How established does a domain look?

Being straight about this

This is not Moz’s Domain Authority, and nothing free is.

“Domain Authority” is a score Moz invented and calculates from Moz’s own index of links between websites. Ahrefs has its own version (Domain Rating) and Semrush another (Authority Score). They disagree with each other constantly, because each is only as good as its own crawl — and none of them is used by Google.

We do not have a link index, so we do not pretend to. What we do is read the free public record: how long the domain has been registered, how long a website has been on it, whether it is among the most visited sites on the web, and whether it works securely today. That tells a real, established business apart from a brand-new or abandoned domain, which is what most people checking a domain want to know.

Link rank is not switched on here yet, so today’s scores come from the other four signals, re-weighted to 100.

How the score is worked out

• Link rank (40%) — Open PageRank’s 0–10 score, times ten. It is built from the Common Crawl, a public crawl of billions of pages.
• Traffic rank (25%) — position in the Tranco list of the top million sites. The top site scores 100, the millionth scores 0, on a log scale. Not being on the list scores 0, which is normal for a small business.
• Domain age (15%) — from the registry’s RDAP record. Five years scores 50, twenty years or more scores 100.
• Website history (10%) — the Internet Archive’s first saved copy, on the same curve. A domain can be old with no website on it; this is how you tell.
• Secure and online (10%) — 100 if it loads over HTTPS, 40 if only over plain HTTP, 0 if nothing answers.

What to do with a low score

Nothing directly: no one can raise a number like this except slowly, by being a site other people link to and visit. What you can fix this week is everything on the site itself — and that is what the free audit checks. A young domain with a clean, fast, well-described site beats an old one that is broken.

Questions people ask first

Can I check a competitor?

Yes, any public domain. Nothing is sent to them.

Why is my score different from Moz or Ahrefs?

Different inputs. Theirs are built from their own link crawls; ours from the public signals listed above. Use any of them to compare domains against each other, never as a target in itself.

Does Google use this score?

No. Google has said plainly that it does not use any third-party authority metric, ours included.