Domain Authority
Popularized by Moz, domain authority is not a metric used directly by search engines themselves, but it's widely used as a benchmark for comparing the relative strength of different websites.
Worth remembering: no search engine or AI platform reads this number. It is a third-party estimate, built from a third-party crawl of the web, and different vendors produce different scores for the same site. Useful for comparing yourself against a competitor on the same scale — misleading the moment it is treated as something a system is actually measuring.
While domain authority doesn't directly measure AI visibility, sites with stronger overall authority tend to be treated as more credible sources by AI systems as well.
A company checks its domain authority against competitors to gauge how much backlink-building effort it might need to close the gap.
What is domain authority?
A third-party score, popularised by Moz, estimating how likely a site is to rank, based largely on backlinks. A useful benchmark — not a Google metric.
What is authority score, and how is it different from Domain Authority?
Authority score rates the sources citing you, in the eyes of AI engines. Domain Authority rates your own domain, based on backlinks, per an SEO tool.
