Domain Authority vs Domain Rating: What the Data Shows
We pulled Domain Authority and Domain Rating for more than a thousand real websites to see how closely Moz and Ahrefs actually agree, and where the numbers fall apart.
Two numbers turn up on almost every link-building spreadsheet and outreach pitch: Domain Authority (DA) from Moz and Domain Rating (DR) from Ahrefs. Both claim to score the same thing, how strong a website's backlink profile is, yet they almost never match. A site quoted as DA 55 might be DR 40, or DR 68, and nobody can quite tell you why.
So we stopped guessing and measured it. We looked up both scores for more than a thousand real websites and worked out how they actually line up. The findings are more useful, and more revealing, than the usual "they're roughly similar" hand-wave, and one of them says a lot about why so many "high authority" link opportunities are worth far less than the number suggests.
Two scores, one question
Domain Authority and Domain Rating are both trying to answer the same question: how much ranking power does this website's backlink profile carry? They come from different companies, built on different data, which is exactly why comparing them is so fiddly.
Domain Authority (Moz)
A 1 to 100 score from Moz that predicts how likely a domain is to rank in search. It is built from Moz's own link index plus a machine-learning model, and it is logarithmic, so climbing from 20 to 30 is far easier than 70 to 80.
Domain Rating (Ahrefs)
A 0 to 100 score from Ahrefs that rates the strength of a domain's backlink profile, driven by the number and quality of referring domains in Ahrefs' index. It is also logarithmic, so the top of the scale is the hardest to move.
The key difference: DR is purely about links, while DA folds in a prediction about ranking. Same intent, different measuring tape.
How closely do they actually agree?
Across our verified sample of real websites, the correlation between DA and DR came out at about 0.77. In plain terms, that is a genuine, fairly strong relationship. Knowing a site's DA tells you a lot about its likely DR. It just does not tell you everything.
On real websites, Domain Authority and Domain Rating move together most of the time
Measured across more than 1,100 sites, each looked up in both Moz and Ahrefs.
A correlation of 0.77 means DA explains around 60% of the variation in DR. That is strong enough to be useful for a quick sanity check, and weak enough that treating the two as interchangeable will burn you.
The gap is wider than people think
The single headline number hides the thing that matters most: the spread. Take every site in our sample at a given DA and look up its DR, and you do not get one answer, you get a range.
A site at DA 50 sits at around DR 52 on average. But most of those sites land anywhere between roughly DR 44 and DR 62. That is an 18-point window for a single DA value. Across the whole scale, about 60% of sites fall within 10 points of the typical conversion, and the average miss is around 11 points.
If you know the DA, here is the DR you can expect
| Feature | Typical DR | Where most sites land |
|---|---|---|
| DA 30 | around 31 | roughly 21 to 40 |
| DA 50 | around 52 | roughly 44 to 62 |
| DA 70 | around 74 | roughly 66 to 77 |
| DA 90 | around 89 | roughly 85 to 91 |
There is a pattern in the spread, too. The two scores agree most closely at the very top: for sites above DR 90, the typical gap shrinks to a few points, because the biggest, most established sites are unambiguously strong in both tools. The disagreement is widest in the middle of the range, DR 40 to 70, where a site's profile can look meaningfully different depending on which index you trust.
The finding that surprised us: a lot of DA is fake
When we first ran the numbers across our full database of link-building sites, the correlation was not 0.77. It was 0.40, barely a relationship at all. That did not match reality, so we dug in, and the cause turned out to be the most useful finding of the whole exercise.
The problem was the sites themselves. Most domains that get sold for links have no real audience. In our full inventory, more than 80% of sites had zero organic traffic: expired domains, private blog networks, and pages built purely to host outbound links. And for those sites, Moz DA became almost meaningless. It clustered around 54 no matter how weak the site actually was. Ahrefs DR, which is harder to game, saw straight through them and scored them low.
The clearest way to see it is to split the sites by how much real traffic they get, then measure the DA to DR correlation within each group.
The relationship gets stronger the more real the website is. On dead sites the two scores barely relate. On sites with genuine audiences of 10,000 visits a month or more, they line up tightly, at a correlation close to 0.80. That single chart is the whole story of DA versus DR: on real websites the two metrics broadly agree, and where they disagree wildly, it is usually a sign the site is not what its DA claims.
So why do the two scores disagree at all?
Even on legitimate sites, DA and DR rarely land on the same number, for a few honest reasons:
- Different indexes. Moz and Ahrefs crawl different slices of the web. Each sees backlinks the other has not found yet.
- Different formulas. DR is built purely from the link graph. DA blends the link graph with a machine-learning model trained to predict rankings, so it is measuring a slightly different thing.
- Different update cycles. The two tools refresh their scores on their own schedules, so a fresh batch of links can show up in one before the other.
- Both are logarithmic. A few points near the top of either scale represent far more link power than the same gap in the middle, which stretches disagreements unevenly across the range.
None of this makes either score wrong. They are simply two companies' best estimates of the same underlying idea, and estimates from different data will not agree to the decimal.
How to use DA and DR without getting burned
Our rules of thumb
- Use a range, not a number. Convert DA to DR (or back) as a band, and expect real sites to fall a good ten points either side of the midpoint.
- Cross-check with traffic. If a site has a healthy DA but no organic traffic, treat the score as suspect until proven otherwise.
- Do not mix scores in one report. Pick one metric per client and stick with it, so month-on-month numbers stay comparable.
- Trust agreement. When DA and DR both say a site is strong, they are almost always right. It is the disagreements that need a closer look.
The bottom line
Domain Authority and Domain Rating are close cousins, not twins. On real websites with genuine audiences they track each other well, closely enough that a converter is genuinely useful, and far enough apart that you should always think in ranges. The bigger lesson sits underneath the numbers: a score is only as trustworthy as the site it describes. Check the traffic, trust the agreement, and treat any single metric with healthy suspicion.
Common questions
Is DA 90 the same as DR 90?
Close, but not identical. In our data a DA 90 site sits at around DR 89, with most landing between DR 85 and 91. The two scores converge at the very top of the scale because the biggest sites are unambiguously strong in both tools. Lower down, expect more of a gap.
Which is better, Domain Authority or Domain Rating?
Neither is better, they answer the same question with different data. Ahrefs (DR) is purely link-based and harder to game. Moz (DA) folds in a ranking prediction. Use whichever your tools report, and convert between them when you need to compare like for like.
Can I convert DA to DR exactly?
No, and be wary of any tool that claims to. Two sites with the same DA can have noticeably different DR. The accurate answer is a typical value plus a range, which is how our converter presents it.
Why does a site have high DA but almost no traffic?
Usually because the DA has been inflated with low-quality or manipulated links, which is common on domains sold purely for backlinks. Domain Authority is the easiest SEO metric to game. Real organic traffic is a much harder signal to fake, so always check it alongside the score.
How many websites is this based on?
More than 1,100 real sites, each independently looked up in both Ahrefs and Moz. We filter out zero-traffic and private-blog-network domains, because their scores are unreliable and would distort the comparison.
Further reading