Domain Rating (DR)
Domain Rating (DR) is Ahrefs' score from 0 to 100 for how strong a website's backlink profile is compared with other sites.
Domain Rating, or DR, is a score from 0 to 100 that Ahrefs gives a website for the strength of the links pointing to it. A higher DR means more links from sites that are well linked themselves. It's an Ahrefs number, not something Google uses or shows.
Marketers use DR as a quick way to size up a site: a competitor, a publication you'd like coverage from, or a site offering you a guest post.
How it's worked out
Ahrefs explains it in its help article on DR. Each linking site passes on part of its own rating, split evenly across all the sites it links to. The result is then put on a 0 to 100 scale. So one link from a strong site that links out rarely counts for more than many links from weak sites, and the score is relative to every other site Ahrefs tracks.
Other tools have their own versions, such as domain authority. They're built differently, so don't compare a DR from one tool with a score from another.
What DR can and can't tell you
DR is about links to a whole domain. It says nothing about a single page, about traffic, or about whether a site covers your subject.
For example, a national newspaper with a DR of 92 might never write about coffee, while a specialist coffee blog with a DR of 41 publishes the buying guide that every "best espresso machine" search turns up. For Fernhill Coffee, the blog is the better target.
DR and AI answers
AI platforms don't look up DR. When they search before answering, they read the pages that rank and the pages that suit the question. High-DR sites often rank well, so they show up in answers a lot, but a smaller site on exactly the right topic can be cited just as often. It's better to see which sites the platforms actually read for your questions than to guess from a score.
In AnswerOrbit
Sources lists the domains and pages the answers used for your prompts, with how many answers used each one. Its Gaps tab ranks sources by how often they're used and how many of your competitors they name. See Sources.