Check DA vs DR: Why Ahrefs & Moz Disagree on the Same Marketing Site

You check a marketing site on Ahrefs and it shows a DR of 68. You check the exact same site on Moz and it shows a DA of 41. Same website. Same backlinks. Two very different numbers.

If you’re new to SEO, this is confusing — shouldn’t “authority” be one number? It isn’t, because DR and DA aren’t measuring authority the same way. They’re two different tools, built by two different companies, using two different methods, that happen to land on a similar 0–100 scale. Once you understand what each one is actually doing under the hood — and how to check both yourself — the mismatch stops being confusing and starts being genuinely useful information.

First, the Simple Version

Think of it like two people rating the same restaurant using completely different methods.

• DR (Ahrefs) is like counting how many respected people recommended the restaurant, and how respected each of those people is. It’s a math calculation based purely on links.
• DA (Moz) is like a food critic who’s eaten at thousands of restaurants and built a personal “gut instinct” model for predicting which ones will become popular — based on patterns they’ve noticed over time, not just counting recommendations.

Both are trying to answer a similar question — “how strong is this site’s link profile?” — but one is doing straight math, and the other is making a trained prediction. That’s the whole reason the numbers don’t match. Let’s go one level deeper on each, then walk through how to check domain rating and check domain authority yourself.

How Ahrefs Calculates Domain Rating (DR)

DR stands for Domain Rating, and it’s Ahrefs’ way of scoring a website’s backlink profile from 0 to 100.

Here’s what’s actually happening:

1. Ahrefs has its own robot (AhrefsBot) that crawls the internet nonstop, following links from page to page, the same way Google’s crawler does. This builds a massive map of which sites link to which.
2. Every site gets a “power level” based on who links to it. But here’s the part most people miss: a website doesn’t hand out its full power to everyone it links to — it splits that power between all the sites it links out to. So if a site links to only 3 other websites, each of those 3 gets a bigger boost than if that same site linked out to 10,000 websites. A smaller, more focused website can actually pass more value per link than a huge site spreading itself thin.
3. This “power” gets passed around the entire web, over and over, until the numbers settle into a stable ranking. Ahrefs then squeezes that huge range of values down into the simple 0–100 scale we see as DR.
4. Only real, “counted” links matter. Links marked nofollow, sponsored, or user-generated (like a forum signature) don’t count toward DR at all — even if they technically exist.
5. The scale gets harder to climb the higher you go. Going from DR 10 to DR 20 takes way less effort than going from DR 70 to DR 80. Think of it like weight classes — every extra pound of muscle gets harder to add once you’re already strong.

The key thing to remember about DR: it only looks at links. It doesn’t care about your traffic, how good your content is, or how old your site is. It’s pure “who links to me, and how strong are they.”

How Moz Calculates Domain Authority (DA)

DA stands for Domain Authority, and it’s Moz’s version of the same idea — but built completely differently.

Instead of a pure math calculation, Moz built a prediction model. Here’s what that means in practice:

1. Moz has its own crawler (Mozscape) that maps out backlinks across the web — separately from Ahrefs, so it doesn’t always see the exact same links.
2. Moz fed this model tens of thousands of real Google search results and asked it: “Looking at all these link patterns, what combination of signals best predicts which sites actually rank higher on Google?” The model then learned which patterns tend to show up on high-ranking sites.
3. That model blends several signals together — not just how many sites link to you, but also how trustworthy those linking sites are, how “spammy” your backlink profile looks, and how varied your link sources are. A big update in 2019 (nicknamed “DA 2.0”) made the model pay much closer attention to spam signals, which is why a lot of sites saw their DA drop that year even though nothing about their actual links had changed — the model just got stricter.
4. Because it’s a trained model, not a straight calculation, it updates more slowly. Moz refreshes its data and retrains its model roughly once a month, compared to Ahrefs, which often reflects new links within days.
5. Like DR, it’s on a 0–100 logarithmic scale, so the same “harder to climb at the top” rule applies here too.

The key thing to remember about DA: it’s a prediction, informed by real Google ranking outcomes — which is powerful, but also means it can shift for reasons that have nothing to do with your own site, like Moz updating its model.

How to Check Domain Rating (DR)

If you want to check DR for your own site or a site you’re vetting for backlinks, you don’t need a paid Ahrefs subscription:

1. Go to Ahrefs’ free Website Authority Checker (or the DR field inside Ahrefs Site Explorer if you already have access).
2. Enter the domain or subdomain you want to check.
3. Click through to see the DR score, along with related numbers like referring domains and backlink count.
4. If you want to track it over time, Ahrefs Site Explorer also shows historical DR — useful for confirming whether a link-building push actually moved the needle.

A couple of things worth knowing before you check domain rating for a site: DR is domain-wide, not page-specific (a separate score, URL Rating, covers individual pages), and free checkers sometimes show slightly cached or delayed numbers compared to a full Ahrefs account.

How to Check Domain Authority (DA)

To check DA, the safest route is Moz’s own tools, since third-party “DA checker” sites often display outdated, cached, or inaccurate numbers:

1. Go to Moz’s free Domain SEO Analysis / Link Explorer tool.
2. Enter the domain you want to check.
3. The tool returns the current DA score, along with Page Authority (the page-level version), linking root domains, and Spam Score.
4. Remember DA updates roughly monthly, so if you just check domain authority right after a link-building push, don’t expect the number to move immediately — give it a full update cycle before judging results.

If you’re evaluating a batch of sites rather than one at a time — for guest posting or backlink vetting — checking each one individually this way gets slow, and it’s easy to misjudge a single score in isolation. It’s more reliable to compare DA/DR across the marketing site list, so an inconsistent or inflated score on one site stands out clearly against the pattern of the rest of the list.

So Why Are the Numbers Actually Different?

Now that you know how each one works, the gap makes sense. It usually comes down to four things:

• They’re reading from two different maps of the internet. AhrefsBot and Mozscape crawl the web separately. Neither one sees every single link that exists, and they don’t always find the same ones.
• One is math, the other is a trained guess. DR calculates link power directly. DA predicts ranking likelihood based on patterns learned from real search results. Different processes, different outputs — even from similar-looking input data.
• They update on different schedules. DR often reacts to new links within days. DA typically takes closer to a month to catch up, since it depends on Moz’s slower refresh and retraining cycle.
• They care about different things. DA specifically penalizes spammy-looking link patterns as part of its model. DR doesn’t factor in spam or quality at all — it’s pure link math. So a site with a lot of links from lower-quality sources might score higher on DR than it does on DA.

This isn’t just a theory — it’s been tested. A 2023 academic study published in the journal Profesional de la información compared Ahrefs, Moz, and Semrush’s authority scores across more than 3,100 real websites pulled from actual Google search results. The researchers found that, across large groups of sites, all three tools’ scores tend to agree pretty strongly overall. But that “strong agreement” is a big-picture pattern — it doesn’t mean any two tools will agree on one specific website you’re checking today, especially sites sitting in the middle of the scale, which is exactly where most real marketing sites fall.

Which One Should You Actually Trust?

Neither, fully — and that’s not a dodge, it’s important context. Google has said directly that it doesn’t use DR, DA, or any third-party authority score in its ranking algorithm. Both Ahrefs and Moz describe their own metrics as estimates, not real Google signals. So the goal isn’t picking a “correct” number — it’s using both as directional clues.

	DR (Ahrefs)	DA (Moz)
What it’s really doing	Calculating link power mathematically	Predicting ranking likelihood with a trained model
Data source	Ahrefs’ own web crawl	Moz’s own web crawl
How fast it updates	Often within days	Roughly monthly
Does it factor in spam?	No — pure link math	Yes — built into the model
Best used for	Quick comparisons of raw link strength	A second opinion that accounts for link quality

Here’s the simplest way to use both, especially if you’re new to this: look at the gap between them, not just each number on its own. If a site’s DR and DA are reasonably close together, that’s usually a good sign — it suggests a healthy, well-earned link profile. If there’s a big gap, especially a much higher DR than DA, it’s worth digging a little deeper, because that pattern often shows up on sites that gathered a lot of links quickly without much regard for quality.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is DR the same as DA? No. DR (Domain Rating) is Ahrefs’ score, calculated with straight link-equity math — similar in spirit to how Google’s original PageRank worked. DA (Domain Authority) is Moz’s score, built by a machine-learning model trained on real Google search results. Both land on a 0–100 scale and both try to estimate “authority,” but they get there through completely different processes.

How do I check domain rating for free? Use Ahrefs’ free Website Authority Checker — enter the domain and it returns the current DR along with referring domain and backlink counts. A full Ahrefs account adds historical tracking so you can see DR change over time.

How do I check domain authority for free? Use Moz’s own free Link Explorer / Domain SEO Analysis tool rather than an unofficial third-party “DA checker,” since those often show cached or inaccurate numbers. It returns DA, Page Authority, linking root domains, and Spam Score.

Why does one site have a high DR but a low DA (or the other way around)? There are two main reasons. Ahrefs and Moz may find different sets of backlinks for the same site. Their systems also evaluate those links differently. Moz’s model considers spam signals. Ahrefs’ DR calculation focuses on raw link equity instead.

Which score is more accurate? Neither is “more accurate” in an absolute sense. Neither is a real Google metric, and both are estimates based on separate data. A 2023 academic study compared authority scores from Ahrefs, Moz, and Semrush. It found strong agreement across large groups of websites. However, the tools may still disagree on individual sites, especially those in the middle of the scale.

Do DR and DA affect my Google rankings? No, not directly. Google doesn’t use DR or DA in its ranking algorithm at all. They’re useful because they can reflect link authority, which matters for SEO. However, Google doesn’t directly use DR or DA as ranking signals.

Should beginners use DR or DA when checking backlink or guest post sites? Use both metrics if you can. Pay more attention to how closely the two scores match. A site where DR and DA are reasonably aligned usually has a cleaner link profile. A big gap between them is worth investigating. This is especially important when DR is much higher than DA.