What Is a Good Domain Rating? Benchmarks by Site Age (2026)

A good domain rating in 2026 is roughly 20-40 for a site under two years old, 40-60 for an established niche site, and 60 or higher for a widely recognized brand. Ahrefs Domain Rating (DR), Moz Domain Authority (DA), and DataForSEO’s backlink rank all grade the strength of your backlink profile on a 0-100 logarithmic scale, and none of them is a Google ranking factor.

That is the two-sentence answer. The longer, more useful answer is that “good” depends on two things: how old your site is, and what the sites you actually compete with score. A DR of 35 is excellent for a nine-month-old side project and alarming for a ten-year-old SaaS company. This guide gives you the benchmark table, the math behind the scale, and a worked example with real July 2026 numbers, so you can judge your own score honestly.

Want the number first? Run your site through our free domain rating checker, then come back to see where you land on the benchmarks.

What a Domain Rating Actually Measures

A domain rating is a third-party estimate of how strong your backlink profile is compared to every other site in a tool’s index. It is calculated from two inputs:

1. How many unique websites link to you (referring domains, not raw backlink count)
2. How strong those linking sites are themselves (a link from a DR 80 site passes far more weight than a link from a DR 5 site)

The important word is third-party. Google does not publish this number. Google retired its public PageRank toolbar back in 2016, and every “authority” score you see today is a tool vendor’s reconstruction of that idea from their own crawl:

• Ahrefs Domain Rating (DR) measures backlink strength only, on a 0-100 scale
• Moz Domain Authority (DA) uses machine learning to predict ranking likelihood, also 0-100
• Semrush Authority Score blends backlinks with traffic estimates, 0-100
• DataForSEO backlink rank and similar API-based ranks score the link graph on 0-100
• Open PageRank grades on a 0-10 decimal scale; multiply by 10 to compare it with the others

Because each tool crawls a different slice of the web, the same site gets different scores in different tools. A gap of 5-15 points between Ahrefs and Moz for the same domain is normal. Pick one tool, benchmark inside it, and never compare your Moz DA against a competitor’s Ahrefs DR.

Domain Rating Benchmarks: What Good Looks Like in 2026

Here is the honest mapping between score bands and site maturity, based on what we see across the indie maker sites, SaaS tools, and directories that launch with us:

Three caveats before you screenshot the table:

Age bands assume active link building. A five-year-old site nobody has ever linked to will still sit at DR 3. The bands describe sites that publish, launch, and get referenced at a normal pace.

The bands compress at the top. Most of the internet lives below 30. Ahrefs has noted that the median DR across all crawled domains is in the single digits, so a score of 40 already puts you ahead of the overwhelming majority of websites.

A “good” score is the one your keywords require. Which brings us to the part most benchmark posts skip.

The Scale Is Logarithmic, So Points Get Harder as You Climb

All of these scores are logarithmic, like the Richter scale. Each point gets harder to earn as you climb.

In practice that means:

• Going from DR 10 to DR 20 might take 30-50 decent referring domains. A single launch season across a handful of directories plus a few guest posts can do it in 2-3 months.
• Going from DR 40 to DR 50 takes several hundred quality referring domains, often a year or more of steady earned links.
• Going from DR 70 to DR 80 is the territory of thousands of referring domains from strong sites. Very few companies get there without years of brand building.

Two consequences follow. First, early progress is fast and flattering: a new site can jump 15 points in its first six months, then spend the next year gaining 5. That slowdown is the math, not a failure. Second, comparing raw point gaps is misleading. The distance between DR 50 and DR 60 is far larger, in real links, than the distance between DR 20 and DR 30, even though both are “10 points.”

Budget your expectations accordingly: 3-6 months per meaningful band shift early on, longer as you climb.

“Good” Means Within Striking Distance of Your Competitors

Here is the worked example, with our own numbers as of July 2026.

Smol Launch is a weekly launch directory that has been live for about one year. On DataForSEO’s backlink rank we sit at roughly 50/100. The category peers we actually compete with in search, other indie launch directories and Product Hunt alternatives, range from 57 to 64. Product Hunt itself sits at 88.

How should we read that?

• Against Product Hunt (88): hopeless in a head-to-head, and irrelevant. On a logarithmic scale, 38 points is a different universe of links. We do not target the head terms Product Hunt owns, so its score does not set our bar.
• Against category peers (57-64): we are 7-14 points behind, which on this part of the curve is real but closeable. More importantly, it is close enough that page-level factors, content quality, search intent match, and internal linking, decide most individual rankings. Sites routinely outrank higher-DR competitors on specific queries when their page is simply the better answer.
• Verdict: 50 at one year old is a good score for this category, because it puts us within striking distance of the pages we actually compete with.

That is the method to copy. Take your 5-10 most important keywords, note which domains hold the top positions, and check their scores. If you are within about 10-15 points of the sites ranking on page one, your domain rating is good enough and your energy belongs in content. If the gap is 25+ points, target longer-tail keywords those sites ignore while you build links.

A useful rule of thumb we apply to our own keyword planning: your score does not need to be high, it needs to be sufficient for the SERPs you have chosen.

Domain Rating Is Not a Google Ranking Factor

This deserves its own section because the misunderstanding costs founders real money.

Google representatives have said repeatedly, on record, that Google does not use Moz DA, Ahrefs DR, or any third-party authority score in ranking. It cannot: those numbers live in private databases owned by tool companies. What Google does use is its own internal assessment of your link graph, which these scores attempt to approximate from the outside.

So why does a higher DR correlate with better rankings? Because both are downstream of the same cause: lots of strong sites linking to you. The score is a thermometer, not the weather. Buying “DR 70 backlinks” from a marketplace to inflate the thermometer does nothing for the underlying condition and can trigger link-spam penalties that make things worse.

Treat your domain rating as a progress metric for link building and a competitive scouting tool. Never treat it as the goal itself.

Domain Name Quality vs Domain Rating: Not the Same Question

A surprising number of people searching “how good is my domain” are asking about their domain name, not their backlink score. They are different audits:

• Domain rating measures your backlink profile. It changes monthly and you improve it by earning links.
• Domain name quality is about brandability: length, spelling, the radio test, extension choice, trademark risk. It is fixed the day you register, and keyword-rich names have carried no ranking bonus since Google’s exact-match domain update in 2012.

A brilliant name can sit on a DR 2 domain, and clunky names rank everywhere on the strength of their links. If the name itself is what you are evaluating, our guide on how to choose a domain name covers the naming tests; this page covers the score.

One overlap worth knowing: an aged domain with existing referring domains starts with a head start. If you are buying a domain on the aftermarket, check its rating and link history before paying a premium, because you are partly buying the link profile.

Referring Domain Quality Beats Quantity

The fastest way to misread your own score is to count links instead of weighing them.

One editorial link from a DR 70 industry publication will typically move your score, and your actual rankings, more than 50 listings on thin, zero-traffic directories. The tools are explicit about this: Ahrefs weights links by the linking page’s strength, and Moz’s model discounts link networks aggressively.

Practical filters we use before chasing any link:

• Does the linking site rank for anything? A site with zero organic keywords passes little value regardless of its displayed score.
• Is the link dofollow, and is the page indexed? A nofollow listing or an unindexed page contributes brand visibility but no link equity.
• Is it topically relevant? Ten links from maker and startup communities beat one from an unrelated crypto blog for a product site.
• Would you want the referral traffic anyway? Links that send real visitors are almost always the links that move scores.

This is also why launch platforms remain the highest-leverage first links for a new product: they are topically relevant, indexed, and controllable. Our guide to backlinks from launch platforms walks through which listings are actually worth the submission time.

How to Check and Benchmark Your Domain Rating

The full loop takes about 30 minutes a quarter:

1. Check your score in one primary tool. Our domain rating checker is free with no signup and returns your 0-100 score in seconds. Ahrefs and Moz both offer free checkers as well; paid plans start around $99/month and $49/month if you want full link data.
2. Record referring domains, not just the score. The score summarizes; the referring domain count is what you can actually influence. Track both monthly.
3. Pull scores for the top 5 domains on each of your money keywords. This is your real benchmark, not a generic “good score” table.
4. Set a relative target. Within 10-15 points of the page-one median means compete on content now. A 25+ point gap means go longer-tail and keep building.
5. Prioritize your next 10 links by quality filters (relevance, indexation, dofollow, traffic), not by volume. Our guide on getting backlinks for a new website lists the tactics in order of effort.
6. Re-check quarterly and expect log-scale progress. Fast early, slower later. A one-point gain at DR 50 represents more new links than a five-point gain at DR 15.

If you are earlier than all of this, start with the SEO starter guide first; domain rating only matters once the technical and content foundations exist.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is a domain rating of 50 good?
Yes, for most sites. On Ahrefs’ index the median domain sits in the single digits, so DR 50 already beats the vast majority of the web, and for a site under two years old it is a strong result. Whether it is sufficient depends on your SERPs: at one year old, Smol Launch’s 50 sits 7-14 points behind its direct category peers, close enough to compete on content quality.

How can I increase my domain rating?
Earn links from more unique, stronger websites. The controllable first tier is launch platforms and directories, submitting to Smol Launch, Product Hunt, and similar indexed sites gives a new product 10-30 relevant referring domains in weeks. After that, guest posts, original data or free tools that attract citations, and PR outreach do the heavy lifting. Expect visible movement 2-4 months after the new links are crawled, and skip purchased link packages, which add penalty risk without durable gains.

Is Ahrefs DR the same as Moz DA?
No. Both run 0-100, but Ahrefs DR measures backlink strength alone, while Moz DA uses machine learning to predict ranking likelihood and folds in more signals. The same site commonly scores 5-15 points apart across the two tools because each crawls a different index. Neither number is used by Google. Benchmark within one tool consistently instead of mixing scores across tools, and name which tool you used whenever you report the number.

Does domain rating affect Google rankings directly?
No. Google has confirmed it does not use Ahrefs DR, Moz DA, or any third-party score; those numbers live in vendors’ private databases. The correlation you see exists because strong backlink profiles cause both high scores and good rankings. Chasing the score itself, for example buying high-DR links from marketplaces, adds spam risk without adding the underlying authority Google actually evaluates. Use the score to track link-building progress, never as the target itself.

What is a good domain authority for a new website?
For a site under 12 months old, a Moz DA or Ahrefs DR of 10-25 is normal and healthy, and anything above 30 in year one is ahead of schedule. New domains start at 1, and the logarithmic scale makes early points the cheapest ones: a few dozen quality referring domains from launches, directories, and guest posts typically get a new site into the 15-25 range within 6 months.

Is 3.5 a good Moz domain score?
Check the scale first. Moz DA runs 0-100, so a literal DA of 3.5 means a very new site with almost no referring domains, which is normal in the first months. Some third-party checkers built on Open PageRank display a 0-10 decimal instead; there, 3.5 reads as roughly 35/100, a solid score for a site around 1-2 years old. Confirm which index your checker uses before reacting.

The Short Version

A good domain rating is one within 10-15 points of the sites ranking for your target keywords, and the benchmark table above tells you whether your absolute number matches your site’s age. The score is logarithmic, vendor-owned, and not a Google ranking factor, so treat it as a scouting metric: measure quarterly, weigh referring domain quality over count, and spend the rest of your time on pages worth linking to.

Run your site through the free domain rating checker to get your number, then launch your product on Smol Launch to start earning the relevant, indexed links that move it.