Domain Authority: What It Is, What It Isn’t & Why It Matters

Ask a roomful of digital marketing professionals what domain authority (DA) is, and they’ll likely mention domain authority scores from companies like Moz or Semrush. While these third-party domain scores can be helpful indicators of a site’s authority, it’s a common mistake to conflate them with the authority signals Google uses to rank content.

It’s high time we do some serious myth-busting about what DA is. I want to set the record straight on what Google says about authority and talk about how search engines evaluate it.

What Is Domain Authority?

Domain authority, website authority, or site authority is a catch-all term for the quality signals Google uses in its core algorithm. The third-party tools that popularized the term score it on a 1-to-100 scale, where a higher number signals a stronger backlink profile. That number belongs to the tool that calculated it, though, not to Google; domain authority isn’t a Google ranking factor and doesn’t impact a website’s performance in search. 

Many third-party SEO tools simplify domain authority into a single score meant to estimate how Google views your site, or a site that links to yours. Questions about authority often come up when we talk about backlinking. The problem is, third-party metrics, like Semrush’s Authority Score and Moz’s Domain Authority Score, use proprietary algorithms that are a best guess at the Google search algorithm.

In reality, authority is a concept that can’t easily be measured. No single metric can represent a website’s quality. That’s why it’s best to use various indicators and analytics to determine a website’s potential to rank well in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Domain Authority: A Trailing or Predictive Metric?

Third parties compile a proprietary DA score based on trailing metrics (also known as lagging indicators), which are past performance indicators. By comparison, predictive metrics (leading indicators) indicate future performance.

Because companies like Moz, Ahrefs, and Semrush don’t have the massive infrastructure and resources that Google has, they have no choice but to base their domain authority scores on trailing metrics. So, regardless of how they frame it, their authority scores can’t predict a website’s future success. It’s more like a best guess based on a limited data sample of past performance indicators.

How Is Domain Authority Calculated?

The major SEO tools each publish their own version of this score, and they don’t calculate it the same way. Here’s how the most commonly cited ones compare:

Moz’s tool also generates a separate Spam Score alongside Domain Authority, flagging link profiles that look manipulated or purchased rather than earned. It’s worth checking alongside the score itself.

What Does Google Say About Domain Authority?

John Mueller has addressed this topic directly in the past, stating that Google doesn’t have a website authority score or anything like it.

However, Mueller said Google uses sitewide signals to determine a website’s overall quality and rank new pages. Rather than using an official scoring system, Google looks at domain ranking signals based on a website’s current state rather than past performance or quality.

Time out for real talk.

At Victorious, we don’t take everything that John Mueller, Gary Ilyes, or any other “SEO expert” says as gospel. We put their statements into the context of our own experiences and data. Sometimes our data is consistent with what they say, and sometimes it’s not. This isn’t to say they’re deliberately misleading the public, but sometimes they answer a particular question that the general public then conflates with a more general truth.

In this case, our experiences align with John Mueller’s statements about domain authority.

I can’t stress enough how important it is not to mistake third-party domain authority scores for the actual signals Google examines to determine a website’s overall quality.

You can use domain authority scores to compare your site to competitors or track your own site’s changes over time, but every score is a relative measuring stick with no direct bearing on search performance or how Google evaluates sites and pages.

How Does Google Evaluate Authority?

Google assesses authority page by page rather than considering an entire website’s authority. Google’s ranking systems sort through billions of web pages using hundreds of factors to instantly provide the most valuable and relevant results for searchers.

A series of algorithms make up these ranking systems, each considering various factors (or signals). Three categories of domain rank signals include:

• Relevance: Analyzing webpage content to assess whether it contains information relevant to the query at hand.
• Links: For external citation authority. Quality backlinks serve as an endorsement of a page.
• User satisfaction/experience: As estimated by some engagement signals and Core Web Vitals. These algorithms check whether the site displays correctly across browsers and devices, and whether it loads fast enough for users on slow connections.

A Brief Overview of How Domain Ranking Works

First, Google indexes a page to determine its central topic, structure, and user experience. Next, it uses external signals like high-quality backlinks to validate and gauge the page’s authority for any given topic.

Why are backlinks an authority indicator?

• Links from third-party sources act as endorsements.
• The more backlinks a website has, the more authoritative and trustworthy it’s considered.
• The authority of referring websites matters, with links from higher quality sources carrying more weight.

Reviews are also important in evaluating authoritativeness. Online reviews can build or break a business’s reputation. They may also help you rank higher in organic search results by sending signals to Google that your site is reputable, trustworthy, and high quality.

Does Domain Authority Affect AI Overviews and AI Search?

No, for the same reason domain authority isn’t a Google ranking factor: it isn’t an AI Overviews or AI search citation factor either. Neither Google nor any other major answer engine has confirmed using a third-party authority score to decide what to cite.

What influences whether AI systems cite or mention a page lines up with what already influences traditional rankings: 

• How clearly the content answers a specific question
• How consistently other authoritative sources reference it
• How well the page’s structure lets a machine extract the answer. 

A high domain authority score won’t get a page cited in an AI Overview any more than it guarantees a first-page ranking. Third-party citations, clear entity signals, and content built to answer a specific question do the actual work, for both.

When Domain Authority Is Worth Checking

Domain authority earns its keep in a few specific situations:

• Benchmarking your backlink profile against direct competitors before a content or link-building push.
• Tracking your own site’s trajectory over time, using the same tool every time you check. Tools use different methodologies, so scores aren’t comparable across them.
• Weighing whether a specific link opportunity is worth pursuing, alongside the linking page’s relevance and traffic, not the score alone.

When To Ignore Domain Authority

Domain authority stops being useful and can actively mislead you in a few common situations:

• Making day-to-day content or publishing decisions. DA moves too slowly and too indirectly to guide what you write this week.
• Comparing your score to a site in a different industry or size class. A DA of 40 means something different for a two-year-old regional service business than it does for an established enterprise brand.
• Reacting to a single month’s dip or spike. Each tool recalculates on its own schedule, and scores shift for reasons like a competitor’s link changes or an update to the tool’s own algorithm, which have nothing to do with your site’s actual search performance.

Common Domain Authority Mistakes To Avoid

A few mistakes show up often enough to call out directly:

• Treating domain authority as the goal instead of a proxy. Rankings, qualified traffic, and conversions are the actual goal.
• Chasing link volume over link relevance and quality. A handful of links from sites your customers actually trust outweighs a large batch of unrelated ones.
• Buying “DA-boosting” services. No legitimate service moves a third-party score overnight, and the tactics that move it fastest are usually the ones that put a site at risk with Google.
• Letting a low score talk you out of a strategy that’s already producing rankings and traffic. If you’re getting the results you want, the score is beside the point.

How To Increase Domain Authority With SEO

It takes sustained effort to improve domain authority. If you want the specific tactics, from link building to on-page fixes, we’ve laid them out in a dedicated guide to increasing domain authority. 

Victorious builds an integrated SEO and answer engine optimization (AEO) strategy that combines quality link building with SEO content designed to earn links and citations. Whatever your goals, we measure the work against organic traffic value (OTV) and ERS. Reach out for a free SEO consultation to see where your site actually stands.

Domain Authority FAQs