What is a good domain authority? DA and DR bands

In lower case, domain authority is the general idea, also sold as website authority; capitalised, Domain Authority (DA) is Moz's metric. If you have just checked your site and got a number like 18 or 34, the short answer to whether it is good is the one every vendor gives: it is good if it is close to, or above, the scores of the sites ranking for the keywords you want.

What counts as a good domain authority

To show what sites at each stage look like, here is a sample of 55 domains we measured on 2026-10-02: each went through the same DataForSEO query our checker uses and was set against its Ahrefs Domain Rating. The sample came from SEO search results, so it leans towards agencies and software companies, with 4 to 14 sites per band: a map, not a census.

Ahrefs DR	Typical sites in the sample	Domain rank on our checker, median (middle half)	Referring domains, median
0 to 19	Small sites and agency blogs	26 (20 to 39)	263
20 to 39	Small agencies and software products	34 (33 to 35)	240
40 to 59	Established agencies and smaller software brands	42 (36 to 52)	716
60 to 79	Well-known agencies and software brands	50 (47 to 56)	1,561
80 to 89	Major SEO software and agency brands	63 (57 to 67)	16,789
90 to 100	Moz, Ahrefs, Semrush, Shopify	82 (80 to 86)	126,057

Three readings of the table answer the questions people ask most.

Is 20 a good domain authority? For a site in its first year or two, yes. Semrush followed new domains for a year: of those that kept a top-100 ranking throughout, the best 10 percent ended at an average domain authority of 20.3 on its scale, and the group as a whole averaged under 10. For an established business chasing competitive keywords, 20 is low.

What is the average domain authority? A web-wide average would tell you nothing; the average that matters is the one across the results for your keyword. Semrush averaged the Authority Scores of the top ten results for ten keywords in each of ten industries and got anything from 53.1 in construction to 75 in finance.

Is my number normal? Below DR 40, the domain rank our checker shows barely separates sites: the medians are 26 and 34, with outliers in both directions. Our own site, structurawp.com, read 28 on the day Ahrefs rated it DR 34, and one DR 1 site read 54. Above DR 40 the two scales separate the bands more clearly, with the domain rank running lower. That is why the checker gives each rank a stage label rather than a grade: under 30 is an early-stage link profile, 30 to 44 a typical small-business or niche site, 45 to 59 an established publisher or SaaS, and 60 and up a major authority. The labels describe size, so none of them is green or red.

You can check your domain rank and a competitor's in the same way, and the page on how to increase domain authority covers what moves a site up a band.

Why the number is relative, and what to compare it with

Every vendor that publishes one of these scores says the same thing about it. Ahrefs: "It's not possible to say that a Domain Rating of 30 is good, or 50, or 60, or 70. It's all relative." Its rule of thumb is that a score "is good if it's higher than or comparable to similar sites." Moz makes the point with an example: "Knowing that your DA is 48 is useless in a vacuum. Knowing that your DA is 48 and the sites competing on a query you're targeting have DAs from 30-45 can be extremely useful."

Two properties make comparison the only honest use. The scales are logarithmic, so the step from 69 to 70 takes far more than the step from 9 to 10. And each score is relative to the whole index, so it can fall while you lose nothing: when the strongest sites gain links, Ahrefs explains, "other websites are pushed down the scale."

So compare like with like: your domain next to the sites ranking for the keywords you want, in the same tool, on the same day. If they sit close to you, those keywords are realistic; if they sit far above, start narrower. Matching keywords to your number is the job of keyword difficulty, which reads the same kind of strength for a single search.

How domain authority, domain rating and the DataForSEO rank are calculated

All of them start from links and differ in what they weigh.

Score	Published by	Built from
Domain Authority (DA)	Moz	Linking root domains, total links and other link signals; discounts spammy links and gives weight to links from sites with real traffic
Domain Rating (DR)	Ahrefs	The rating of each linking domain, split equally across all the domains it links to, scaled to 0 to 100
Authority Score	Semrush	Link power, organic traffic and spam factors
Domain rank	DataForSEO, shown on our checker	Link strength weighted by the strength of the linking domains, on a 0 to 100 scale

The Ahrefs formula explains most surprises. In its own example, "a DR-10 domain which links to three other domains can influence your DR more than a DR-80 domain which links to a million other domains." Semrush adds traffic, Moz filters spam, and each company crawls its own slice of the web, so one site gets different numbers in different tools. In our sample, the DataForSEO rank put the 55 sites in nearly the same order as Ahrefs DR (a rank correlation of 0.85), on a compressed scale. Because who links to you matters more to these scores than how many times, the number to watch underneath is referring domains, not backlink totals.

Domain authority vs page authority

Page Authority is Moz's score for a single URL, and URL Rating is Ahrefs' equivalent: the same idea, measured on one page's own links. Ahrefs notes that its domain score "correlates with Google rankings pretty well" but not as well as its page score, which fits the fact that Google ranks pages, not domains. So a page with good links of its own on a modest domain can outrank a linkless page on a strong one. Our checker reports domain-level figures only; Moz's Link Explorer shows Page Authority and Ahrefs shows URL Rating.

How Structura handles this

Structura treats your domain's strength as an input, not a target. On paid plans, the keyword research behind each campaign sets a difficulty ceiling from your site's current strength, so the keyword bank leads with keywords a site at your number can win and holds harder ones back. Each post is written after a read of the pages ranking for its keyword, cites sources you approve and, with internal linking switched on, links into your existing posts.

It does not raise the number directly. Structura builds no links and does no outreach; the score rises when other sites choose to cite what you publish, and pages that rank are the ones that get found and cited. The blog SEO software page shows how keywords are matched to a site's strength.

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