What Your Domain Authority Score Can Tell You, and What It Cannot

Your domain authority number is one company's estimate, not a Google metric. See the one thing it is safe to decide with it, and when to stop looking.

Editorial TeamEditorial DeskSeptember 16, 2026 · 12 min read
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Domain Authority is a number invented by a software company called Moz. Google does not hold it, does not read it, and does not use it to rank anything.

That leaves the score one honest job: putting sites in order against each other, in one tool, on one day.

Everything else people do with it asks for a precision the number does not have.

Below is what it is built from, what a good one looks like, how to check yours free, and the point on the scale where it stops being fine enough to decide anything.

What Domain Authority Is

Domain Authority is a score from 1 to 100 that predicts how likely a website is to rank against its competitors. Moz built it, Moz publishes it, and Moz decides what it means.

The prediction is the whole definition. It is not a measure of quality, of trust, or of how good your writing is.

A brand new site starts at 1.

That is the bottom of the scale and not a verdict. A new domain has no links pointing at it yet, so the model has nothing to score.

The scale is also not linear, and Moz puts that in plain terms on its own page: growing from 20 to 30 is easier than growing from 70 to 80.

So ten points means something different at each end. Two sites that both went up ten have not done comparable amounts of work.

A horizontal 1 to 100 scale headed that ten points at the bottom of the scale is not ten points at the top. Two ten point stretches are picked out on the track: 20 to 30, labeled the easier ten, and 70 to 80, drawn in solid orange and labeled the harder ten. A marker at 1 shows where every site begins. The first card repeats that Moz says on its own page that growing a score from 20 to 30 is easier than growing it from 70 to 80; the second says the same ten points on the same scale carries a different amount of work behind it. A panel headed where every site begins says a brand new site starts at 1, that this is the bottom of the scale and not a verdict, and that a new domain has no links pointing at it yet so the model has nothing to score. A closing line says two sites that both went up ten have not done comparable amounts of work, and that a rise of ten points on its own says nothing until you know where it started.
Neeraj Jivnani · The 1 to 100 range, the starting score of 1 and the comparison between growing from 20 to 30 and growing from 70 to 80 are all stated by Moz on its own Domain Authority page; reading that as two sites doing different amounts of work for the same ten points is ours
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<a href="https://neerajjivnani.com/blog/domain-authority/"><img src="https://neerajjivnani.com/infographics/domain-authority/ten-points-is-not-ten-points.png" alt="A horizontal 1 to 100 scale headed that ten points at the bottom of the scale is not ten points at the top. Two ten point stretches are picked out on the track: 20 to 30, labeled the easier ten, and 70 to 80, drawn in solid orange and labeled the harder ten. A marker at 1 shows where every site begins. The first card repeats that Moz says on its own page that growing a score from 20 to 30 is easier than growing it from 70 to 80; the second says the same ten points on the same scale carries a different amount of work behind it. A panel headed where every site begins says a brand new site starts at 1, that this is the bottom of the scale and not a verdict, and that a new domain has no links pointing at it yet so the model has nothing to score. A closing line says two sites that both went up ten have not done comparable amounts of work, and that a rise of ten points on its own says nothing until you know where it started." width="1200"></a> <p>Chart: <a href="https://neerajjivnani.com/blog/domain-authority/">Neeraj Jivnani</a></p>
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Neeraj Jivnani, "What Your Domain Authority Score Can Tell You, and What It Cannot", neerajjivnani.com, https://neerajjivnani.com/blog/domain-authority/

Free to republish with a link back to this page.

Whether Google Uses It

No. The clearest statement of that comes from the company that owns the metric: Moz's own page says Domain Authority "is not a Google ranking factor and has no effect on the SERPs."

Semrush says the same about the whole category. It describes website authority as "not an official metric used by Google, AI search platforms, or other search engines", and as a concept the search engine optimization industry created to approximate a site's strength.

What Google has admitted to is looser and older.

Ahrefs notes on its own checker page that Google representatives consistently deny using domain authority as a ranking factor, while John Mueller has said Google holds a sitewide score that "maps to similar things."

So something site-wide exists inside Google. It is not this number, nobody outside Google has seen it, and no tool can read it.

That splits the answer to "is Domain Authority real?" in two. It is real as a measurement, computed from a real index, and anyone can look it up.

It is not real as a ranking factor, because it changes nothing about where you appear.

What the Score Is Counting

The score counts links from other websites, and mostly the number of separate sites rather than the number of links.

Moz calculates the score with a machine learning model trained to predict how often Google uses a domain in its results, over its own Link Explorer index.

The two inputs it names specifically are the count of linking root domains and the quality of those links. It also says the calculation runs on dozens of factors, and it does not name the rest.

Root domains is the part that trips people up. A hundred links from one website count as one linking root domain, which is close to what they are worth.

Semrush publishes more of its formula than the others do. Its Authority Score combines eight weighted signals across three groups, link power, organic traffic and spam signals, the last being six named checks for manipulated link patterns.

Ahrefs goes the other way and narrows. Domain Rating counts the quantity and quality of external backlinks and, in its own words, takes no account of link spam, traffic or domain age.

Read those three descriptions next to each other and one thing is obvious. They are not counting the same things.

Three Names for the Same Idea

Moz has Domain Authority. Ahrefs has Domain Rating. Semrush has Authority Score.

Each runs on a hundred point scale and each is built from links, which is why the three names get used as though they were interchangeable.

They are not. Semrush's own comparison page calls them different metrics created by different tools, while crediting Moz with introducing the concept to the industry.

The reason is structural. Each company crawls its own index of the web and applies its own formula to it, and neither the index nor the formula is shared.

One instruction follows, and it is most of the practical advice on this subject.

Pick one tool and stay in it.

Check Moz in January and Ahrefs in March and you will see a change that means nothing. You will read it as movement, and it is a change of instrument.

A three card comparison of Moz's Domain Authority, Ahrefs' Domain Rating and Semrush's Authority Score, headed that one site gets three numbers because the three formulas count different things. The Moz card describes a machine learning model trained to predict how often Google uses a domain in its results, run over Moz's own Link Explorer index, and names the two it names specifically, the count of linking root domains and the quality of those links, adding that the calculation runs on dozens of factors it does not name. The Ahrefs card calls Domain Rating the narrowest of the three, counting the quantity and quality of external backlinks and stopping there, and lists what it says it ignores: link spam, traffic and domain age. The Semrush card calls Authority Score the most published of the three, with eight weighted signals grouped into link power, organic traffic and spam signals, and six named checks inside the spam group. An orange panel says to pick one tool and stay in it, because each company crawls its own index of the web and applies its own formula to it and neither is shared. A closing line says checking one tool in January and another in March shows a change that is a change of instrument rather than movement.
Neeraj Jivnani · What each score counts is taken from each company's own page, Moz's Domain Authority page and the Ahrefs and Semrush website authority checkers; setting the three descriptions beside each other and reading them as an instruction to stay in one tool is ours
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<a href="https://neerajjivnani.com/blog/domain-authority/"><img src="https://neerajjivnani.com/infographics/domain-authority/three-formulas-not-one.png" alt="A three card comparison of Moz's Domain Authority, Ahrefs' Domain Rating and Semrush's Authority Score, headed that one site gets three numbers because the three formulas count different things. The Moz card describes a machine learning model trained to predict how often Google uses a domain in its results, run over Moz's own Link Explorer index, and names the two it names specifically, the count of linking root domains and the quality of those links, adding that the calculation runs on dozens of factors it does not name. The Ahrefs card calls Domain Rating the narrowest of the three, counting the quantity and quality of external backlinks and stopping there, and lists what it says it ignores: link spam, traffic and domain age. The Semrush card calls Authority Score the most published of the three, with eight weighted signals grouped into link power, organic traffic and spam signals, and six named checks inside the spam group. An orange panel says to pick one tool and stay in it, because each company crawls its own index of the web and applies its own formula to it and neither is shared. A closing line says checking one tool in January and another in March shows a change that is a change of instrument rather than movement." width="1200"></a> <p>Chart: <a href="https://neerajjivnani.com/blog/domain-authority/">Neeraj Jivnani</a></p>
Cite it
Neeraj Jivnani, "What Your Domain Authority Score Can Tell You, and What It Cannot", neerajjivnani.com, https://neerajjivnani.com/blog/domain-authority/

Free to republish with a link back to this page.

What a Good Domain Authority Score Is

There is no such thing, and the companies that publish these scores are the ones saying so.

Moz's page states that no universal good or average score exists, because the metric is relative. What matters is how yours compares with the sites in your own results.

Its launch guide for the current version is blunter: use the score as a comparative metric between sites of a similar caliber, category or industry.

So a 30 can be strong in a quiet market and weak in a crowded one. Nothing about the number tells you which market you are in.

Where the Grading Bands Come From

You will find the bands anyway. Forty to fifty is average, fifty to sixty is good, over sixty is excellent, in some version or other, often on the same page that has finished explaining that the metric is relative.

Those bands are not measurements.

They describe what a mature commercial site tends to score, and they are written by people who mostly write for mature commercial sites.

They also fail the reader who needs them most. Say your site sits at 12: a band starting at 40 gives you nothing you can act on this quarter.

The Part of the Scale Where the Number Is Loosest

The three tools agree closely about strong sites and much less closely about weak ones. If your site is young, it is in the second group, because every site starts at the bottom of the scale and climbing is slow.

That is a measurement rather than an impression.

Three researchers collected Moz, Semrush and Ahrefs scores for 3,151 separate domains, drawn from 61 deliberately ordinary search queries, and compared the three sets against one another. Their study, published in Profesional de la información in 2023, found overall agreement above 0.9, which is high.

Then they split the sample at a score of 50.

Above that line the three tools tracked each other closely. Below it, every pairing weakened, and the difference was statistically significant in all three.

Two smaller findings from the same work matter as much. About 10% of the domains carried no score at all in one of the three indexes, because the domain was missing from it.

And 79% of the sample scored above 50 against 21% below, because the domains were pulled from the top of search results.

The authors name that as their own study's limitation. It cuts the right way for a reader with a small site: the noisiest part of the scale is also the part with the least data behind it.

None of this makes the score useless. It makes it a coarse instrument at the low end, where a few points between two small sites is not a fact about those sites.

The Comparison Worth Making

Put the bands aside, and your own trend line with them.

Open the search you want to win, take the three or four pages already winning it, and look at their scores beside yours.

That answers something you can act on. Are the pages ahead of you in a different league, or the same one?

It also has the property the abstract bands lack. Both sides of the comparison are competing for the same thing, which is the only condition under which a relative number means anything.

The order on this one search

The comparison this article keeps asking for, run on your own search. Open the search you want to win, take the pages already winning it, and put their scores in the order they appear. Nothing here is kept or sent anywhere.

All of these have to come from the same tool on the same day. Pick one tool and stay in it, or you are comparing two instruments rather than two sites.

One number on its own is the thing you arrived holding, and it is the one arrangement the score cannot help with.

Domain Authority and Page Authority

Domain Authority scores a whole domain or subdomain. Page Authority scores one page. Moz publishes both and draws the line in those terms.

The distinction has a practical edge.

One page can carry far more weight than the site it sits on, if that page earned links the rest of the site never did.

A small site with one widely cited piece of research is the ordinary case. The domain score stays modest, the page score does not, and it is the page that ranks.

So when the question is whether a specific page can compete, the domain number is the wrong one to be looking at.

How to Check It

You can check any domain free, in a browser, in under a minute. None of the routes below needs a paid plan.

  • Moz's Link Explorer takes a domain and returns its Domain Authority alongside the linking root domains and top linking pages behind it. It is free with a Moz Community account.
  • The MozBar browser extension puts the same score next to every result while you browse. That is the fastest way to read a whole page of competitors at once.
  • Ahrefs and Semrush both run free checkers for their own metrics, returning backlink counts and referring domains with the score.

One more, since the score, Page Authority and spam score get asked about together. All three are Moz metrics, so Moz's own checker is the single place they sit side by side.

Why Your Score Moved When You Did Nothing

Because the score is relative, and the rest of the web does not hold still.

Moz lists five causes on its own page, and three of them have nothing to do with your site.

  • Its index may crawl more or fewer linking domains than last time.
  • Other sites, especially strong ones, may have gained links and shifted the scale under everybody.
  • The model itself may have changed. The current version arrived in March 2019, built on an index Moz had rebuilt the year before to be 35x bigger and 30x fresher than the one before it.

The two that are about your site are both about your links. Your backlink profile may have grown or shrunk, or you may have earned links from places that do not carry much weight in search results.

Neither of those is a thing you would notice yourself doing on the day it happened.

Refresh timing layers more noise on top.

Some of what you see is arithmetic catching up rather than anything new in the world. Semrush recalculates every domain every two weeks, on its own published cadence.

Expect regular fluctuation, then, and check whether competitors' scores moved as well before reading anything into your own. That is what Moz's own launch guide told users to do when the current version arrived.

A number that moves on its own is a number you cannot grade yourself against.

A five row list of the reasons a Domain Authority score moves, headed that three of the five have nothing to do with your site. Three rows labeled not yours are drawn in orange: the index crawled more or fewer linking domains than last time, so nothing about your site changed and the amount of the web being measured did; other sites gained links and shifted the scale under everybody, strong sites especially, so the scale moves under you without you touching anything; and the model itself changed, with the current version arriving in March 2019 on an index Moz had rebuilt the year before to be 35x bigger and 30x fresher than the one before it. Two rows labeled yours follow, both of them about links: your own backlink profile has grown or shrunk, and you earned links from places that do not carry much weight in search results, with the note that neither is a thing you would notice yourself doing on the day it happened. A panel underneath adds that Semrush publishes its cadence, a recalculation for every domain every two weeks, so part of any change is arithmetic catching up rather than anything new in the world. A closing line says Moz's own launch guide told users to expect regular fluctuation and to check whether competitors' scores moved as well before reading anything into their own.
Neeraj Jivnani · All five causes are the ones Moz lists on its own Domain Authority page, the March 2019 version date and the 35x bigger and 30x fresher index rebuild come from Moz's Guide to Domain Authority 2.0, and the two week recalculation is Semrush's own published cadence; sorting the five by whether your own work reaches them is ours
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<a href="https://neerajjivnani.com/blog/domain-authority/"><img src="https://neerajjivnani.com/infographics/domain-authority/three-of-five-are-not-yours.png" alt="A five row list of the reasons a Domain Authority score moves, headed that three of the five have nothing to do with your site. Three rows labeled not yours are drawn in orange: the index crawled more or fewer linking domains than last time, so nothing about your site changed and the amount of the web being measured did; other sites gained links and shifted the scale under everybody, strong sites especially, so the scale moves under you without you touching anything; and the model itself changed, with the current version arriving in March 2019 on an index Moz had rebuilt the year before to be 35x bigger and 30x fresher than the one before it. Two rows labeled yours follow, both of them about links: your own backlink profile has grown or shrunk, and you earned links from places that do not carry much weight in search results, with the note that neither is a thing you would notice yourself doing on the day it happened. A panel underneath adds that Semrush publishes its cadence, a recalculation for every domain every two weeks, so part of any change is arithmetic catching up rather than anything new in the world. A closing line says Moz's own launch guide told users to expect regular fluctuation and to check whether competitors' scores moved as well before reading anything into their own." width="1200"></a> <p>Chart: <a href="https://neerajjivnani.com/blog/domain-authority/">Neeraj Jivnani</a></p>
Cite it
Neeraj Jivnani, "What Your Domain Authority Score Can Tell You, and What It Cannot", neerajjivnani.com, https://neerajjivnani.com/blog/domain-authority/

Free to republish with a link back to this page.

What Moves the Number

Two things move this number directly, and the larger of them is links from websites that have not linked to you before.

That is the only lever with a direct path into a score computed from links, and everything else on the usual lists reaches it through one.

Earn links from sites that already carry authority, and publish the kind of thing worth linking to: original data, reference material, work somebody has a reason to cite. Ahrefs puts it harder still, saying new referring domains are the only way its own score moves.

Say a trade publication writes about your research and links to it twice. That is one new referring domain, however many times they link, and one is the unit being counted.

Content belongs in this answer for one reason and it is worth being exact about which. Publishing does not raise the number.

Publishing something that gets cited raises it, and not until months afterwards. Read those two sentences again, because almost every complaint about this metric sits between them.

Cleaning up damaging links is the other half of it, on the numbers that count spam. Semrush scores six specific patterns of manipulation straight into its score, and Moz's launch guide says the current version factors in Spam Score.

Ahrefs is the exception and says so: Domain Rating takes no account of link spam at all.

The Levers That Only Reach It Through a Link

Three more things appear on most lists of how to raise your Domain Authority, Moz's own included, and none of them has a direct path into the number.

  • Internal linking is the clearest case. It moves weight between your own pages and adds nothing to a count of other people's sites.
  • Page speed and mobile layout are worth doing and can move your rankings. Neither one puts another domain into your link profile.
  • On page work belongs in the same group. Better titles and better headings help a page compete for a search.

Read the three together and the honest version is the same for all of them. Each can help you earn a link, and the link is the part the score counts.

Do all three. Do not do them expecting this particular number to notice.

The Shortcut That Is Priced In

There is an open market in links sold by the score they claim to lift you into, and you can find the offers on the same pages that give the scores away free.

Every one of these companies now scores manipulation patterns directly.

Semrush names six of them, among them an unusually high share of dofollow domains, referring domains sitting on one network address range, and a backlink profile that does not match the traffic underneath it.

That is the thing worth knowing about that market. The number you would be buying is computed by people looking for exactly that purchase.

A two column comparison headed that two things reach the number directly while three things people are told to do only reach it through a link. The left column, drawn in orange and headed reaches it directly, lists a website that has not linked to you before, called the only lever with a direct path into a score computed from links, with the note that the unit being counted is the site and not the link; and cleaning up damaging links, on the numbers that count spam, because Semrush scores six specific patterns of manipulation straight into its score and Moz's launch guide says the current version factors in Spam Score, with Ahrefs named as the exception because Domain Rating takes no account of link spam at all. The right column, headed only through a link, lists internal linking, which moves weight between your own pages and adds nothing to a count of other people's sites; page speed and mobile layout, both worth doing and both able to move your rankings, neither one putting another domain into your link profile; and on page work, where better titles and better headings help a page compete for a search. A panel underneath says each of the three can help you earn a link and the link is the part the score counts, and that publishing does not raise the number while publishing something that gets cited raises it, and not until months afterwards.
Neeraj Jivnani · Our own reading of where each lever's path into the score runs, drawn from Moz's, Ahrefs' and Semrush's own descriptions of their own metrics. Moz's page lists internal linking, on page SEO and user experience under how to increase Domain Authority; what none of the three descriptions of the CALCULATION gives them is a route in that does not pass through another site's link
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<a href="https://neerajjivnani.com/blog/domain-authority/"><img src="https://neerajjivnani.com/infographics/domain-authority/what-reaches-the-number-directly.png" alt="A two column comparison headed that two things reach the number directly while three things people are told to do only reach it through a link. The left column, drawn in orange and headed reaches it directly, lists a website that has not linked to you before, called the only lever with a direct path into a score computed from links, with the note that the unit being counted is the site and not the link; and cleaning up damaging links, on the numbers that count spam, because Semrush scores six specific patterns of manipulation straight into its score and Moz's launch guide says the current version factors in Spam Score, with Ahrefs named as the exception because Domain Rating takes no account of link spam at all. The right column, headed only through a link, lists internal linking, which moves weight between your own pages and adds nothing to a count of other people's sites; page speed and mobile layout, both worth doing and both able to move your rankings, neither one putting another domain into your link profile; and on page work, where better titles and better headings help a page compete for a search. A panel underneath says each of the three can help you earn a link and the link is the part the score counts, and that publishing does not raise the number while publishing something that gets cited raises it, and not until months afterwards." width="1200"></a> <p>Chart: <a href="https://neerajjivnani.com/blog/domain-authority/">Neeraj Jivnani</a></p>
Cite it
Neeraj Jivnani, "What Your Domain Authority Score Can Tell You, and What It Cannot", neerajjivnani.com, https://neerajjivnani.com/blog/domain-authority/

Free to republish with a link back to this page.

When the Number Is Worth Looking At

Three situations, and they share one property. Each is a comparison between sites, decided once.

  • Sizing up a search before committing to it. Put your score beside the pages already ranking and you learn which league the contest is in.
  • Sorting a list of link prospects. Fifty sites and one afternoon is the job the score is good at, and Ahrefs describes it that way while warning against judging any site on a sitewide score alone.
  • Answering somebody who asks how strong a site is. It is a fast, rough, shared vocabulary, and rough is fine when the decision it feeds is which of two sites to open first.

Outside those three, the number is a distraction dressed as a metric.

Use It Once, Then Stop Looking

Use it once, then stop looking at it.

Domain Authority is a prediction, made by one company, about how a site might fare against other sites. It is at its loosest below the halfway mark of its own scale, and what moves it is other people's sites rather than yours.

A site at 12 and a site at 18 are not meaningfully apart, however much the gap between them reads like one.

Read as a ranking of options the score earns its afternoon. Read as a grade it is a number you cannot move on any schedule and cannot interpret when it moves on its own.

So spend it on the one question it can settle, which is whether the sites ahead of you are in a different league or the same one.

Then let it go. The work that would move the number is the work you would be doing anyway, and what you rank for measures it more honestly.