What is Domain Rating (DR)?

Domain Rating (DR) is Ahrefs' 0–100 score of a website's backlink profile strength. It is logarithmic, so moving from DR 70 to DR 80 is far harder than moving from DR 10 to DR 20. DR is a popularity metric for links — it does not measure traffic, content quality, or rankings directly.

What's the difference between DR and DA?

DR (Domain Rating) is Ahrefs' metric; DA (Domain Authority) is Moz's. Both estimate backlink strength on a 0–100 logarithmic scale, but they are calculated from different link indexes, so the numbers are not interchangeable. Pick one scale and compare sites within it.

Free Bulk Ahrefs DR Checker — Check Ahrefs Domain Rating

What is Domain Rating?

Domain Rating (DR) is Ahrefs' 0–100 measure of a website's backlink profile strength. It looks at how many unique websites link to a domain and how strong those linking sites are themselves, then compresses the result onto a logarithmic scale. That last part matters: climbing from DR 10 to DR 20 takes a handful of decent links, while climbing from DR 70 to DR 80 takes a link profile most companies never build.

DR is a link popularity metric — it doesn't directly measure traffic, content quality, or how well a site ranks. But because backlinks remain one of the strongest ranking signals in Google, DR is the fastest single-number proxy SEOs have for answering "how hard will this site be to outrank?" and "is a link from this site worth pursuing?".

What is a good DR score?

There's no universal "good" — a DR 35 site can dominate a low-competition niche while a DR 60 site struggles in a brutal one. As a rough frame:

DR 0–20 — new or very small sites; little link equity yet.
DR 21–40 — established sites with a real, growing link profile.
DR 41–60 — strong sites; competitive in most mid-difficulty niches.
DR 61–80 — authorities; typically large publishers, SaaS brands, institutions.
DR 81–100 — the web's giants (Google, YouTube, Wikipedia-tier).

The only comparison that matters is against the sites on the SERP you're targeting. That's exactly what bulk checking is for: paste every domain ranking for your keyword and see the DR landscape you're up against in one table.

Why check Domain Rating in bulk?

Checking domains one at a time is fine for curiosity; real SEO work happens in lists. The three most common bulk-DR workflows:

Link prospecting — you've scraped a batch of candidate sites for outreach. Bulk-check them, sort by DR, and spend your outreach hours on the prospects whose links actually move the needle.
Competitor analysis — paste every domain ranking on page one for your target keywords to gauge whether you can realistically compete, and which SERPs are soft.
Auditing a backlink profile — export the referring domains of any site (yours or a competitor's) and check them in bulk to see how much of the profile is high-authority versus filler.

DR vs DA: what's the difference?

DR (Domain Rating) is Ahrefs' metric. DA (Domain Authority) is Moz's. They answer the same question — "how strong is this domain's link profile?" — but from different link indexes with different math, so the numbers are not interchangeable: the same site might be DR 54 and DA 47. Neither is used by Google. Pick one scale, use it consistently, and compare sites within it rather than across metrics.

How to increase your Domain Rating

Since DR is driven by links from unique, strong domains, it improves the same way rankings do: earn links from sites that themselves have authority. The durable playbook is creating genuinely linkable assets — original data, free tools, definitive guides — then promoting them to the sites that cover your space. Volume of referring domains beats volume of links: ten links from ten DR 50 sites move DR more than a hundred links from one.

Frequently asked questions

Is this bulk DR checker really free?

Yes — up to 100 domains per run, no sign-up, no credit card. The scores come from Ahrefs' public Domain Rating data.

How many domains can I check at once?

Up to 100 per run. One per line or comma-separated — full URLs work too, we extract the domain automatically. Results stream in as they resolve and can be exported to CSV.

Why do some domains show no DR score?

A dash means Ahrefs returned no rating — usually a brand-new domain, a domain with effectively no backlinks, or one that doesn't resolve. Transient lookup failures also show a dash; re-running the check fixes those.

How often does Domain Rating update?

Ahrefs recalculates DR continuously as its crawler discovers and drops links. Day-to-day movements of ±1 are normal noise; meaningful changes show up over weeks. Our checker caches scores briefly, so you're always within a few days of live.

Check keyword data where you already work

DR tells you how strong a domain is — KWScanner tells you what its keywords are worth. Our browser extension shows search volume, CPC, competition, and Ahrefs DR for every result directly on Google, and the dashboard handles bulk keyword research with pay-as-you-go credits — no subscription.