Free Domain Rating Checker (DR4)

Domain Rating (DR) is a score from 0 to 100 created by Ahrefs. It measures the strength of a website's backlink profile compared with every other site in the Ahrefs database. A site that is linked to by many strong, independent websites gets a high DR. A site with few or weak links gets a low one.

The scale is logarithmic. Moving from DR 20 to DR 30 takes a modest number of new links from new referring domains, while moving from DR 70 to DR 80 takes a very large number of links from sites that are themselves highly rated. Each step up is harder than the last, so a ten-point gap at the top of the scale is a much bigger difference than a ten-point gap near the bottom.

DR is not a Google ranking factor, and Google does not use it. It is a useful stand-in for link authority, because the sites that rank well for competitive searches tend to have strong link profiles. SEOs use it to compare competitors, to decide which sites are worth a guest post or outreach, and to judge how hard a keyword will be to rank for. DR only looks at links. It ignores domain age, content quality and traffic.

DR4 is the fourth version of the Domain Rating model. Ahrefs describes two main changes. First, DR4 counts links from a smaller, higher-quality pool of sites, putting more weight on sites estimated to have organic search traffic. Second, subdomains now get their own rating instead of inheriting the score of the root domain, so help.example.com and example.com can have different scores.

DR4 also lowers the scores of domains that Ahrefs labels as spam. In Ahrefs' testing, DR4 correlates more strongly with Google ranking positions across all hosts than DR3 did. If your DR moved after the switch, it does not mean your site got worse. It means the links pointing to you now count differently.

This checker shows DR4 and DR3 side by side, so you can see how the new model changes the score for any domain. Check a root domain and one of its subdomains to see the biggest differences.

You can get DR4 scores programmatically in two ways. Ahrefs offers a free Domain Rating endpoint that accepts a version parameter. It needs a free API key, which you can create in your Ahrefs account settings. Use of the data requires the attribution “Domain Rating by Ahrefs” with a link to ahrefs.com.

curl -G "https://api.ahrefs.com/v3/public/domain-rating-free" \
  --data-urlencode "target=example.com" \
  --data-urlencode "version=dr4" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_AHREFS_API_KEY" \
  -H "Accept: application/json"

The response contains the rating and a link to the licence terms:

{ "domain_rating": { "domain_rating": 54.3, "license": "https://ahrefs.com/legal/domain-rating-license" } }

If you do not want to manage a key, this site exposes the same lookup. Send a POST request with a JSON body. The version field is optional and defaults to dr4. Requests are limited to 20 per minute per visitor, and results are cached for six hours.

curl -X POST "https://shipcircle.dev/api/tools/domain-rating" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url":"example.com","version":"dr4"}'

# { "result": { "domain": "example.com", "version": "dr4", "rating": 54.3,
#   "band": { "label": "Moderate", "summary": "..." }, "checkedAt": "..." } }

Set version to dr3 for the previous model, or to both to get a comparison. The comparison response has the shape { "result": { "domain", "dr4": {...}, "dr3": {...} | null } }. dr3 is null if Ahrefs stops returning it. Ahrefs has said DR3 will stay available through its API for only a short period after DR4 becomes the default, so do not build long-term reports on it.