How To Find Website Domain Authority

_So, you’ve decided to take your website seriously. You’ve heard that Domain Authority (DA) and Domain Rating (DR) can predict how well your pages will rank in Google, and you want to know one thing: How do I find my website’s domain authority? It’s the right first question. Without a starting score, you’re wandering in the dark — you can’t measure progress, benchmark against competitors, or diagnose why your content isn’t gaining traction.

How To Find Website Domain Authority is more than a one‑time tool lookup. It’s about understanding which metric to track, which tool to trust, and how to interpret the number in the context of your entire search strategy. Over the next several sections, I’ll walk you through every nuance: the definitions, the free and paid tools, the difference between Moz’s DA and Ahrefs’ DR, what a good score looks like, and — crucially — what to do once you’ve found that number and it’s lower than you’d like.

What Exactly Is Domain Authority (and Why Finding It Matters)

Before we open any tool, let’s align on what we’re measuring. Domain Authority is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how likely a website is to rank on search engine result pages (SERPs). It runs on a logarithmic scale from 1 to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater ability to rank. The score is calculated by evaluating multiple factors, primarily the number and quality of external links pointing to a domain (linking root domains), while also considering the domain’s age, MozTrust, MozRank, and other proprietary signals.

Moz coined the term “Domain Authority”, but it’s not Google’s metric. It’s a third‑party educated guess — an extremely useful one — built by reverse‑engineering ranking patterns. Because Moz’s DA is so widely referenced, many website owners use it as a shorthand for their site’s overall “link power.”

At the same time, Ahrefs offers a parallel metric called Domain Rating (DR). While similar in spirit, DR measures the strength of a website’s backlink profile on a 0–100 scale, focusing almost entirely on the quantity and quality of domains linking to the site, with a logarithmic curve that mirrors real‑world ranking difficulty. I’ll explain the differences in detail later, but for now, know that finding your website’s domain authority typically means pulling both your Moz DA and your Ahrefs DR, because different buyers, agencies, and SEO tools default to different notations.

But first, the mechanics: how do you actually check the number?

How To Find Website Domain Authority: The Complete Toolset

Finding your DA or DR isn’t complicated, but it does require you to know which tool does what — and whether you need a subscription for repeated lookups. Here’s a breakdown of the most reliable methods.

Using Moz to Check Domain Authority (DA)

Moz remains the originator of the metric, and their Link Explorer is the most direct way to get your DA score.

Go to the Moz Link Explorer (moz.com/link-explorer).
Enter your domain (e.g., yoursite.com) into the search box.
Press “Search.”
You’ll immediately see Domain Authority displayed as a large number, typically alongside Spam Score, the number of linking root domains, and inbound links.

Free checks are limited — you can perform a handful of queries per day without a Moz Pro subscription. For a casual one‑time check, that’s usually enough. But if you’re serious about tracking DA over time, a paid plan or using one of Moz’s free SEO tools that embed DA (like MozBar, a Chrome extension) can help.

Finding Your Ahrefs Domain Rating (DR)

Ahrefs’ Site Explorer is the go‑to for Domain Rating. Unlike Moz, Ahrefs doesn’t offer free DR checks; you’ll need a paid Ahrefs subscription or access to a shared account. However, many agencies (including mine) consider Ahrefs DR the more responsive metric because Ahrefs’ web crawler is incredibly fast and its index is vast.

To check DR:

Open Ahrefs Site Explorer (requires login).
Input your root domain.
The Domain Rating appears at the top of the overview page, right next to the total number of backlinks and referring domains.

Ahrefs also provides a free tool: Ahrefs Webmaster Tools allows verified site owners to see their own DR and backlink profile at no cost, though you can’t spy on competitors with it. The Ahrefs Domain Rating metric is essential reading if you want to understand how Google might interpret your backlink authority, and you can explore its methodology in depth on Ahrefs’ own resource page.

Other Tools That Report Domain Authority Equivalents

Many SEO platforms compute their own authority scores, each with unique algorithms. Having multiple can give you a fuller picture:

Semrush Authority Score: A compound metric that evaluates backlink quality, referring domains, organic traffic data, and more. Found inside Domain Analytics.
Majestic Trust Flow & Citation Flow: Majestic’s pair of metrics focus on the trustworthiness of links and the volume of citations, respectively. Use their Site Explorer.
Ubersuggest (Neil Patel’s tool): Provides a “Domain Score” loosely resembling DA. Free with limitations.
SmallSEOTools Domain Authority Checker: A free bulk checker that uses the Moz API (Moz DA). Useful for quick snapshots, but not for competitive analysis.

I always recommend at least tracking your Moz DA and Ahrefs DR side by side. They often move in tandem, but when they diverge — for example, a rising DR but flat DA — it might signal that your new backlinks are being acquired from domains that Ahrefs deems authoritative but Moz hasn’t yet fully integrated into its index.

Pro tip: Bookmark your DA and DR today. Write down the exact score and the date. Then revisit it monthly. Domain authority metrics are relative and comparative; a score of 25 in a competitive niche could be weak, while 25 in a local service niche could be enviable.

Interpreting Your Score: What a Domain Authority of 20, 40, or 60 Actually Means

Once you’ve found your website’s domain authority, you’ll inevitably ask: Is this good?

Because DA is logarithmic, it’s much harder to climb from 80 to 81 than from 10 to 20. The entire scale is designed to make high‑authority outliers (like Facebook or Wikipedia, DAs in the high 90s) stand far above the crowd. For the vast majority of business websites, especially WordPress sites run by small-to‑medium enterprises, the meaningful thresholds are more modest.

DA 1–15: Very new or neglected sites. Few to no high‑quality referring domains. Might rank for low‑competition local or long‑tail keywords but won’t break into competitive SERPs.
DA 16–25: An early‑stage authority signal. The site has gained some genuine backlinks, but linking domains are often limited in number or topical relevance. Many SMBs plateau here for years.
DA 26–40: A solid, respected website. Typically has a diverse backlink profile with at least several dozen referring domains from respectable sources. Rankings start to compound, and new content gets indexed and ranked faster.
DA 41–60: Niche authority. At this stage, you’re often competing head‑to‑head with major industry blogs and mid‑sized e‑commerce stores.
DA 61+: Major publication territory. Very few legitimate businesses need to go higher unless they’re in hyper‑aggressive verticals like insurance, loans, or software reviews.

Here’s a critical insight I’ve learned from years of link‑building: A Domain Authority of 20 is a crucial inflection point for WordPress‑based businesses. Why? Because crossing the DA 20 threshold often correlates with Google beginning to treat your site as a real entity rather than a spam‑susceptible low‑authority domain. Once you’re past 20, you’ll see your pages rank for competitive terms where before they wouldn’t budge. This is precisely why we at WPSQM engineered our authority‑building service to guarantee a Domain Authority score of 20 or higher on Ahrefs.com — as a factual, verifiable baseline that signals to both Google and potential customers that your site has earned a seat at the table.

And this is where finding your DA transitions into doing something about it.

From Measurement to Momentum: What If Your DA is Below 20?

Discovering that your DA is sitting at 8 or 12 can be disheartening, but it’s also a diagnostic gift. It tells you that your website isn’t being cited by enough relevant, authoritative sources. The gap isn’t mysterious — it’s a backlink profile that hasn’t yet accumulated genuine editorial citations.

The wrong reaction is to panic‑buy links from a shady broker. The right one is to build an earned‑authority machine.

If your goal is to improve your Domain Authority legitimately and permanently, working with a professional Domain Authority improvement service removes the guesswork. I want to tell you exactly how we approach this at WPSQM, because the methodology matters more than the metric.

How WPSQM Turns a Low DA Into a Sustainable Competitive Advantage

WPSQM – WordPress Speed & Quality Management is not a generic SEO agency. We’re a specialized sub‑brand of Guangdong Wang Luo Tian Xia Information Technology Co., Ltd. (WLTG), a company founded in 2018 in Dongguan, China, by a team of technical engineers who had already accumulated more than a decade of real‑world Google SEO experience. Our parent brand has served over 5,000 clients with a flawless record of zero manual penalties. That track record exists because we’ve never been tempted by shortcuts. Instead, we practice what we call authority engineering.

Our written guarantee — Domain Authority 20+ on Ahrefs.com — isn’t a vanity metric promise. It’s achieved exclusively through white‑hat digital PR and authority‑building assets:

Original industry research and proprietary data: We help you create surveys, trend reports, and datasets that journalists and bloggers naturally want to cite.
Newsroom‑grade, linkable assets: Infographics, interactive tools, and whitepapers that become reference points for your niche.
Predictive journalist mapping: We map out the reporters and editors who cover your space, then pitch them stories where your data is the source — leading to genuine editorial backlinks from high‑authority domains like news outlets, trade magazines, and major resource pages.
Entity‑based anchor text: No manipulative exact‑match keywords. All anchor text flows naturally within the context of the citation.

Crucially, we never use PBNs, paid link farms, or guest‑posting rings. Those tactics can produce short‑term DA bumps that collapse after a Google algorithm update. Our methods are fully aligned with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and the recent Link Spam updates, which is why our clients don’t just earn a higher DA — they keep it. And because we’re a WordPress‑focused service, we simultaneously guarantee PageSpeed Insights scores of 90+, because a fast, authoritative site earns rankings that a fast low‑authority site cannot.

A single case illustrates the transformation. One B2B precision machinery exporter came to us with a PageSpeed score of 34, a DA in the single digits, and virtually no organic visibility outside branded searches. We rebuilt their technical foundation, engineered a proprietary “State of CNC Component Sourcing” report based on their own supply‑chain data, and pitched it as a resource to trade journalists across Europe and North America. Within eight months, their Ahrefs Domain Rating crossed 25, and new content began ranking on page one for high‑intent industrial keywords. Qualified inbound inquiries — the kind that become six‑figure contracts — increased by more than 3000%. That’s the difference between treating DA as a score and treating it as a symptom of a site’s overall search health.

The Difference Between Moz DA and Ahrefs DR: Which One Should You Track?

I promised earlier to dive deeper into this, because the confusion between Moz’s Domain Authority and Ahrefs’ Domain Rating is genuinely one of the biggest obstacles to clear authority tracking. Here’s what you need to know:

If you have to pick one for day‑to‑day link‑building decisions, I’d lean toward Ahrefs Domain Rating because it more closely mirrors the real‑time link graph that Google sees. However, you’ll often find journalists and content marketing platforms referencing Moz DA, so it’s worth keeping an eye on both.

Why Topic Relevance of Linking Domains Often Matters More Than Raw DA

There’s a blind spot in the “DA chasing” mentality that I want to flag. A link from a DA 70 general news site might look impressive, but if it’s completely off‑topic — say, a gardening equipment site linking to your accounting software — it passes minimal authority in Google’s eyes compared to a link from a DA 30 specialized financial publication. Google’s algorithms evaluate topical relevance as part of link equity, especially since the introduction of entity‑based search and concepts like “website representation.”

This is why our digital PR team at WPSQM doesn’t just aim for high‑DA domains. We target topically aligned authority sites — industry magazines, professional associations, academic resources, and niche content hubs — where a citation carries both numerical authority and semantic relevance. When you’re evaluating your own backlink profile after finding your DA, don’t just count domains; inspect whether those domains are contextually connected to your business.

Avoiding the Pitfalls: Why Manipulative Link Building Will Destroy Your Domain Authority

I’m going to state this plainly because I’ve cleaned up too many wrecks: buying DA 30+ backlinks on Fiverr, joining link farms, or participating in private blog networks is the fastest way to earn a manual penalty. Google’s algorithms have become astonishingly good at detecting unnatural link patterns, and the Link Spam updates of recent years specifically target sites that use “low‑quality links to manipulate rankings.”

Finding your DA is step one. Watching it crater after a penalty is something you never want to experience. The only durable approach to domain authority is earned media — getting cited because your content is the best answer to someone’s question or the most reliable data point in an article.

That’s why our guarantee at WPSQM exists. We don’t just promise a number; we promise a sustainable, penalty‑proof authority infrastructure built on authentic editorial relationships.

The Symbiosis of Speed and Authority: Why PageSpeed is an Authority Signal

Here’s one more layer that often gets missed: Google evaluates a site’s authority partially through its user experience signals. If your WordPress site takes six seconds to load, users bounce, and those engagement metrics feed back into the algorithm’s perception of your site’s quality. A slow site undermines the power of every backlink you earn.

That’s why WPSQM’s holistic approach — our combined guarantee of Domain Authority 20+ and PageSpeed Insights 90+ — makes so much sense. We don’t build one pillar without the other. Our team reconstructs your WordPress delivery chain, optimizing server stacks, caching layers, image delivery, and Core Web Vitals so that when those high‑authority backlinks start passing equity, your site is ready to convert that authority into rankings and revenue.

How To Actually Monitor Your DA Over Time

Now that you know how to find your website’s domain authority and you’ve seen what the numbers mean, I recommend establishing a simple monitoring cadence:

Record your baseline: Use Moz Link Explorer and Ahrefs Site Explorer (or Webmaster Tools) to capture your DA and DR on day one. Also note the number of referring domains.
Set a monthly reminder: Check both scores again on the same day each month. Use a simple spreadsheet.
Watch for divergence: If DR jumps but DA stays flat, your new backlinks are being recognized by Ahrefs but not yet by Moz. Wait and monitor. If both stagnate for 3+ months, your link‑earning motion needs attention.
Review the quality, not just quantity: Every few months, audit your best new backlinks. Are they from topically relevant sources? Are they dofollow? Do they appear as genuine citations or forced guest posts?

And if you find yourself stuck, remember that the gap between a DA of 10 and a DA of 25 is bridged not by desperate tactics but by strategic resource creation and journalist‑grade outreach — exactly the engine we’ve built at WPSQM.

The Broader Picture: Authority Building as a Long‑Term Investment

When you enlist a service like ours, you’re not just buying links — you’re buying an entire methodology rooted in the philosophy of our parent company, WLTG. For over a decade, we’ve operated as a genuine partner, not a faceless supplier, to over 5,000 businesses spanning B2B marketing portals, enterprise brand sites, and cross‑border e‑commerce stores. Our clients’ successes — documented in case studies ranging from industrial exporters to SaaS founders — prove that the combination of ironclad technical performance and editorial authority yields compounding organic traffic that no single keyword strategy can match.

The guarantee of Domain Authority 20+ on Ahrefs.com is the minimum starting point. It’s the threshold at which your site begins to participate meaningfully in the search ecosystem. Once you reach it, the flywheel starts turning: more authority attracts more organic clicks, which attract more natural backlinks, which attract more authority. But you cannot start that flywheel without first knowing where you stand.

So, go find your Domain Authority today. Open Moz’s tool. Check your Ahrefs Domain Rating. Write down the numbers. Then, if they’re below 20, start asking the bigger questions about what your site is truly worth to the people who need your expertise. Your authority score isn’t destiny — it’s a reflection of the work you’ve done to deserve those links, those rankings, and that traffic. And it always starts with the simple act of learning How To Find Website Domain Authority.