- Domain authority is a 1-100 prediction score invented by Moz, built mostly from your backlink profile. It estimates ranking ability; it does not cause rankings.
- Google does not use domain authority. John Mueller has said so directly. The score correlates with rankings only because both depend on links.
- There is no universal good score. DA is relative to your niche: compare against the sites actually ranking for your keywords, not against the whole internet.
- Every tool scores differently. The same site can read 62 in Semrush, 90 in Ahrefs, and 74 in Moz. Never compare scores across tools.
- The score is logarithmic: 20 to 30 is quick, 50 to 60 is a grind. Plan on three to six months of link earning before meaningful movement.
- The levers that raise DA (quality backlinks, linkable assets, clean profile, brand mentions) are the same signals AI engines lean on when choosing what to cite.
If you searched the term and just want the answer, here it is:
Domain authority (DA) is a score from 1 to 100, created by Moz, that predicts how well a website will rank in search results based on the quantity and quality of backlinks pointing at it. It is a third-party estimate, not a Google metric: useful for comparing sites and tracking link-building progress, useless as a goal in itself.
Everything below unpacks that sentence: where the number comes from, why Google keeps disowning it, what score you actually need, and how to raise it without buying links you will later regret.
What Is Domain Authority?
Domain authority is a search-ranking prediction score. Moz introduced it to compress a website's entire backlink profile (how many sites link to it, and how strong those linking sites are) into one comparable number from 1 to 100. A brand-new domain starts near 1. Wikipedia and Google themselves sit in the high 90s. Everyone else lives in between.
Three properties of the score matter in practice:
- It is built from links. The inputs are the number of referring domains, the authority of those domains, and the shape of the link profile. Content quality and traffic influence DA only indirectly, by earning links.
- It is logarithmic. Climbing from DA 10 to 20 takes a handful of decent links. Climbing from 60 to 70 takes hundreds of strong ones. Progress slows as you rise, by design.
- It is relative. Moz recalibrates the scale against the whole web. Your score can dip because other sites gained links faster, even when you lost nothing. Read your backlink report before panicking about a two-point drop.
Because the inputs are links, DA moves when your link profile moves. That is why every serious plan to raise it is really a link-building plan wearing a different name.
Is Domain Authority a Google Ranking Factor?
No. Google does not use domain authority, and has said so repeatedly. Google Search Advocate John Mueller put it about as plainly as a Google statement gets: "We don't use domain authority at all in our algorithms." DA is a Moz product. Google cannot use it any more than it uses your Ahrefs subscription.
So why does everyone keep quoting the number? Because it correlates. Sites with high DA tend to rank well, not because Google reads the score, but because both the score and the rankings are downstream of the same thing: a strong backlink profile. Google has its own internal signals for site-wide authority and trust (leaked documentation in 2024 referenced a site-wide quality signal), and links remain a meaningful input to them. Whether links still deserve your effort at all is a fair question in 2026; our answer, with evidence, is in Do Backlinks Still Matter?
The practical framing: treat DA like a fitness tracker's readiness score. Google does not award rankings for it, just as a doctor does not treat a readiness score. But it is a cheap, fast proxy for the underlying health you actually care about, and it makes progress visible.
DA vs DR vs Authority Score: Three Tools, Three Numbers
Domain authority has competitors, and they are not interchangeable. Moz's DA, Ahrefs' Domain Rating (DR), and Semrush's Authority Score (AS) all compress link data into a 1-100 number, but each uses its own crawler, its own link index, and its own formula. The same website routinely scores 20+ points apart across the three.
| Domain Authority (DA) | Domain Rating (DR) | Authority Score (AS) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Made by | Moz | Ahrefs | Semrush |
| Scale | 1-100, logarithmic | 0-100, logarithmic | 0-100 |
| Main inputs | Linking domains, link quality, spam signals | Referring domains weighted by their own DR | Link power plus organic traffic and spam factors |
| Free check | Moz Domain SEO Analysis tool | Ahrefs Website Authority Checker | Semrush free account |
| Known quirk | Recalibrates against the whole web, so scores drift | Tends to read higher than DA for the same site | Traffic input means thin-content link farms score lower |
Backlinko's own site illustrates the spread: at one measurement it scored 62 in Semrush, 90 in Ahrefs, and 74 in Moz. Same site, same links, three numbers. Two rules follow. Pick one tool and stay in it, and only ever compare your score against competitors measured in that same tool.
What Is a Good Domain Authority Score?
A good domain authority score is one higher than the sites outranking you. That is the honest answer. Because the scale is relative and logarithmic, a DA of 35 can own a local or niche market while a DA of 55 gets buried in national finance or software. Benchmarks only make sense inside your own SERP.
That said, rough brackets help you read a score cold:
| Score | What it usually means | Typical sites |
|---|---|---|
| 1-19 | New or barely linked. Rankings depend almost entirely on low-competition keywords. | New sites, small local businesses |
| 20-39 | Established but modest profile. Competitive locally, stretched nationally. | Most small business and niche sites |
| 40-59 | Strong profile. Can compete for meaningful commercial keywords. | Successful blogs, mid-size brands |
| 60-79 | Serious authority. Links from these domains are prized. | Major publishers, big SaaS, universities |
| 80-100 | Internet infrastructure tier. | Wikipedia, YouTube, government portals, Google |
The working method: pull the top five ranking domains for your three most important keywords, check their scores in one tool, and average them. That average is your target neighborhood. If you are two brackets below it, authority (not on-page tweaks) is your bottleneck, which is also the most common reason a site sits invisible on page two despite decent content.
How to Check Domain Authority (Free)
You can check any site's authority score in under a minute, free, no signup wall worth fearing. Each of the three big indexes offers a free checker, and each works on any domain, so you can benchmark competitors as easily as yourself:
- Moz Domain SEO Analysis: the official DA number, plus linking domains and top pages. Free with a Moz community account.
- Ahrefs Website Authority Checker: instant DR for any domain, no account needed, plus a sample of backlinks.
- Semrush Authority Score: shown in the Domain Overview with a free account, alongside traffic estimates.
Check quarterly, not daily. The score updates when link indexes refresh, and staring at daily noise leads to bad decisions. While you are at it, pull the actual link data behind the number: our guide to checking backlinks free walks through all four ways, and checking your real rankings tells you whether the authority you have is converting into positions.
How to Increase Domain Authority: 7 Steps That Work
Raising domain authority means earning links from more, and stronger, referring domains while keeping the profile clean. There is no shortcut that survives contact with reality: schemes that inflate the number without real links leave rankings unchanged, which defeats the purpose. These seven steps, in this order, are what move the metric and the rankings behind it.
Earn quality backlinks over quantity
One link from a relevant DA 60 publisher outweighs fifty directory entries. Prioritize relevance (sites in or near your niche), editorial placement (inside content, not footers), and dofollow status. The full tactic list, from guest posts to broken link building, lives in our step-by-step backlink playbook.
Publish linkable assets
Original statistics, free tools, calculators, and definitive guides earn links while you sleep, because journalists and bloggers need something to cite. Backlinko's TikTok statistics page alone earned 5.9K backlinks from 2.4K domains. You do not need that scale: one well-maintained stats page in your niche can out-earn a year of outreach.
Audit and clean your link profile
Spammy inbound links drag on the spam-signal side of every authority formula. Run a periodic audit, identify genuinely toxic patterns (link farms, irrelevant foreign anchors, paid networks), and disavow only when the evidence is clear. Our toxic backlinks and audit guide covers the find, assess, disavow workflow.
Keep anchor text natural
An over-optimized anchor profile (every link saying your money keyword) reads as manipulation to both Google and the authority formulas. Aim for a mix dominated by branded and natural anchors. The safe ratios, with examples, are in our anchor text guide.
Tighten internal linking and site structure
Internal links do not add external authority, but they distribute what you have. A flat architecture where key pages sit within three clicks of the homepage, connected by descriptive internal anchors, lets one strong backlink lift a whole cluster instead of one URL.
Bank the free foundational links
Legitimate directories, industry communities, and profile links will not make you an authority, but they build the baseline every real site has. The trick is picking ones that fit your niche instead of spraying 200 generic submissions. Our free backlinks guide sorts the legit categories, and the free Backlink Finder tool matches verified sources to your niche in seconds.
Run digital PR and claim unlinked mentions
Answering journalist requests, publishing quotable research, and converting existing brand mentions into links is the highest-leverage authority work in 2026, because it feeds two systems at once: search rankings and AI answer engines. The playbook chapters on digital PR and brand mentions show how the same campaign earns both.
What not to do: buy bulk links from marketplaces, swap links in private networks, or chase the score itself with high-DA-but-irrelevant links. All three inflate DA faster than rankings, and the gap between your number and your traffic is exactly what a penalty review, or a skeptical client, will find.
Domain Authority in the AI Search Era
AI engines do not read Moz scores, but they reward the same underlying trust signals that raise them. When ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI features decide which sources to cite, they lean on link authority, brand mentions across trusted sites, and consistent entity signals: the exact inputs behind every authority metric. Building authority and building AI citability are one program, not two.
Two findings define the opportunity. First, Semrush found nearly 90% of ChatGPT citations come from pages ranking in position 21 or beyond, meaning AI answer engines happily cite sites that traditional rankings would bury. Modest-DA sites with evidence-rich, well-structured content get cited beside giants. Second, what a model says about your brand comes from your entire off-site footprint (reviews, directories, press, forums), which the playbook maps in the off-site corpus chapter. How machines evaluate expertise and trust is covered in E-E-A-T for machines.
The strategic read: domain authority remains the best single proxy for your strength in classic Google, and the work that raises it now pays a second dividend in AI answers. If your DA is stuck while competitors get cited, the fix is the same seven steps above, weighted toward mentions and PR. The full system, from crawler access to citation tracking, is the GEO Playbook.
Frequently Asked Questions
Domain authority (DA) is a 1-100 score, created by Moz, that predicts how likely a website is to rank in search results. It is calculated mostly from the quantity and quality of backlinks pointing at the domain. Higher scores mean stronger ranking potential, but DA is a third-party prediction, not a Google metric.
No. Google's John Mueller has stated plainly that Google does not use domain authority at all in its algorithms. DA is a Moz metric that estimates ranking ability from link data. It correlates with rankings because both depend on backlinks, but raising the number itself changes nothing inside Google.
There is no universal good score. DA is relative: a 35 can dominate a local niche while a 55 loses in national finance. Compare against the sites ranking for your target keywords. As a rough guide, 20-39 is average for small businesses, 40-59 is strong, and 60+ is enterprise or publisher territory.
Three free checkers cover it: Moz's free Domain SEO Analysis tool shows official DA, Ahrefs' free Website Authority Checker shows Domain Rating (DR), and Semrush shows Authority Score with a free account. Each uses its own link index and scale, so check competitors in the same tool you use for yourself.
Expect three to six months of consistent work before the score moves meaningfully. New backlinks must be discovered, crawled, and folded into each tool's index before they count. The scale is also logarithmic: moving from 20 to 30 is far easier than moving from 50 to 60, so growth slows as you climb.
Domain authority (DA) is Moz's metric; domain rating (DR) is Ahrefs' metric. Both run 1-100 and both measure link strength, but each uses its own crawler, link index, and formula. The same site commonly scores very differently across tools, so never compare your DA against a competitor's DR.
Most drops are not penalties. Common causes: the tool recalibrated its scale, other sites gained links faster than you (DA is relative), you lost a few strong backlinks, or spammy links entered your profile. Check your backlink report first. If rankings and traffic are stable, a small DA dip usually means nothing.
Indirectly. AI engines do not read Moz scores, but they lean on the same underlying signals: links, brand mentions, and consistent citations across trusted sites. Semrush found nearly 90% of ChatGPT citations come from pages ranking beyond position 20, so evidence quality and off-site trust can win citations even before high authority arrives.
The Bottom Line
Domain authority is a prediction, not a prize. Google never reads it, clients always ask about it, and the only honest way to raise it is the same way you raise rankings: earn links and mentions from sites that matter, keep the profile clean, and give the internet something worth citing. Do that consistently for two quarters and the number takes care of itself, in Moz, in Ahrefs, and in the AI answers your next customer reads.