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 for its core query across multiple independently crawled search indexes, whether AI assistants cite it, its load speed and technical SEO, and whether it is recognized as a distinct real-world entity. 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, by 12 points or more. Overrated means it has authority on paper but underperforms where it counts, by 12 points or more in the other direction. Anything inside that band is fairly rated: the two views of the site agree.

Is eDR a Domain Authority checker?

No, and the difference matters. Domain Authority and Domain Rating are both estimates of link strength, so they answer the same question with different arithmetic. eDR answers a different question entirely: given the authority you have, are you actually being found and cited? It is the delta between authority and visibility, which is why it is most useful read alongside DR rather than instead of it.

How do I improve my eDR if I am overrated?

Work the heaviest signal first. Being overrated almost always means links are outrunning citations, so the fix is to become the page an answer engine would quote: cover the specific question your core query asks, put the answer in server-rendered text near the top rather than behind a script, and make the page attributable with clear structured data and a consistent organisation identity. Ranking on more than one independent index, rather than tuning for a single engine, is the second lever. Speed is the third, and it is the smallest.

Effective Domain Rating · free tool

Effective Domain Rating (eDR) Checker

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. Effective Domain Rating is a 0-100 score of realized visibility, shown as a delta against DR.

What eDR measures: four signals, one delta

Domain Rating answers one question, and answers it well: how strong is the set of sites linking to you. eDR answers the question that actually pays, which is whether that strength shows up anywhere a person or an assistant would find you. Four signals go into it, weighted as shown, and a signal that cannot be resolved is dropped rather than guessed at.

1. Real search visibility

Do you actually rank?36% of the score

Where you show up for your core query, checked across more than one independently crawled search index rather than a single engine. Two indexes disagreeing about you is itself a finding: it usually means your ranking rests on one provider’s view of your links rather than on the page being the best answer.

2. AI citations

Do assistants cite you?32% of the score

Whether an AI assistant answering your core query actually names you as a source, as opposed to merely mentioning you in passing. This is the heaviest single signal, because a citation is the closest thing to a click in an answer engine, and it is the one that high-authority sites most often fail.

3. Entity authority

Are you a recognised entity?18% of the score

Whether you are understood as a distinct real-world organisation rather than a string of characters. Entities get disambiguated, described and reused across surfaces; unrecognised domains have to re-earn their identity on every query.

4. Site health

Are you fast and indexable?14% of the score

Load performance and technical SEO on the page a visitor or a crawler actually lands on. It is weighted lowest deliberately: being fast will not make an uncited site cited, but being slow will quietly cap everything else.

Overrated, underrated, or fairly rated

The verdict is the delta, not the score. Subtract Domain Rating from eDR: a gap of 12 points or more in either direction is a real disagreement between what your links claim and what the surfaces show, and anything inside that band means the two views agree.

Underrated is eDR at least 12 points above DR. The site performs on real search and AI surfaces better than its backlink profile implies: a modest link graph, but it owns its niche and gets quoted. This is the healthy version of a small site, and it usually means the pages answer a specific question better than the bigger domains bothered to.

Overrated is eDR at least 12 points below DR. Authority on paper, underperformance where it counts. It is far more common than people expect at the top of the DR range, because accumulating links is something a well-known company does automatically, while being cited as the source of an answer is something a page has to earn one query at a time.

Fairly rated is everything in between. Your links and your visibility are telling the same story, and DR is a reasonable proxy for how findable you are.

Example eDR reports: three sites nobody would call weak

These are real results from the checker above, run on 27 August 2026. All three sit near the ceiling of Domain Rating, and they land on opposite sides of the verdict, which is the useful part: at the top of the DR range the link graph stops distinguishing between sites and the visibility signals still do. Run any of them yourself and the numbers will have moved, because that is the point of measuring visibility instead of links.

wikipedia.orgOverrated -15

Ahrefs DR: 97
eDR: 82
Delta: -15

Every signal resolved and nearly all of them are maxed: first place on both indexes, full entity authority, site health 98. The gap is citation. The most linked-to site on the internet was not named as a source when an assistant answered its own core query.

nvidia.comFairly rated +1

Ahrefs DR: 91
eDR: 92
Delta: +1

The only domain here that an assistant actually cited, and the only one whose eDR came out above its DR. Its site health is the weakest of the three at 61, and it still finishes ahead, which is a fair summary of how the weighting works.

openai.comOverrated -13

Ahrefs DR: 93
eDR: 80
Delta: -13

First place on both indexes with full entity authority, and mentioned in the AI answer without being cited as its source. Site health did not resolve on this run, so the score is normalised over the four signals that did.

The heaviest signal is what separates them. All three rank at or near the top of the indexes we check and all three are unambiguous entities, so the difference is citation, and only nvidia.com earned one. That is the case the whole metric exists to make: being linked to and being quoted are different achievements, and a backlink score can only predict the first. Wikipedia is the sharpest version of it. Nothing on the web is linked to more, and it still finishes fifteen points below what those links imply.

Domain Rating vs Effective Domain Rating

Comparison of Ahrefs Domain Rating and StartupHub.ai Effective Domain Rating
	Domain Rating (DR)	Effective Domain Rating (eDR)
What it measures	Backlink profile strength, 0-100	Realised visibility: do you get found and cited?
Signals	Referring domains and the strength of the sites linking to you	Rankings across independent indexes, AI citations, entity authority, speed and technical SEO
Lag	Lagging. Reflects links earned months ago	Current. Reflects whether you rank and get cited today
What it tells you	How much authority you have on paper	Whether that authority translates into being seen
Failure mode it exposes	A high score can flatter a site that nobody finds	Shows the overrated, underrated or fairly rated gap explicitly

Why some signals show as unavailable

Every signal is best-effort. If a surface is rate-limited, or a source is temporarily unavailable, that signal is dropped and eDR is re-normalized over the ones that did resolve, so you get a usable score rather than an error. The openai.com example above is a live case: site health did not return on that run, and the score is the weighted blend of the remaining four signals rather than a zero standing in for missing data.

The trade-off is worth stating plainly. A score built from four signals is not identical to one built from five, so a re-run that resolves everything can move the number. Treat a single reading as a snapshot and the direction of the delta as the durable part.

Frequently asked questions

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 for its core query across multiple independently crawled search indexes, whether AI assistants cite it, its load speed and technical SEO, and whether it is recognized as a distinct real-world entity. 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, by 12 points or more. Overrated means it has authority on paper but underperforms where it counts, by 12 points or more in the other direction. Anything inside that band is fairly rated: the two views of the site agree.
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.
Is eDR a Domain Authority checker?: No, and the difference matters. Domain Authority and Domain Rating are both estimates of link strength, so they answer the same question with different arithmetic. eDR answers a different question entirely: given the authority you have, are you actually being found and cited? It is the delta between authority and visibility, which is why it is most useful read alongside DR rather than instead of it.
How do I improve my eDR if I am overrated?: Work the heaviest signal first. Being overrated almost always means links are outrunning citations, so the fix is to become the page an answer engine would quote: cover the specific question your core query asks, put the answer in server-rendered text near the top rather than behind a script, and make the page attributable with clear structured data and a consistent organisation identity. Ranking on more than one independent index, rather than tuning for a single engine, is the second lever. Speed is the third, and it is the smallest.

DR baseline by Ahrefs. eDR is a StartupHub.ai metric.