What Is a Good Domain Rating? (With Real Data)

Domain Rating (DR) is Ahrefs’ measure of how strong a website’s backlink profile is, on a scale from 0 to 100. It’s relative by design: your score reflects how your backlink profile stacks up against every other website in our index.

That’s why “what’s a good DR?” has no single answer. A DR of 60 could be excellent in one industry and middling in another. It could be more than enough to rank for one keyword and nowhere near enough for another.

There’s one more thing worth knowing before you judge your own score. DR is logarithmic, so websites aren’t spread evenly across the 0–100 scale. The internet is mostly small, new, or abandoned sites, which means the overwhelming majority of domains sit right at the bottom — DR 0 to 10. Climbing from DR 20 to 30 takes a handful of links. Climbing from 70 to 80 can take thousands. So a “high” number is rarer than it looks.

Rather than chase a magic number, judge your DR the three ways that actually matter: against your competitors, against your industry, and against the specific keywords you want to rank for. Here’s how to do each, with real data.

The most practical benchmark isn’t the whole internet — it’s the specific companies you’re fighting for the same customers.

Take the SEO software space. Here’s how the major players compare:

In this market, a “good” DR is 80+ — that’s just the cost of entry. A DR of 69 (Ubersuggest) stands out as the outlier, and the referring domains column shows why: it has a fraction of the linking websites the rest of the pack has earned. That’s DR doing its job — it’s a summary of your backlink profile’s strength relative to the field.

Run the same comparison for your own niche. If your competitors cluster around DR 40, then a DR of 50 is genuinely good. If they’re all at 85, a DR of 70 means you have ground to make up. “Good” is whatever beats the people you’re actually competing with.

You’ll see your whole competitive set ranked by Domain Rating in one view, exactly like the table above. That instantly tells you whether your DR is “good” for the company you keep.

Zoom out from direct rivals to your whole sector, and the picture shifts again.

To give you a quick example, I used our SEO agent, Agent A, to pull the Domain Rating of 600 SaaS companies to see what “normal” looks like across an entire industry:

So if you run a SaaS site, DR 62 is dead average, DR 77 puts you in the top quarter of your industry, and anything above 86 is elite company. That’s a far more useful yardstick than a generic “70 is good,” because it’s measured against businesses like yours.

The lesson isn’t the specific SaaS numbers, it’s the method. Build a list of 20–30 companies in your space, check their Domain Ratings, and you’ve got an industry benchmark tailored to you.

That gives you a benchmark calibrated to your sector — far more meaningful than any universal number.

This is the comparison that actually predicts whether you can rank (and the one almost nobody runs).

Instead of asking “is my DR good?”, ask “what DR do the sites already ranking for my target keyword have?” Here’s the average Domain Rating of the top 10 organic results for a range of keywords:

Two lessons jump out.

First, competitive commercial keywords demand serious authority. To compete for “best CRM software,” you’re up against a SERP averaging DR 89. A new site at DR 20 isn’t getting onto that page anytime soon, no matter how good the content.

Second — look at that “lowest DR ranking” column. A DR 29 site ranks on page one for “best running shoes.” A DR 37 site ranks for “budgeting tips.” DR is not a ranking factor, and it’s not a gate. Lower-authority sites absolutely rank, especially for less competitive or more informational queries. DR tells you how steep the climb is, not whether it’s possible.

If your filtered list comes back nearly empty, the keywords in this space are locked up by high-DR sites — pick an easier topic first. But if you get a healthy list back, those are your openings: keywords where sites at your authority level are already ranking, so you can compete without needing to outgrow everyone first.

In the example above, filtering a list of SEO keywords to “Lowest DR: up to 30 in top 5” cuts thousands of terms down to 467 winnable opportunities — proof that a modest DR is no barrier if you pick the right battles.

It’s worth saying plainly, because it’s the most common misconception: DR is not a Google ranking factor. Google doesn’t use Ahrefs’ Domain Rating. It’s our metric, built from the size and quality of a site’s backlink profile.

What DR correlates with is competitiveness. Strong backlink profiles tend to come with the things that do help you rank — authority, trust, and the resources to produce and promote good content. But the correlation is loose, which is why you see DR 29 pages on page one and DR 90 pages buried on page five for the wrong query.

When we studied this back in 2025, we found that DR has a 0.131 correlation with SERP rankings: a small positive correlation, and far from definitive.

Treat DR as a strategic gauge, not a scoreboard:

Since DR is built almost entirely on your backlink profile, improving it comes down to earning more high-quality referring domains:

Improvement is gradual and logarithmic: the higher your DR, the more links each additional point requires. Focus on the links and the DR score follows.

There’s no universal “good” Domain Rating. There’s only good relative to something:

Check yours, then check those three benchmarks. That’ll tell you far more than any one-size-fits-all number ever could.