What is a good domain valuation? (With real data)

“Is my domain rating good?” is one of the most common questions in SEO. The honest answer: It really depends on what you’re comparing it to.

Domain Rating (DR) is Ahrefs’ measure of how strong a website’s backlink profile is, on a scale of 0 to 100. It is inherently relative: your score reflects how your backlink profile compares to all other websites in our index.

Therefore, “What is a good DR?” has no consistent answer. A DR of 60 could be excellent in one industry and mediocre in another. It might be more than enough to rank for one keyword and not nearly enough for another.

There is something else you should know before judging your own score. DR is logarithmicso that sites are not evenly distributed across the 0 to 100 scale. The Internet is largely made up of small, new or abandoned websites, which means the vast majority of domains are at the bottom – DR 0 to 10. Going up from DR 20 to 30 requires a handful of links. Going from 70 to 80 can take thousands. So a “high” number is rarer than it looks.

Instead of chasing a magic number, assess your DR based on the three criteria that really matter: compared to your competitors, compared to your industry, and compared to the specific keywords you want to rank for. Here’s how to complete each step with real data.

The most practical measure is not the entire Internet, but the specific companies you are competing with for the same customers.

Enter the SEO software space. Here’s how the main players compare:

website	Domain valuation	Referring domains
Semrush	92	132,404
Ahrefs	91	100,201
Moz	91	106,417
Similar web	89	49,594
SE ranking	85	19,574
Mangools	82	15,770
Ubersuggest	69	1,522

There is a “good” DR in this market 80+ — that’s just the entry cost. A DR of 69 (Ubersuggest) stands out as an outlier, and the Referring Domains column shows why: it has a fraction of the linking sites the rest of the group earned. This is DR doing its job – it is a summary of the strength of your backlink profile compared to the field.

Do the same comparison for your own niche. If your competitors are concentrated around DR 40, then a DR of 50 is really good. If they are all at 85, a DR of 70 means you have some catching up to do. “Good” is what outperforms the people you actually compete with.

Here’s how to calculate this using Ahrefs

1. Open Batch Analysis (Site Explorer → Batch Analysis).
2. Add your domain and your direct competitors – up to 200 at once.
3. Set the mode to domain and click Analyze.
4. Sort the results by DR Split.

You’ll see your entire competitor set organized by domain rating in one view, just like in the table above. This will let you know immediately whether your DR is “good” for the business you run.

When you zoom out from your direct competitors to your entire sector, the picture changes 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:

Benchmark	Domain valuation
Lower quartile	38
Medium SaaS company	62
Upper quartile	77
Top 10%	86

So if you run a SaaS site, DR 62 is absolutely average, DR 77 puts you in the top quartile of your industry, and anything above 86 is elite. This is a far more useful metric than a general “70 is good” because it is measured against companies like yours.

The lesson is not the specific SaaS numbers, but the method. Create a list of 20 to 30 companies in your field, check their domain ratings, and get an industry benchmark tailored to you.

Here’s how to calculate this using Ahrefs

1. Create a list of 20 to 50 companies in your industry (your own customer list, a “Top X Tools” roundup, or competitors’ competitors all work).
2. Place the domains in Batch Analysis and export them DR Split.
3. Sort from bottom to top and read the quartiles: The middle value is the median of your industry, the top 25% mark “strong”, the bottom 25% mark “lagging”.

This gives you a benchmark tailored to your industry – far more meaningful than any universal number.

This is the comparison that actually predicts whether you can rank (and the comparison that almost no one does).

Instead of asking, “Is my DR good?”, ask, “What DR do the sites that are already ranking for my target keyword have?” Here is the average domain score of the top ten organic results for a range of keywords:

keyword	Average DR of the top 10	Lowest DR rank
What is SEO?	91	81
best crm software	89	73
Email marketing software	85	76
Project management software	84	69
Keto recipes	80	61
Budgeting Tips	78	37
best running shoes	76	29

Two lessons jump out.

First, Competitive commercial keywords require serious authority. In the competition for the “best CRM software” you are dealing with a SERP average of DR 89. A new website with DR 20 will not get to this page quickly, no matter how good the content is.

Second, look at the “lowest DR rank” column. A DR 29 The website ranks on page one for the “best running shoes.” A DR-37 website receives a “Budget Tips” rank. DR is not a ranking factor and not a goal. Lower authority sites have absolute ranking, especially for less competitive or more informative queries. DR tells you how steep the climb is, not whether it is possible.

Here’s how to calculate this using Ahrefs

1. Enter your target keywords in Keywords Explorer.
2. Click Add filter and add the DR to your website Lowest DR Filter.
3. Check your keyword list with similar DR websites that are already ranking in the top 5.

If your filtered list is almost empty, the keywords in this area will be blocked by high DR sites – choose a simpler topic first. But when you get a healthy list again, these are your opportunities: keywords that sites at your authority level already rank for, allowing you to compete without having to outgrow everyone first.

In the example above, filtering a list of SEO keywords by “Lowest DR: up to 30 in top 5” reduces thousands of terms to 467 winnable opportunities – proof that modest DR is not a hindrance when you pick the right battles.

It’s worth saying it clearly because it’s the most common misconception: DR is not a Google ranking factor. Google does not use Ahrefs’ domain rating. It is our metric based on the size and quality of a website’s backlink profile.

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

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

Treat DR as strategic measure, not a scoreboard:

• Use it to estimate how difficult a keyword or niche will be.
• Use it to track your own backlink growth over time.
• Don’t obsess about moving it a few points. You don’t rate the points themselves – the links behind them do.

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

• Earn links from more unique websites. DR rewards the number of distinguishable Domains that link to you, not the pure number of links. Ten links from ten websites beats a hundred from one.
• The volume of unique domains is what really defines DR. Counterintuitively, you can achieve high DR with links from low DR sites alone – you just need a lot of them. A single link from a massive site like TechCrunch barely moves your DR because its link equity is split among the 100,000+ sites it links to. Follow more distinguishable referring domains and don’t over-index a single large link.
• Create truly linkable assets – Original data, free tools, definitive guides – other sites want quote.
• Reclaim and repair – Find unlinked brand mentions and broken links pointing to your old pages and convert them into live links.

Improvement is gradual and logarithmic: the higher your DR, the more connections are required for each additional point. Focus on the links and the DR score will follow.

There is no universal “good” domain rating. There is only good relative to something:

• Good compared to your competitors: You beat the specific sites you compete with.
• Good compared to your industry: where you sit among your colleagues.
• Good compared to SERP: enough authority to compete for the keywords you actually want.

Check yours and then these three benchmarks. This tells you far more than any uniform number ever could.