“Domain authority” gets used two ways. Loosely, it means a website’s overall strength and reputation in search: how likely its new pages are to rank because the site as a whole is trusted. Specifically, Domain Authority (DA) is a score from the SEO company Moz, on a scale of 1 to 100. Ahrefs has a similar score called Domain Rating (DR), and Semrush has Authority Score.
How the scores work
Each tool calculates its score from its own index of the web, mostly from the number and quality of referring domains and backlinks pointing to a site. The scales are logarithmic: going from 20 to 30 is much easier than going from 70 to 80.
Because every tool crawls a different slice of the web and uses its own formula, the same site will have different scores in each. A local business might be DA 24 in Moz and DR 31 in Ahrefs.
Google doesn’t use them
Google has said many times that it doesn’t use any “domain authority” metric, and none of these third-party scores feed into its rankings. They are estimates that try to approximate the link-based part of how Google might see a site. They’re useful for comparison, not as a goal.
That said, the underlying idea, that some sites are more trusted overall than others, clearly reflects how search works. Google’s systems do consider site-wide signals.
How to use these scores sensibly
- Compare like with like. Use one tool and compare your site with direct competitors, not with Wikipedia.
- Judge link prospects. A higher score suggests a link from that site may carry more weight, though relevance matters too.
- Track the trend. A slowly rising score usually means your link profile is growing.
- Gauge competition. If every page ranking for a keyword is on DA 70-plus sites, that’s useful context alongside keyword difficulty.
Common mistakes
- Selling or buying on the number. Link sellers often inflate DA and DR with link schemes. A high score on a site with no real traffic is a warning sign.
- Making the score the KPI. Clients asking “how do we get to DA 40?” are asking the wrong question. Clicks, calls and revenue matter; the score doesn’t.
- Expecting quick changes. Scores update with each tool’s index refresh, and can drop when the tool recalibrates, even if nothing changed on your side.
A local example
Brightside Dental has DR 22. The top-ranking practice for “dentist austin” has DR 35. That gap is worth knowing about, and it points to the real task: earning links from local, relevant sites. Chasing the number itself would miss the point.
RankThat’s Backlinks feature tracks your backlink profile and new and lost links, which are what actually move any of these scores.