What Is Domain Authority?
Domain authority is a score, on a scale of one to a hundred, created by the SEO tool Moz to predict how likely a site is to rank well in search results. It is one of the most cited numbers in SEO, but it is worth knowing upfront that it is not a metric Google itself uses or publishes, it is a third party estimate.
What it actually measures
The score is built mostly from the number and quality of backlinks pointing at a domain, run through Moz's own formula. Other companies, like Ahrefs and Semrush, publish similar but differently calculated scores under different names, like domain rating.
Why it is useful despite not being official
- It gives a rough, comparable way to size up how established a domain is before pitching a guest post or partnership
- A sudden drop can flag a real problem, like losing a large batch of backlinks
- It correlates loosely with ranking ability, even though it does not cause it
Why it does not carry over to AI visibility
An AI model has no access to your domain authority score, and does not need one. What it has instead is whatever it absorbed during training and whatever it can find live: mentions, reviews, comparisons, and how those sources describe you. A high domain authority score with no actual mentions anywhere still leaves a model with nothing to say about you.
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