Domain authority, domain rating and domain rank are scores from zero to a hundred that SEO tools calculate from the links pointing at a website. Each tool has its own name and its own formula. Google has said repeatedly that it does not use any of them. They are useful for comparing sites against each other, and useless as a target in themselves.
Where the numbers come from
Every major SEO tool crawls the web, builds its own map of who links to whom, and summarises each domain's position in that map as a single figure. Moz calls it Domain Authority, Ahrefs calls it Domain Rating, others use authority score or domain rank. The backlink data in this tracker carries a domain rank of the same kind.
Because each tool has a different crawl and a different formula, the same site gets different scores in different tools, and a score is only comparable with other scores from the same tool.
What Google says
Google's representatives have said plainly and more than once that Google does not use domain authority in crawling, indexing or ranking, and that Google has no single overall domain authority figure of its own. Google evaluates links to pages, and it has site-level signals of various kinds, but the third-party number is not one of them.
How to use the number anyway
As a comparison. If every site on page one for your keyword scores in the sixties and you score twelve, you have learned something real about how much link building stands between you and that page. If a prospective link comes from a site scoring two with a high spam score, you have learned something about that too.
As a trend on your own site, loosely. It moves slowly and lags reality, but a domain rank that has not moved in a year while you have been publishing tells you the publishing is not attracting links.
How not to use it
Never as a goal. Chasing the score leads to buying links, which is the one thing that reliably makes the score go up and rankings go down. Never as a threshold for who may link to you: a relevant link from a small local site is worth more than an irrelevant one from a large general one. And never in a report to a client as if it were a Google metric. It is not, and a competitor who knows that will say so.
Sources
Where this shows up in the tracker
Every term in this glossary is something the product actually measures or acts on. Plans start at £29 a month, with rank tracking, AI visibility, the daily AI readiness scan, security and domain health, Search Console, backlinks and audits on every one of them.
Related terms
PageRank
PageRank is the algorithm Google was founded on: a page's importance is estimated from the number and importance of the pages linking to it. Google still lists link analysis systems and PageRank among the systems it uses today. The public score was retired years ago, but the principle that links from trusted pages confer trust has never gone away.
Backlink
A backlink is a link from someone else's website to a page on yours. Search engines treat it as a vote: the more trusted and relevant the site casting it, the more it counts. Links are still among the strongest ranking signals Google has, which is exactly why buying them is against Google's rules and why earning them is slow.
Toxic backlinks
Toxic backlinks, spammy backlinks and high spam-score links are all names for links that an SEO tool has flagged as coming from low-quality or manipulative sites. The score is the tool's estimate, not Google's judgement. Google says it ignores most such links on its own, so a red number in a report is usually information, not an emergency.
Anchor text
Anchor text is the visible, clickable words of a link. Search engines read it as a description of the page being linked to, which makes it one of the clearest signals of what a page is about. Descriptive anchor text helps. Identical, keyword-stuffed anchor text across many links is one of the recognised marks of bought links.