Does your Domain Rating match reality?
Backlink authority is not the same as getting found. Effective Domain Rating (eDR) measures your site's real cross-surface visibility, Google, Brave, DuckDuckGo, AI answers, site health, and the Knowledge Graph, then tells you whether Ahrefs DR is over- or under-rating you.
Why backlink authority is only half the story
Domain Rating tells you how strong your backlink profile is. It does not tell you whether you actually rank, whether AI assistants cite you, or whether your pages are fast and indexed. Two sites with the same DR can have wildly different real visibility. Effective Domain Rating closes that gap: it checks where you really show up across search engines and AI answers, factors in site health and entity authority, and expresses the result as a delta against DR so you can see, at a glance, if your authority is translating into being found.
FAQ
- What is Effective Domain Rating (eDR)?
- eDR is a 0-100 score of a site's realized visibility: does it actually get found and cited? It blends where the site ranks on Google, Brave, and DuckDuckGo for its core query, whether AI assistants cite it, its PageSpeed health, and its Google Knowledge Graph presence. Ahrefs Domain Rating measures backlink authority; eDR measures whether that authority translates into being seen.
- How is eDR different from Domain Rating (DR)?
- DR is a lagging backlink score: it tells you how many strong sites link to you, not whether you rank or get cited today. A site can have a high DR but rank poorly (overrated), or a modest DR but dominate its niche and get cited by AI (underrated). eDR shows that gap by comparing realized visibility to DR.
- What does overrated or underrated mean?
- Underrated means the site performs on real search and AI surfaces better than its backlink score implies. Overrated means it has authority on paper but underperforms where it counts. Fairly rated means the two roughly match.
- Why do some signals show as unavailable?
- Every signal is best-effort. If a surface is rate-limited or a data source is temporarily unavailable, that signal is dropped and eDR is re-normalized over the ones that resolved, so you always get a usable score rather than an error.
DR baseline by Ahrefs. eDR is a StartupHub.ai metric.