Introducing a Preview of DR4: Our New Domain Rating Model for Scoring Backlink Profiles

As a result, you may notice your own DR change.

This fourth iteration (DR4) includes two significant updates: a smaller, higher-quality pool of domains that can impact DR and, by popular request, ratings for individual subdomains.

That means a subdomain like help.ahrefs.com will now have its own score (DR 75), separate from ahrefs.com (DR 92).

In our testing, DR4 shows a stronger correlation with Google ranking positions across all hosts and subdomains than our current model (DR3).

We've always been clear that Domain Rating is a link-based metric, which doesn't take into account things like the age of a domain or the quality of a site's content.

It's still calculated from links, but we're now putting more weight on those from sites (and their individual subdomains) that we estimate to have organic search traffic.

As a result, the number of sites with a DR4 score is around half the number with a DR3 score.

This also means a smaller pool of domains can now influence the DR of other sites.

If you've ever sorted our link reports by Domain Rating, you likely saw subdomains on popular sites show up high in the results.

Things like GitHub Pages sites, Blogspot blogs, and sites hosted on other popular website builders can dominate the results, even if the subdomains themselves don't have a strong link profile.

Now, these subdomains will get their own rating based on the relative strength of backlinks pointing to them.

There were a handful of exceptions that already had separate scores for their subdomains in the past, but now this will be rolled out much further.

Across 10 million domains/hosts, DR4 more strongly correlates with top 3 and top 10 Google ranking positions.

The current DR3 metric correlates more with root domain rankings, which is what DR3 was built around.

DR4 takes a broader view, scoring each host on its own merits, making its overall correlation more than 2.5x stronger.

In various backlink reports, you may notice a Spam label next to certain links.

We initially rolled out this label in 2025, based on a manually curated list of domains. In January 2026, we moved to a machine learning model to automatically detect spam domains.

Domains labeled this way are automatically excluded from emails about new links and can be easily filtered in various backlink reports.

Spam domains with DR3 scores between 30 and 70 saw the largest drops—with a median of around 15–20 points.

Non-spam domains remain relatively stable, with median DR4 changes generally close to zero across most DR3 ranges.

Using data from AhrefsTop.com, I compared the impact of DR4 vs. DR3 for sites we estimated to get the most organic traffic worldwide.

15.8% saw their Domain Rating stay the same, and 19.9% saw it decrease.

"But why would some of the most trafficked domains see their Domain Rating decrease?"

While there are drops, they're relatively small: The average decrease was 7.3 points, and the median was 4.

Answering this question is also a good opportunity to help revisit major changes in DR4.

One of the biggest "losers" is github.io, a domain used by GitHub to host its free GitHub Pages offering, which sees a 32-point decrease.

This is separate from their main site at GitHub.com.

Its subdomains, such as facebook.github.io, will still have a high Domain Rating (DR 86 in this case).

Our focus with Domain Rating has always been to help judge the strength of a site's backlink profile, which is useful for things like link prospecting and judging the difficulty of ranking in certain search results.

It's not a reflection of the quality of your content, your impact, or anything other than your backlink profile.

If you see your DR decrease, you may be wondering whether you did anything wrong.

No, you didn't, but I understand wanting to learn more.

My first recommendation is to check your backlink profile in Ahrefs.

A lower score simply means we don't see enough "quality" links pointing to your site that would push it higher.

(Keep in mind that Domain Rating is relative to other sites in our database and is logarithmic, so it's harder to move from 84→85 than it is from 54→55.)

I also recommend checking your closest competitors' scores. They may see similar changes, which can help put things in perspective.

With DR4, Monday.com will see their DR decrease slightly, from 91 to 90.

Competitors like Zoho will also see a 1-point decrease (to DR 91), whereas Teamwork.com keeps the same DR 82 score and Airtable sees a slight increase to DR 92.

If you report on these numbers, it might be wise to include what you see across multiple sites, and how your backlink profiles align or differ.

This update will roll out in the standard Ahrefs UI on December 1st.

For a short period of time afterwards, you'll still be able to compare DR3 scores via our API.

Over the past five weeks, I've checked thousands of domains and shared feedback with our development team where relevant.

We also asked a small group of active SEOs for their thoughts, and received very positive responses.

Now, we're opening up the chance for anyone to see their score before it's live on the site.

You can currently view your new Domain Rating score using the version=dr4 parameter on our free Domain Rating API, or check it via the demo page I set up: detailed.com/dr-v4/.

We know how popular the metric is (the free Domain Rating API hit 10M daily requests not long after launch), and believe it's important to give you time to check the updated scores.

We expect to receive feedback via social media and other channels, but I'm also temporarily opening up a feedback form if you have any comments you would like me to read privately.

We're all really excited to start sharing this with you, and hope you enjoy these updates.