QuilllyDomain Rating Checker
Check any domain’s authority score (DR, by Ahrefs) and what it means for which keywords you can realistically rank for.
Related free tools
Browse all toolsPaste any URL and find out why it isn’t ranking: meta tags, content quality, AI-agent readiness, robots/sitemap, and Domain Rating — with a copy-paste diagnosis.
Notify Bing, Yandex, Seznam and Naver about new or updated pages instantly. Generate a key, verify it, and submit up to 100 URLs.
Count words, characters, sentences, and paragraphs instantly with reading time estimate.
Generate a spec-correct llms.txt (with sitemap prefill) or validate an existing one — so ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity can read and cite your site.
Quillly checks titles, metas, structure and snippets on every page, and tells you what to fix.
What is Domain Rating?
Domain Rating (DR) is Ahrefs' 0–100 measure of how strong a website's backlink profile is, relative to every other site Ahrefs has indexed. It is calculated from the number of unique domains linking to you and how much authority those linking domains have themselves — a single link from a DR 80 publisher moves it far more than fifty links from sites nobody links to.
The scale is logarithmic, not linear. Climbing from DR 5 to DR 15 is ordinary work; climbing from DR 75 to DR 85 takes an order of magnitude more. That is the single most useful thing to know about the number: the same “+10 DR” means two completely different amounts of effort depending on where you start, which is why a promise phrased that way is worth nothing.
DR is Ahrefs' metric. Google does not publish it, does not use it, and has never confirmed anything like it. Treat it as a proxy — a fast, checkable read on whether backlink authority is the thing holding your pages back.
How to check a domain's DR
- Type the bare domain into the box above —
example.com, not a full page URL - Press Check DR
- Read the band underneath the number: it tells you which keywords are realistically in reach today
- Compare against two or three competitors ranking for the keywords you want — the gap is the real target
Scores refresh weekly, and a repeat check on the same domain returns the cached reading rather than a new lookup. Checking twice in a day will not show a change, and that is correct: DR does not move that fast.
Why DR moves — and why it often does not
DR responds to new referring domains, not to new links. Ten more links from a site that already links to you barely register; one link from a site that never has can shift the number. It also falls: links get removed, pages that carried them get deleted, and a linking domain that loses its own authority passes less of it on.
The honest ways to raise it are the slow ones — get listed where your category is catalogued, publish things other people have a reason to cite, earn mentions from established sites in your industry, and keep the links you already have alive. Directory listings move the number fastest on a site that starts low, and the effect flattens out past the mid-twenties.
What Quillly commits to for a low-DR site
Because the scale is logarithmic, Quillly's directory submission service states its target as the DR you will actually have, keyed on the DR you start from — not as a gain:
| Your DR today | The DR committed to | What we typically see | Listings it takes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0–10 | 15 | 20–25 | 80 |
| 11–15 | 20 | 24–28 | 100 |
| 16–20 | 25 | 27–30 | 150 |
Above DR 20 no target is offered at all. At that level the number moves on editorial links rather than directory listings, and promising otherwise would be a mis-sale. The DR is read 60 days after an order completes, and the committed figure is the one in the middle column — never the typical range beside it.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a good Domain Rating?
It depends entirely on what you are competing for, but as a rough read: below DR 20, authority rather than on-page SEO is usually why pages do not rank, and long-tail keywords are the realistic target. From DR 20 to 40 medium-competition keywords open up. Above DR 70 backlink authority has stopped being the bottleneck and content depth decides the result.
How long does it take to raise DR?
Links have to be found and crawled before they count, which typically takes a few weeks after they go live. Quillly measures its directory guarantee 60 days after the order completes for that reason. Anyone promising a DR jump in days is describing something other than how the metric is recalculated.
Is Domain Rating a Google ranking factor?
No. DR is Ahrefs' own score, built from Ahrefs' own crawl of the web. Google neither publishes nor uses it. It correlates with rankings because both are influenced by the same underlying thing — who links to you — but it is a proxy, not an input.
Why did my DR drop when I did not lose any links?
Two common causes. The score is relative, so if other sites gain authority faster than you do, your position on the curve slips without anything of yours changing. And a linking page can disappear, get de-indexed or lose its own authority without you ever being told.
Does checking a domain here cost anything or need an account?
No. The lookup is free, needs no signup, and works on any public domain — yours or a competitor's. Domain Rating is provided by Ahrefs.