What Is Domain Rating? A Plain-English Guide for Buyers

If you have ever read a PR proposal, you have probably seen a line like “we will earn backlinks from sites with a Domain Rating of 70 or higher.” Most buyers nod and move on. That is a mistake, because domain rating is one of the few numbers in this industry that tells you whether a story is worth what you are paying for.

I run Prism PR, an award-winning, full-service PR agency that is also a digital PR and linkbuilding firm. After eight years as a business owner, I have learned to ask what any number in a proposal actually measures. This guide answers that question for domain rating: what it is, how it is calculated, what a good score looks like, and the ways it gets misused. You do not need a technical background to follow it.

What Is Domain Rating?

Domain rating, or DR, is a score from 0 to 100 that estimates how strong a website’s backlink profile is. A backlink is a clickable link from one website to another, and when it sits inside a news story it lifts your Google ranking. DR was created by Ahrefs, a software company, and it is the number we use for every site we mention at Prism.

According to Ahrefs’ own help center, DR shows the strength of a website’s backlink profile compared to the others in its database, on a 100-point scale. A site with a DR of 90 has a far stronger set of backlinks than a site with a DR of 20.

Think of it as a credit score for a website. A credit score does not tell a lender everything about you, but it summarizes your history in one number. DR does the same for a domain’s link history. A big national news site that thousands of other sites link to sits near the top. A brand-new blog that nobody links to sits near the bottom.

The number matters to anyone buying PR for a reason that goes beyond Google. A story on a high-DR outlet is a story on a site that many other sites trust. That is the kind of page that search engines and AI tools tend to treat as credible.

How Domain Rating Is Calculated

You do not need the math, but the logic helps you spot weak claims. Ahrefs explains on its website authority page that it looks at how many unique domains link to a site, the “authority” of those linking domains, and how many other sites each of those domains links to. It then scales the result to 100 points.

Three details from that description matter for buyers:

• Quality beats quantity. One backlink from a high-DR news site can move the number more than hundreds of links from tiny sites.
• Unique domains count, not total links. Fifty links from one site count far less than one link each from fifty different sites.
• Link value is shared. According to Ahrefs, a site splits its rating among the domains it links to. A DR 10 site that links to three sites can pass more value than a DR 80 site that links to a million.

That last point surprises people. It means the highest number is not always the best placement. A well-edited news outlet that links selectively to the sources it quotes is usually worth more than a huge site that links to everyone.

Ahrefs also says DR does not account for link spam, traffic, or domain age. That is why I never treat it as a complete verdict on a site. It is a strong first filter, not the final answer.

What Is a Good Domain Rating?

Buyers ask this more than any other question, and the honest answer is that it depends on who you are comparing against. Ahrefs says it directly: DR is relative by definition, so it is not possible to call a DR of 30, 50, or 60 good or bad in absolute terms. A site is in good shape if its DR is higher than or comparable to similar sites.

For your own website, that means you should compare against the competitors who rank for the same searches, not against a national publisher. A local plumber with a DR of 25 may be winning against rivals at 15. A software company with a DR of 25 may be badly behind rivals at 60.

For the outlets that cover you, a rough guide is easier to use. Here is how I think about the sites where a story might run:

• DR 90 and above. The largest national outlets and global brands. Stories here carry the most weight and are the hardest to earn.
• DR 70 to 89. Major national outlets, large trade publications, and well-known regional papers. This is the sweet spot for most campaigns.
• DR 50 to 69. Solid trade publications and respected niche sites. Valuable, especially when the readers match your buyers.
• Below DR 50. Small blogs and local sites. They can still be useful for reach or relevance, but they add little link authority.

These bands are my working rule of thumb, not an official standard. The right target depends on your goals, and a trade outlet that your buyers read can beat a bigger site they never open. Our guide on do-follow vs no-follow backlinks explains why the type of link matters alongside the score of the site it sits on.

Domain Rating vs Domain Authority

You will also see “domain authority,” or DA. It is a similar score from Moz, another software company. Moz describes DA as a score from 1 to 100 that predicts how likely a website is to rank, and it says plainly that DA is not a direct ranking factor for Google.

The two numbers are close cousins, but they come from different companies, different link databases, and different formulas. The same website can have a DR of 72 and a DA of 65. Neither one is wrong. They are two measuring sticks.

What matters for you is to pick one and stay consistent. If a proposal quotes DR for some sites and DA for others, you cannot compare them. At Prism we use Ahrefs Domain Rating for every outlet, in every report, so a “DR 80” in one month means the same thing in the next.

Does Google Use Domain Rating?

No. Domain rating is a third-party metric, not something Google publishes or uses as a score. Ahrefs notes that Google representatives consistently deny using “domain authority” as a ranking factor. It adds that its own correlation study of 218,713 domains found DR and keyword rankings correlate well, and it states that this is a correlation and does not prove causation.

That is the right way to hold the number in your head. DR does not make a site rank. A site with strong, trusted backlinks tends to rank, and DR is a decent way to estimate that. It is a useful shorthand, not a lever you can pull.

The same logic applies to how people find you today. Strong backlinks from trusted outlets help your SEO and AEO, which is showing up when people search on Google and when they ask AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. Muck Rack’s What Is AI Reading? report analyzed more than 25 million links cited by AI tools and found that about 84% of the sources they cite are earned media. Earned media, stories that reporters choose to write, is exactly the kind of coverage that sits on high-DR sites.

How to Check a Domain Rating

You can check any site in a minute, and I recommend doing it before you sign anything.

1. Open Ahrefs’ free website authority checker. Enter a domain, such as a news outlet or your own site.
2. Read the number. The tool shows the Domain Rating on the 0 to 100 scale.
3. Check your competitors the same way. Put your own score next to the three or four companies you compete with in search.
4. Open the page, not just the domain. DR describes the whole site. Click through and confirm your story is on a real article page, written by a reporter, with your link in the body.

The last step is the one most people skip. A high DR on the homepage tells you nothing about a page that was bought, buried, or tagged so that it passes no value. Google’s spam policies list “exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links” as link spam, so a high-DR site that sells placements is not the prize it looks like.

How Agencies Misuse Domain Rating

Because DR is easy to quote, it is easy to abuse. These are the patterns I see most often in proposals.

Counting every mention as a win. An agency reports 40 “high-DR placements,” but half of them are syndicated copies of one story, and many carry no backlink. Ask how many of the stories link to your website.

Quoting the average instead of the list. “Our average DR is 75” can be built from three big sites and thirty small ones. Ask to see each story, its outlet, and its score.

Paying for the number. Some sites sell sponsored posts at a high DR. The score looks great and the page may be labeled as an ad. I explain the difference in earned media vs paid media.

Treating DR as the goal. The point is a story your buyers read and a backlink that earns its keep. A site with a lower DR that your customers actually trust can beat a bigger one that does not match your business.

How We Use Domain Rating at Prism

We use DR in two ways: to choose targets and to hold ourselves accountable.

To choose targets, we look at the DR of every outlet before a pitch goes out, and we weigh it against whether the reporter covers your topic. Fit comes first, score second. Our guide on how to pitch a journalist shows how we match a story to a reporter’s beat.

To stay accountable, we tie our pay-for-performance pricing to it. In our pay-for-performance pilot, you pay from $1,999 for a newsworthy, data-driven industry study, and each backlink we earn is billed only when it comes from a site with a DR of 50 or higher. No backlinks means no invoice. Our 2026 industry study campaigns average 20.8 stories a month, each carrying a backlink. You can see how a full-service campaign plays out in our live dashboard for our client CareScout, showing what we’ve secured over the last 9 months, which was a full-service campaign, including these monthly studies.

We also keep checking after a story runs. Stories that run without a link are common, so we run a process to reclaim unlinked brand mentions. A high-DR story with no link is a missed opportunity, and a polite request often fixes it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a domain rating in simple terms?

Domain rating is a score from 0 to 100 from Ahrefs that estimates how strong a website’s backlink profile is. The higher the number, the more trusted, well-linked sites point to it.

What is a good domain rating?

It depends on who you compare against. Ahrefs says DR is relative, so a good score is one that is higher than or comparable to similar sites. For outlets that might cover you, DR 70 and above is a strong target and DR 50 and above is solid.

Is domain rating the same as domain authority?

No. Domain rating comes from Ahrefs and domain authority comes from Moz. They are built from different data and formulas, so the same site can score differently on each. Pick one and use it consistently.

Does Google use domain rating to rank websites?

No. Domain rating is a third-party metric. Ahrefs says Google representatives consistently deny using domain authority as a ranking factor, though its own research found DR correlates well with rankings.

How do I find my domain rating?

Enter your domain into Ahrefs’ free website authority checker. It shows your Domain Rating right away, and you can check competitors and news outlets the same way.

How can I raise my domain rating?

Earn backlinks from trusted, relevant sites. The most reliable way is earned media: stories that reporters choose to write about your company, carrying a link to your website.

The Short Version

Domain rating is a useful, imperfect number. It will not tell you whether a story is good, but it tells you quickly whether the site it ran on is one the web trusts. Use it to compare outlets, question proposals, and hold your agency to real results. Then look at the page itself.

If you want backlinks from outlets people actually read, and a team that bills you only when they show up, talk to us or see our SEO and linkbuilding approach and our case studies.