Domain authority checker

Five tools, five authority scores, and they rarely agree. Before reading any of them, it helps to know what each one is actually measuring. This domain authority checker shows one link-based estimate for up to five domains and explains the family of scores it belongs to.

Is domain authority a Google ranking factor?

No. Every authority score is a third-party estimate built from a vendor's own crawl of the web. Google says ranking combines many signals about relevance, quality, usability and context (How results are automatically generated); it has never published a sitewide authority number, and it does not consult Moz, Ahrefs, Semrush or DataForSEO. A score of 70 is evidence that many strong sites link to a domain. That is useful evidence, because links remain a signal, but the score itself is a description, not a cause.

Why do DA, DR and authority scores disagree?

They disagree for the same reason backlink counts disagree: different indexes, different formulas. Each vendor crawls a different slice of the web and refreshes it on its own schedule. The formulas differ too. DR is weighted almost purely by linking domains and their own strength; DA is a model trained to predict rankings, so it mixes in other signals; Semrush adds traffic and spam estimates. All of them are logarithmic, which means the gap between 70 and 80 represents far more links than the gap between 10 and 20.

Our view: pick one score, use it only to compare domains and to watch direction over months, and never quote an absolute number as if it were a grade.

How to use an authority score well

Three uses hold up in practice. First, sizing up a query: if every page on the first result page sits on a domain scoring 50 or more and yours scores 12, links are part of the gap, not the whole of it. Second, qualifying link prospects: a site with real authority and relevant content is worth the outreach; a site with authority and nothing else may be selling links, and Google's spam policies apply to both parties. Third, tracking your own progress after a campaign, in one tool, over quarters rather than weeks.

Two uses do not hold up: predicting a specific ranking from a score, and comparing a DA from one tool with a DR from another. The backlink checker shows the referring domains behind the number, which is where the explanation usually lives.

How this tool calculates its score

The Authority column is the link index rank, which runs from 0 (no backlinks detected) to 1,000, divided by 10. Vendor claim: the rank is computed with a method similar to PageRank over DataForSEO's link index (bulk ranks documentation). Domains with no backlinks in the index show as "not in index" rather than zero, because absence from a crawl is not the same as having no links.

Because the score comes from one index, treat it as a comparison between domains checked at the same time rather than an absolute grade, and look at the referring domains behind any number that surprises you. The glossary entry on domain authority covers the history of these scores.

What to do next

Put your domain next to the four sites that outrank you for a query you care about. If the gap is wide, read the backlink analysis guide and start with the referring domains your competitors share and you lack. If the gap is small or you are ahead, authority is not your problem; run the full audit below to find what is.