The comparison is asked constantly and the honest answer is unsatisfying: pick one, use it consistently, and stop worrying about which.
The interesting part is not the difference between them. It is the mistake people make when they have both numbers in front of them.
What each one is
| Domain rating (DR) | Domain authority (DA) | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | Ahrefs | Moz |
| Scale | 0–100, logarithmic | 0–100, logarithmic |
| Built from | Quantity and strength of linking domains | Link data modelled against observed rankings |
| Index | Ahrefs’ own crawl | Moz’s own crawl |
| A Google ranking factor? | No | No |
| Moves when | New linking domains appear | Link profile changes, or the model is retrained |
They are not the only two. Majestic runs Trust Flow and Citation Flow on a similar principle, and its glossary of link metrics is a reasonable illustration of how differently vendors can define what is nominally the same idea.
The mistake
Mixing them inside one comparison. A shortlist where some rows carry DR and others carry DA is not a ranking of sites — it is a ranking of which vendor happened to crawl each one more thoroughly.
The scores are not interchangeable and there is no conversion between them. DR 40 does not equal DA 40, and the gap between the two numbers for a single site says more about index coverage than about the site.
This matters most in link prospecting, where lists get assembled from several sources. A marketplace quoting DA and a scraped list quoting DR produce a combined shortlist sorted by nothing meaningful at all.
Why the scale trips people up
Both are logarithmic, which is rarely stated plainly. The consequence is that equal-looking gaps are wildly unequal in effort.
Moving from 20 to 30 is a modest amount of work. Moving from 70 to 80 is a different category of undertaking entirely. And the difference between 78 and 82 is close to meaningless — well inside the noise of either vendor’s index.
Treating these as linear produces a particular error: believing a site at 45 is “halfway” to one at 90. It is not remotely halfway.
Why the two numbers differ for the same site
A site frequently carries noticeably different scores from the two vendors, and the reasons are mundane rather than meaningful.
Each vendor crawls the web independently, so one may simply have found links the other has not. Update cadences differ, so a recent link-building push shows up at different times. And the models themselves are different: one is derived more directly from the link graph, the other is fitted against observed rankings and retrained periodically.
A gap of ten points between a site’s DR and DA is therefore unremarkable. It is a statement about two indexes, not a contradiction that needs resolving, and treating it as a discrepancy to investigate is time spent on nothing.
Which to use
Whichever your other tools already report, because consistency beats correctness here. If you are choosing fresh, the practical considerations are index size for your market, how often it updates, and what you already pay for.
The one thing worth avoiding is treating either as a target. Both can be raised by acquiring links that bring no traffic and no relevance, which moves the score without moving anything that matters — the fuller argument is in does domain rating matter.
Where both scores mislead in the same way
Because both are built from links, both inherit the same blind spot: they cannot see whether anyone reads the site.
A domain that accumulated links years ago and has published nothing since retains most of its score. Links persist, and neither metric decays meaningfully with neglect. The number describes a link profile, and a link profile is a record of the past.
That is why a high score beside flat or falling traffic is such a common pattern, and why it is the single most useful thing to look for when the two figures sit next to each other.
What both are genuinely good for
Comparative work within one index. Three jobs, all relative rather than absolute:
- Sizing a competitive field. Whether the sites ranking for your target queries are broadly strong or broadly weak.
- Spotting anomalies. A low score beside high traffic is the interesting case, and the basis of finding low-DR, high-traffic sites.
- Filtering long lists. Cheap, universally available, good enough to cut a thousand candidates to fifty.
What neither is good for is judging a single site in isolation. A score without a comparison set is a number with no denominator.
The number to look at instead
When either score disagrees with traffic, trust traffic. A DR 70 domain with four hundred monthly visitors is worth less on almost any measure than a DR 25 domain with sixty thousand engaged readers.
That gap — between authority and audience — is more informative than either score alone, and it is the reason we show them side by side rather than sorting by one. A site whose traffic far exceeds its link profile is telling you something specific about the results it competes in.
It is also why sorting link prospects by either metric produces worse shortlists than sorting by readership, which is the case made in building guest post lists from traffic data.
A practical rule
Record which metric a number came from, every time. It sounds fussy and it prevents the only error in this subject that actually costs anything.
A column headed “authority” containing values from two vendors will be sorted, trusted and acted on by somebody eventually — probably months later, probably not by the person who built it. Labelling the column is a few seconds of work that keeps the list meaningful for as long as it exists.
Frequently asked questions
Is domain rating better than domain authority?
Neither is better. They measure the same broad idea using different crawls and different models, and both are third-party estimates rather than anything Google uses. Consistency within one comparison matters far more than the choice between them.
Can I convert DR to DA?
No, and any conversion table you find is invented. The scores come from separate indexes with separate methods, so the gap between a site’s two numbers usually reflects crawl coverage rather than anything about the site.
What is a good score?
Only meaningful relative to the sites you are competing against. Thirty is strong where the leaders sit at thirty-five and irrelevant where they sit at eighty, so read either metric against the field rather than against a benchmark.
Why did my score drop without losing links?
Both are relative to the rest of the index and both vendors periodically recalibrate. A score can move because other sites gained, or because the model was retrained, without anything changing on your site at all.
The takeaway Pick one and never mix them in a single comparison. Both are logarithmic, so equal gaps are not equal effort — and when either disagrees with traffic, traffic is the one to believe.
