URL Rating (UR) and Domain Rating (DR) are both Ahrefs scores from 0 to 100 on a logarithmic scale, calculated from links. UR measures the strength of one page's link profile; DR measures the strength of a whole website's backlink profile, relative to other sites. Neither is a Google metric. When you judge a backlink, DR describes the site and UR describes the page that actually links to you.
- Check DR to shortlist and compare whole sites: directories, link prospects, competitors.
- Check UR to judge one page: a page linking to you, your live directory listing, or a page of yours you want to rank.
- Don't stop at either: a followed link, an indexed page and relevant visitors matter more than both scores.
Disclosure: DirPilot sells directory submissions, and a high DR is how many directories sell themselves. So for how the metrics work we quote Ahrefs' own documentation, and every DR, link type and price below comes from our directory pages, as of our last check in October 2026. We don't publish UR for listing pages, so you won't find a UR figure here.
What is URL Rating (UR) in Ahrefs?
Ahrefs' help article on UR says: "URL Rating (UR) shows the strength of a page's link profile on a 100-point scale." Its SEO glossary adds that Ahrefs URL Rating is "measured on a logarithmic scale from 0 to 100" and "somehow similar to Google's PageRank." Here's what Ahrefs says about how it works:
- It's page-level. "UR is a page-level metric, whereas DR is a domain-level metric." Enter a whole website in Site Explorer and the UR you get "will be for the homepage alone."
- Internal and external links both count. Links from the same site's own pages feed UR too. The glossary says the two are "weighted" differently, without saying how.
- Only followed links pass it. The glossary says only dofollow links pass UR, and the help article says Ahrefs respects the nofollow attribute.
- It uses PageRank principles. Ahrefs applies "the same basic PageRank principles": it counts links between pages, respects nofollow, uses a "damping factor" and crawls the web "far and wide".
- It's logarithmic. In Ahrefs' words, "it's a lot easier for a page to go from UR 20 to UR 30 than it is to go from UR 70 to UR 80."
- Some links are filtered out. Ahrefs cuts off "linking loops" between two websites, and its algorithm "removes some links which can artificially increase UR."
Ahrefs says "high UR pages tend to rank higher in organic search results," and its help article on DR says DR correlates with rankings, but "it doesn't do this as well as our URL Rating (UR)." Those are Ahrefs' correlation claims about its own metrics. And Ahrefs publishes principles, not a formula, so any precise claim about how much UR one link passes is a guess.
What is DR in Ahrefs? A short recap
Ahrefs Domain Rating (DR) "shows the strength of a website's backlink profile compared to the others in our database on a 100-point scale." The difference from UR is the unit: in Ahrefs' guide to Domain Rating, "PageRank is calculated between pages, while DR is calculated between websites." In short:
- It's built from backlinks, links from other sites: Ahrefs' Website Authority Checker says DR "looks at the quantity and quality of external backlinks to a website."
- It counts domains with a followed link to you, and "Only the first link from a domain will increase your DR."
- Each linking domain passes roughly its own DR divided by the number of unique domains it links to.
- It's relative, so it can drop when other sites gain links.
Our Domain Rating glossary entry has the full definition, and what is a good domain rating has benchmarks from the directories we track.
UR vs DR side by side
| URL Rating (UR) | Domain Rating (DR) | |
|---|---|---|
| Measures | Strength of one page's link profile | Strength of a whole website's backlink profile, relative to other sites |
| Level | One URL | The whole domain |
| Scale | 0 to 100, logarithmic | 0 to 100, logarithmic |
| Links counted | Followed internal and external links to that page | Followed links from other domains, first link per domain |
| What moves it | Links to that page, including from the site's own pages | New referring domains, their DR and how many sites they link to |
| Calculation | "basic PageRank principles", between pages | Similar to PageRank, between websites |
| Best used for | Judging one page or one link | Shortlisting and comparing sites, benchmarking competitors |
| Main limitation | Only as complete as Ahrefs' crawl of that page | Says nothing about any one page, and "doesn't account for backlink SPAM" |
| Used by Google? | No | No |
Google's documentation on how Search works, its spam policies and its Links report don't mention either metric. Both are Ahrefs' estimates from its own crawl of the web.
How UR and DR relate
They come from the same links, measured at different levels. Ahrefs' help center explains that DR "looks at the quantity and quality of domains linking to your entire website," while UR looks at the same factors for individual pages. In practice:
- A strong domain can lift its pages through internal links. Ahrefs' search traffic study says stronger sites "have more PageRank that they can pass to pages with internal links to help them rank." Since UR counts internal links, a page linked from the site's strong pages has more to draw on than one buried deep in an archive.
- A strong domain can still host weak pages. Ahrefs writes that "pages on high 'authority' domains tend to be stronger than those on low 'authority' sites." Tend to, not always: a page nobody links to doesn't inherit the domain's score.
- A page can outscore its site. Ahrefs' help center has an article titled "Why is a page's UR higher than the DR?", so it happens. The two are calculated differently, so neither has to sit below the other.
- Sites that link out a lot pass less DR to each one. Ahrefs' example is TechCrunch, which links out to "nearly 100K+ other websites", so "the amount of 'DR juice' it contributes to your website is relatively low." A directory links out to many sites by design.
Ahrefs also writes that "Google cares more about the 'strength' of the linking page than that of the linking domain." That's Ahrefs' reading, not Google's documentation, but the advice holds: judge the page, not just the site.
Which one to check, and when
| Situation | Look at |
|---|---|
| Choosing which directories or sites to approach | DR to shortlist, then link type, relevance and visitors |
| Judging a link you already have | UR of the linking page, its rel attribute and whether it's indexed |
| Comparing your site with competitors | DR, with Ahrefs Rank (AR) to separate sites on the same DR |
| Tracking a page you want to rank | That page's UR |
| Weighing a paid listing tier | Neither: what the tier adds besides the link |
For the first row, our free directory shortlist ranks directories for your product.
Common mistakes with UR and DR
- Treating them as Google scores. Both come from Ahrefs' crawler, and Google doesn't use them. Ahrefs itself writes that "Google ranks pages, not websites," and that Google representatives "consistently deny the use of 'domain authority' as a ranking factor."
- Judging a link by the site's DR. Ahrefs says to "never judge the quality of a website on site-wide 'authority' alone." Also check whether the site links out to a lot of websites, gets organic traffic and is "topically-relevant to yours."
- Comparing numbers that don't compare. A DR isn't a UR, and Ahrefs notes that "domain authority" as a concept is not to be confused with the Domain Authority (DA) metric from Moz. Even Ahrefs' legacy and new UR "are expected not to match." Compare one metric, from one tool, from around the same date.
- Chasing the number. Ahrefs says "you should not focus your efforts on growing this metric specifically," and that "large amounts of low-quality backlinks may actually increase your DR." Many cheap links are what Google's spam policies call link spam, such as "Low-quality directory or bookmark site links." Relevance and real visitors come first.
UR vs DR for directory listings and backlinks
A directory's DR belongs to its whole domain. What links to you is one page, your listing: as our high-DR directories page puts it, "one new page on it, often several clicks from the homepage, with almost no links of its own." In Ahrefs' terms, that page usually starts with little UR and gains more only when pages link to it: the directory's homepage, category pages or leaderboard (internal links, which UR counts), or other sites.
So a listing raises three separate questions:
- How strong is the directory? DR, the only number you can see before you submit.
- How strong is your listing page? UR, which only exists once the page is live and Ahrefs has crawled it.
- Does the link pass anything? The rel attribute. Nofollow links pass neither UR nor DR in Ahrefs, and Google says links marked nofollow, ugc or sponsored "will generally not be followed" (qualifying outbound links). Our dofollow vs nofollow study shows how directories differ.
Seven directories we track, when DirPilot last checked, October 2026:
| Directory | The DR describes | DR | Link type | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Product Hunt | producthunt.com | 91 | Nofollow (ugc) | Free |
| G2 | g2.com | 91 | Unchecked | Free, paid from $299 |
| F6S | f6s.com | 83 | Dofollow | Free |
| SaaSHub | saashub.com | 80 | Nofollow | Free, paid from $99 |
| Toolify | toolify.ai | 73 | Dofollow | From $99 |
| Dev Hunt | devhunt.org | 66 | Nofollow | Free, paid from $19 |
| MicroLaunch | microlaunch.net | 64 | Dofollow | From $49 |
Every DR here describes a domain. Your listing page's UR isn't in the table: it doesn't exist until the page is live, and we don't publish one. Link type is a separate question: Product Hunt and SaaSHub gave nofollow links on the listings we checked, so in Ahrefs' model they pass neither UR nor DR, however strong the page. Their value is "referral traffic and discovery rather than link equity," as our directory pages put it. G2 is unchecked because its pages blocked our automated check, and Dev Hunt's FAQ says free listings are nofollow while a $19 paid launch is dofollow.
The same split (site DR, page UR, rel attribute) applies to every one of the backlink examples a startup can collect. For followed links, our free dofollow directories list only includes directories where we've seen one on a live listing. Whether listings are worth it at all: do directory submissions still work.
How to check your listing's UR and link yourself
- Copy the listing's exact address once it's live. UR is per URL, and Ahrefs has a help article on why the version with and without a trailing slash can differ.
- Look it up in Ahrefs. Enter the full URL in Site Explorer, not the directory's domain, or you'll get the homepage's UR. Ahrefs says its SEO Toolbar unlocks DR and UR "with our browser extension and free Ahrefs account." The free Website Authority Checker shows DR only.
- Read a low or missing UR for what it is. A new page with few links scores low, and Ahrefs may not have reached it yet: it uses DR to decide "how many pages of a given website we want to crawl (and how deep we want to go)."
- Check the link. Our free dofollow link checker shows whether the link is followed and whether noindex, robots.txt or a canonical cancels it; how to check dofollow backlinks covers the manual methods.
- Check Google's side. Search the listing's address to see if it's indexed, and look for the directory in the Search Console Links report. It's Google's own data, but "a sample," and it "doesn't specify if a link is marked as nofollow."
- Check for visitors in your analytics' referral traffic.
Nobody outside Google can confirm that a link counts. You can confirm it's followed, on an indexable page and known to Google.
FAQ
What is URL Rating in Ahrefs?
It's Ahrefs' score for the strength of one page's link profile, from 0 to 100 on a logarithmic scale. It counts followed internal and external links to that page, using "the same basic PageRank principles." Enter a bare domain and you'll see the homepage's UR.
Is UR more important than DR?
For judging one link, UR is the closer measure, because it describes the page that links to you, and Ahrefs says DR correlates with rankings less well. For choosing which sites to approach, Ahrefs calls DR "a great metric for selecting websites to build links from." Neither matters more than a followed, indexed, relevant link.
Does Google use UR or DR?
No. Ahrefs calculates both from its own crawl, and Google's documentation doesn't mention them. UR borrows PageRank's principles, but it isn't PageRank: in Ahrefs' words, "Nobody knows exactly how PageRank is calculated except Google themselves."
Why is my page's UR zero or low?
Usually because few followed links point to it yet, which is normal for a new page or listing. Other causes the sources support: the links are nofollow, Ahrefs hasn't crawled the page yet, Ahrefs filtered some links out, or you looked up a slightly different address.
Can a page's UR be higher than its site's DR?
Yes. Ahrefs' help center has an article titled "Why is a page's UR higher than the DR?", and its DR help page explains that DR is calculated at the domain level while UR looks at individual pages, so the numbers don't have to line up.
Rather hand it over?
Before you submit, the only number you can check is the directory's DR; the rest is forms and follow-ups. DirPilot does that part: we pick the directories that fit your product, send you the list before we start (you can swap any out), write a different description for each, submit by hand, check that each listing is live, links to you and is dofollow, and report which pages Google has indexed at day 30. Then you can look up their UR in Ahrefs.
- Economy, $99: 30+ free, medium-DR directories.
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Each plan is a one-time payment, and work starts within one business day. Compare the plans, or browse every directory we track and our best startup directories ranking to do it yourself.