Backlinks
Website Authority Checker
Size up a site's link profile in one number
Enter a domain and get our website authority score with the link data behind it: referring domains, total backlinks, how concentrated the links are in a few sources, and how the score has moved across the checks we hold.
Get early accessWhat it returns
- A website authority score for the domain, computed by us from our own backlink index, with the date of the index it was built from.
- Referring domains and total backlinks, kept separate, because one site linking two thousand times is not two thousand endorsements.
- How concentrated the profile is: what share of referring domains the largest few sources account for, and how many link once and never again.
- The movement in the score across the checks we hold for this domain, so a figure can be read as rising, flat or falling rather than as a standing number.
When this matters
You are about to pay for a guest post on a site that a seller describes as high authority, with a screenshot from some tool to prove it. The score on the screenshot is real and tells you almost nothing on its own. What matters is the shape underneath it: whether the referring domains are varied or the same small network over and over, whether links arrive steadily or in one spike, and whether anything links to it that you would want to be next to. All of that sits behind the number, and the number is what gets quoted.
How to answer this today
The backlinks area is the version of this with a history and a comparison set: it tracks your referring domains over time, shows what was gained and lost between crawls, and puts your profile next to the competitors you have named. A one-off score for a domain you do not track, with the inputs visible, is the question this tool takes.
BacklinksWhy this is harder than it looks
The score is ours and vendors will disagree
Website authority here is a score we compute from our own backlink data on our own scale. It is not Moz's Domain Authority and not Ahrefs' Domain Rating, which are their branded metrics built from their indexes and their models. Checking the same domain in three tools returns three different numbers, and none of them is the wrong one.
No index sees the whole web
Every link index is a crawl, which means a sample, and the samples differ by what they have reached, how recently and what they chose to keep. A domain with links from places we crawl thinly scores lower with us than it would elsewhere, and that is a property of the index rather than of the site.
A number is not relevance
Authority says something about the breadth of a link profile and nothing about whether a link from that site would help you. A strong score on a site in an unrelated subject is a weaker signal than a modest score on one your audience already reads.
Link data is licensed
Backlink indexes are expensive to build and expensive to query, so lookups are metered and rate limited per IP. The limit is what stops a bulk prospecting script from reselling our data budget, while leaving the one-domain check free.