How to check domain authority
Enter your root domain in Moz Link Explorer, Semrush Domain Overview or the Ahrefs Website Authority Checker. Each returns its own score — Domain Authority, Authority Score and Domain Rating respectively. All three offer free checks; pick one as your baseline and record it with a date.
7+ years senior SEO consulting · 200+ engagements · link profile audits and recovery work
Last reviewed August 18, 2026
Where to check, and what each one reports
Moz Link Explorer / MozBar
Domain Authority (DA)
The original score, and the one clients usually mean when they say "DA". Refreshes roughly monthly.
Free access: 10 queries a month on a free account; MozBar shows DA on any page you browse.
Semrush
Authority Score (AS)
Mixes link quality, organic traffic and spam signals, so it drops when a profile looks bought. The one I quote in reports.
Free access: 10 lookups a day on the free tier through Domain Overview.
Ahrefs Website Authority Checker
Domain Rating (DR)
Pure link maths. Fast to read, easiest to inflate, so treat a high DR with a low traffic number as a red flag.
Free access: Unlimited basic checks on the free tool; full backlink detail needs a paid plan.
Majestic
Trust Flow / Citation Flow
Useful as a second opinion — a Citation Flow far above Trust Flow usually means volume without quality.
Free access: Limited free checks; the browser plugin covers casual use.
A five-step check that gives you a usable number
- 1
Pick one tool and make it your source of truth
DA, AS and DR are not interchangeable. Mixing them across months makes the trend meaningless. Choose the one your reporting stack already uses and record the others as secondary.
- 2
Enter the root domain, not a page URL
Type example.com, not https://example.com/blog/post. A page URL returns page-level scores (Page Authority, URL Rating), which answer a different question.
- 3
Check both www and non-www once
If a redirect is misconfigured, the two versions can hold separate link profiles and separate scores. Finding that on the first check has saved several clients months of guesswork.
- 4
Record the number with a date
Scores refresh on the vendor's schedule, not yours. Without a dated log you cannot tell a real climb from an index refresh.
- 5
Benchmark against the sites actually ranking
Check the top five results for your main keyword the same day. Your score only matters relative to the competitors in that specific SERP.
Four ways people misread the number
Comparing DA from one month to DR from the next
Different vendors, different indexes, different curves. The apparent 12-point jump is a change of tool, not progress.
Checking weekly
Moz refreshes DA roughly monthly, Ahrefs updates DR far more often. Weekly checks mostly measure index noise. Quarterly is enough for reporting.
Trusting free 'DA checker' sites
Most scrape or estimate, and some inflate to sell links. Use the vendors' own tools — Moz, Semrush and Ahrefs all allow free checks.
Reading the score as a Google metric
It isn't one. It is a third-party estimate, useful for benchmarking and for spotting a link profile going wrong.
Related reading
Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini about checking website authority?
24 citation-ready answers on AEO, GEO, schema, local SEO, and Bangladesh search — written in the 40–80 word format LLMs quote.