If you've spent any time in SEO, link building, or content marketing, you've run into "Domain Authority" — a score, usually from 1 to 100, meant to estimate how likely a website is to rank in search results. It's become shorthand for "is this site worth my time," whether you're vetting a guest post opportunity, sizing up a competitor, or deciding if a backlink is actually valuable.
Here's the catch: Domain Authority is a trademarked, proprietary metric owned by Moz, and checking it officially requires a Moz account — free accounts come with tight limits, and full access sits behind a subscription. That's a lot of friction for what's often a quick gut-check on a domain.
What the score is actually trying to tell you
Strip away the branding, and every "authority" metric — Moz's DA, Ahrefs' DR, Semrush's Authority Score, or an independent one — is trying to answer the same underlying question: how many other sites, and how credible are they, that link to this domain? A site with links from thousands of unique, established domains tends to score high. A brand-new site with a handful of low-quality backlinks scores low. None of these scores measure ranking directly — they're a proxy, a fast way to estimate a domain's general "weight" without doing a full link audit by hand.
That's important context: no authority score, from any provider, is an exact or official ranking factor. They're all estimates, computed differently, and they won't agree with each other perfectly. What matters is having a consistent number to compare domains against each other quickly — not chasing a specific provider's exact figure.
Checking a domain's score without Moz
Domaniro computes its own independent Domain Score — not Moz's DA, not affiliated with Moz, but built on the same idea: an open, web-graph-based estimate of how well-linked and established a domain is, on a 0–10 scale. You can check it right here, free, with no account:
That's the full picture in three numbers: the score itself, the domain's estimated global rank, and how many unique domains link to it — the same three metrics you'd want from any authority check, without creating an account to see them.
Doing this while you browse, not just once
A one-off check is useful, but most real SEO work involves checking a lot of domains — a page of search results, a list of guest post prospects, a competitor's backlink profile. Opening a tool and pasting in one URL at a time doesn't scale well for that.
That's what the Domaniro Chrome extension is actually for: it puts the same Domain Score, global rank, and referring domain count in your toolbar for whatever page you're on, and adds a small score badge next to every result on a Google or Bing search page — so you can see which results are worth clicking before you click them.
See a domain's score without opening a new tab.
Free forever, no login, no daily limit.
Add to Chrome — free
A quick note on comparing scores across tools
If you check the same domain in Domaniro, Moz, and Ahrefs, expect three different numbers. That's normal and not a sign anything is "wrong" — each provider crawls a different slice of the web and weighs links differently. Use whichever score you check consistently to compare domains against each other, rather than treating any single number as an absolute, universal truth.
Domaniro's Domain Score is an independent metric computed from an open web-graph algorithm. It is not Domain Authority, is not produced by Moz, and no affiliation with Moz is implied.