR4 can have a few explanations. Check which ones fit your site:

• Your links come from sites with little search traffic. DR4 gives those links less weight, so a link profile built mostly on them can lose ground.
• Some sites linking to you are labeled spam. Their own scores may have dropped, which leaves them less to pass along.
• You checked a subdomain. It no longer borrows the main domain's rating. This tool shows both when you enter a subdomain.
• Other sites moved. DR compares sites to each other. When the pool of rated sites shrinks and re-sorts, scores shift even with no change to your own links.

Keep it in perspective. DR only reflects links, so a lower score is no comment on your content, design or value to your audience. The best reality check is your competitors. Paste your domain and up to 9 rivals into the checker, separated by commas, and see if they moved the same way.

What is a good Domain Rating?

There's no universal good score. A good DR is one that's higher than or close to the sites you compete with. DR 20 can be the strongest site in a local market. A software company at DR 60 can still be the weakest site on page one of Google.

Compare against three groups instead of chasing one number: your direct competitors, 20 to 30 companies across your industry, and the sites already ranking for the keywords you want. For a sense of scale, a study of 600 software (SaaS) companies looked like this, measured on DR3 before the switch:

From Ryan Law's What Is a Good Domain Rating? (With Real Data), June 2026.

You'll also see fixed score bands floating around, like "0 to 30 is new, 50 to 70 is good." Those are rules of thumb, not official definitions. With DR4 shrinking the pool of rated sites, compare against real competitors instead.

How to increase your Domain Rating under DR4

DR4 rewards the same thing DR always did, links from strong sites, but it's stricter about what strong means. What works now:

1. Earn links from sites that get search traffic. DR4 gives links from relevant sites with search traffic more weight than links from sites with none.
2. Skip spam and paid link farms. Their scores fell the most under DR4, so they pass little value. They can also be a risk with Google.
3. Build links to the subdomain you care about. If your blog lives on blog.yoursite.com, DR4 scores it on the links pointing to that subdomain, so don't assume it shares your main domain's score.
4. Publish things people have a reason to link to. Original data, free tools and clear reference pages give other sites something to cite.
5. Track it against competitors, not in a vacuum. DR is relative and gets harder as you climb. A one-point gain in the 80s can mean more than five points in the 20s.

DR doesn't measure whether your business shows up in AI answers. My free AI Visibility Audit checks that separately, and the AI SEO strategy guide covers what to do about it.

Domain Rating vs Domain Authority

Domain Rating measures how strong a site's backlinks are compared to other sites. Domain Authority (DA) comes from Moz, a different SEO company, and predicts how likely a domain is to rank. Both run from 0 to 100, but each company crawls the web on its own and scores with its own formula. A site can be DR 45 and DA 30 at the same time, and neither number is wrong.

Don't mix them. If you report DR for your site, report DR for your competitors too. And neither one is a Google metric. Google has never used DR or DA to rank pages.

Frequently asked questions