What is domain rating, and does it matter for press releases?

Domain rating is Ahrefs' 0–100 estimate of how strongly a site is linked to. It is one vendor's model rather than a fact about a business — two tools will give you two different numbers for the same domain — and a high figure beside an outlet tells you that outlet is well linked-to, not what a placement there will do for you. It is also licensed data, which is why a rating is published here only when we can say where it came from and when it was taken.

Every one of the 26 outlets in our catalogue currently shows Not rated where a domain rating should be. That is not an oversight and it is not a loading state. It is the only honest thing the column can say right now, and the reason is worth more to you than the numbers would be.

What domain rating is

Domain rating (DR) is a third-party 0–100 score for a site's search-engine authority, based on how many other sites link to it. The metric belongs to Ahrefs, which defines it as the strength of a site's backlink profile relative to the rest of its index. Household-name publishers sit in the 90s; established trade titles sit in the 70s. The scale is logarithmic, so the distance from 70 to 80 is much larger than the distance from 20 to 30.

It is the metric this industry quotes most and defines least. Three things follow from the definition that sellers rarely mention:

• It measures links pointing at a domain. It is not a measure of traffic, of audience quality, or of whether a publication will ever cover you. Ahrefs says the same of its own metric: DR is purely link-based, and takes no account of a site's search traffic, its domain age or the popularity of its parent brand.
• A placement on a high-rated outlet does not transfer that rating to you. Most press links pass no search-engine credit at all, which is ordinary publisher policy — so on the majority of placements there is no mechanism by which the host's authority reaches your site.
• It is a vendor's estimate, not a fact about a business. Two tools will give you two different numbers for the same domain, and DR specifically is one vendor's model.

Anyone quoting you an average DR across a package is averaging estimates of a thing that mostly does not transfer. That is worth exactly as much as it sounds like.

Why our column is empty

We inherited DR values for every outlet from competitive research rather than from a measurement. Then we checked them against the competitor's own public catalogue: all 16 outlets that overlap match its figures exactly, 16 of 16. Numbers do not agree to the integer across sixteen domains by coincidence. Those values were transcribed.

They are still in our source file, because they are useful for internal work — sort order, margin planning — and they are unusable on a page. So the code enforces the distinction rather than trusting anyone to remember it:

• publishableDr() is the only path a rating can take to a page, and it returns null for any outlet whose source is not recorded. A rating with no provenance degrades to "Not rated" instead of rendering as a confident number.
• assertDrProvenance() fails a production build outright if unattributed ratings are still present, so shipping them is not a thing anyone can do by forgetting.
• A rating claiming to be measured must carry the date it was pulled and the credit its source requires. A measurement with no date is a claim, not a measurement. That check has no override at all, because the escape hatch exists to preview unfinished content, not to publish somebody else's licensed data without the credit it was licensed under.

The result is a catalogue that reads worse than a competitor's and is true. We would rather print nothing than print somebody else's number as ours.

What it will take to fill it

We compared four sources that could supply real ratings. The comparison turns on three things at once: what the number costs, whether we are permitted to show it to you, and whether it is actually the metric the column is named after.

Only one row is free, expressly licensed for public display, and the same metric as the label. We will use the Ahrefs public endpoint.

The licence is worth quoting on, because an express permission and an absence of prohibition are not the same thing. Clause 1 grants a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, revocable licence to "use, display, publish or integrate" the data. Clauses 2 and 3 require the credit Domain Rating by Ahrefs to appear adjacent to the number, legible, hyperlinked, and not hidden or removed. Clause 4 forbids repackaging the data as a competing product. Clause 5 says the terms may be varied or the endpoint withdrawn at any time without notice. Total liability is capped at SGD 100 and it is governed by Singapore law.

We carry that credit as a field on the rating itself rather than as page furniture, so the obligation travels with the number and cannot be dropped by forgetting to edit a page.

One premise we had to correct along the way: we had been told the free Ahrefs checker is capped at about three lookups a day, making it useless. That cap belongs to the free browser tool on Ahrefs' own site, and a competitor separately rate-limits its own visitors to three checks a day as a product decision. The API is a third thing, and no daily cap is documented for it. The only documented ceiling is 60 requests a minute.

What we still do not know

The current developer documentation carves the public endpoints out of the requirement for a paid plan; an older help-centre article says API v3 access needs a Lite plan or higher. Both readings are internally consistent, and the difference between them is $0 a month versus roughly $129. Until somebody generates a key and runs one lookup, that is unsettled, and we have written it down here rather than assuming the answer we prefer.

Meanwhile the checker on this site stays dark until the key is set. It shows a plain notice rather than an input box over an endpoint that can only fail, because a working-looking form that is guaranteed to return an error is a small lie of exactly the kind we are trying not to tell.

What happens when a lookup fails

Every path that cannot produce a real, live, attributed number says so instead of producing something else:

That last row is the one that matters most. A schema change upstream must never become "DR 0" beside a national newspaper.

The standard, in one line

A rating gets published here when we can say where it came from and when it was taken, with the credit its source requires sitting next to it. Everything else reads "Not rated" until that is true. And when the column does fill, it will be re-pulled quarterly, because a rating dated eighteen months ago is a memory rather than a measurement.

None of it is a promise about your rankings. A high number beside an outlet tells you that outlet is well linked-to. It does not tell you what a placement there will do for you, and we are not going to imply that it does.