What Ahrefs DR4 means for makers

Domain Rating is Ahrefs’ score, from 0 to 100, for how strong a website’s backlink profile is compared with the other sites in Ahrefs’ database (Ahrefs’ definition). Two ideas drive it: a link from a higher-rated domain counts for more, and a domain shares its strength among all the domains it links to, so a link from a site that links out to very few places counts for more than one from a site that links to millions.

The scale is logarithmic, so moving from 84 to 85 is much harder than from 54 to 55. And it’s relative: your DR can change when other sites gain or lose links, even if nothing changed for you.

• It isn’t used by Google. Ahrefs’ own help centre says there’s no evidence that search engines use Domain Rating, or similar scores like Domain Authority, as a ranking factor, and quotes Google’s John Mueller saying Google doesn’t have a website authority score (source). Links matter to Google. A third-party summary of them doesn’t.
• It isn’t a quality score. DR only looks at links. Ahrefs says it doesn’t consider things like domain age or the quality of a site’s content, and that a change in DR says nothing about your content or impact (source).
• It isn’t the same as other tools’ scores. Moz Domain Authority, Open PageRank and others use their own link data and formulas, so the numbers aren’t interchangeable.

DR is still useful for what it was built for: a quick way to compare link profiles, to size up a site before asking it for a link, and to get a rough sense of how hard a set of search results will be to break into.

Ahrefs set out the changes in its announcement, Introducing a Preview of DR4, published 5 November 2026:

• Links from sites with search traffic count for more. DR4 gives more weight to links from sites, and their subdomains, that Ahrefs estimates get organic search traffic.
• A smaller pool of sites. DR4 is calculated from a smaller, higher-quality set of domains. About half as many sites have a DR4 score as had a DR3 score.
• Subdomains are scored on their own. A subdomain no longer inherits its root domain’s DR. Ahrefs’ own example: help.ahrefs.com is DR 75 under DR4, while ahrefs.com is DR 92.
• Spam is cut hard. Domains Ahrefs labels as spam lose much of their score. Spam domains that had a DR3 between 30 and 70 dropped the most, by a median of about 15 to 20 points. For domains not labelled spam, the median change is close to zero.

Ahrefs reports that across 10 million domains and subdomains, DR4 correlates much more closely with Google rankings than DR3 did. The detail is worth reading, though: for root domains alone, DR3 still correlated more closely, and the gain comes from scoring subdomains properly. Correlation also isn’t cause. DR4 most likely tracks rankings better because it now leans on search traffic, which is itself a result of ranking.

• 5 November 2026: Ahrefs announces the DR4 preview. Scores are available through Ahrefs’ free Domain Rating API by adding version=dr4 to a request.
• 1 December 2026: DR4 becomes the default in the Ahrefs interface.
• After that: Ahrefs says DR3 scores will stay available through the API for a short period.

Your DR4 depends on where your links come from. Look at your backlinks and ask how many of the linking sites have readers who find them through search.

• Links from directories and launch lists. Many of these sites get little search traffic of their own, so their links count for less under DR4, and their own DR falls too.
• Badge and link exchanges. In the study below, directories that ask for a badge on your site in return for a link lost far more DR than the others.
• Platform subdomains. A link from yourname.notion.site or a project on github.io used to borrow the platform’s DR. Now the subdomain is judged on its own links.
• Links from sites people actually visit. These hold up. In Ahrefs’ own figures, 64.3% of the 1,000 domains with the most estimated organic traffic saw their DR rise.

An early look at the preview, by SaaSCity, ran 2,405 directories through Ahrefs’ free API with both versions. The median change across the whole list was 2 points down, but a set of 123 curated launch directories fell from a median DR of 61 to 32 (SaaSCity’s study; its author runs a directory that sells paid listings and says so in the post). The guide on which launch directories are still worth it goes through those findings.

• Write down both numbers. Before 1 December, record the DR3 and DR4 of your domain and a few competitors with the DR checker. If you report DR to a client, a board or investors, tell them about the change before the number drops.
• Don’t panic about a drop. Your rankings depend on your links and content, not on the score Ahrefs gives them. For how search is really going, look at clicks and impressions in Search Console.
• Judge links by their audience. When you look for links, ask whether the site has readers, ranks for searches in your area and would send you visitors. That was always the better test, and DR4 now leans the same way.
• Check the exact host. If a listing lives on a subdomain, look up that subdomain, not the platform it runs on.
• Stop paying for DR alone. If a site is selling a “high DR dofollow link”, the number may not survive DR4, and Google’s spam policies treat buying links that pass ranking as link spam anyway.
• Keep other measures in view. The domain authority checker shows Open PageRank, a separate measure built from open link data. No single score is the truth, so compare a few.