Hoe je Autoriteit van Domeinen (Domain Authority) kunt controleren (en wat het nummer eigenlijk betekent)

Checking Domain Authority takes about ten seconds. Understanding what you are looking at takes slightly longer, and skipping that second part is how people end up spending six months optimising a number that was never going to move their rankings.

This guide covers both: the four practical ways to check any domain's DA in 2026, and an honest account of what the score does and does not tell you.

What Domain Authority actually is

Domain Authority is Moz's proprietary 0-100 prediction of how well a domain is likely to rank in search results. Three details in that sentence do most of the work:

• Moz's. It is one company's model, not an industry standard. Ahrefs has Domain Rating, Semrush has Authority Score, Majestic has Trust Flow. They disagree with each other constantly.
• Prediction. DA is trained to predict ranking ability, which means it is an output of an attempt to model Google, not an input Google consumes.
• 0-100, logarithmic. Moving from DA 20 to DA 30 is ordinary. Moving from DA 70 to DA 80 is extraordinary. The scale compresses hard at the top, which is why the difference between DA 88 and DA 91 is enormous while the difference between DA 8 and DA 11 is noise.

Google does not use Domain Authority. Google has said so repeatedly, and it would be strange if they did — DA is a third party's guess at Google's own behaviour. What makes DA useful anyway is that the people who gatekeep links use it: guest-post editors filter by DA, link marketplaces price by DA, affiliate programs set DA minimums. The score is a social fact in the SEO industry even though it is not a technical fact in Google's ranking system.

Step 1 — Pick a checker that doesn't gate the number

Every free DA checker is free in a different, slightly annoying way. The honest version of the landscape in 2026:

Two things worth being straight about regarding our own tool, since this post is on our own blog. The two-per-day ceiling exists because the Moz free tier we read from allows 50 rows per month across all our users, not because there is an upgrade waiting behind it — there is no paid plan. And when that monthly allowance runs out, we fall back to a clearly-labelled estimate rather than silently serving you a made-up number. More on exactly how that estimate works in our post on the free Moz tier.

Step 2 — Check the domain, not the page

This trips up a surprising number of people. Domain Authority is a domain-level score. Page Authority (PA) is the page-level equivalent. If you paste a full URL with a path into a DA tool and get a number, you are almost always getting the DA of the root domain, not a score for that specific page.

So when you check example.com/blog/some-post, the DA you see is example.com's. If you actually want to know how strong that individual post is, you want Page Authority, which most free tools do not expose.

Step 3 — Read the number against its neighbourhood

A DA of 32 is meaningless in isolation. It is only interpretable against the sites you compete with for the same queries.

The practical method: take the top ten results for your main target keyword, check the DA of each one, and find the median. That median is your real target. If the page-one median for your keyword is DA 28, then your DA 32 is already competitive and your ranking problem is content or intent, not authority. If the median is DA 71, no amount of on-page work closes that gap this quarter — you need a different keyword or a long-term link strategy.

This reframing is the single most useful thing you can do with a DA checker, and almost nobody does it. They check their own score, feel good or bad about it, and close the tab.

Step 4 — Sanity-check against a second metric

Because DA is one vendor's model, it inherits that vendor's blind spots — most notably that Moz's crawler index is smaller than Ahrefs's. A site with a lot of recent links can read low on DA simply because Moz hasn't crawled them yet.

Cross-check with at least one of:

• Domain Rating — Ahrefs's equivalent, built on a different crawl
• Referring domain count — the raw input most authority models are built on
• Domain age — registry-verified, and a quiet contributor to how established a site looks

When DA and DR disagree sharply, the usual explanation is crawl coverage, not that one of them is "wrong".

What a good Domain Authority actually looks like

There is no universal threshold, but these bands reflect how the industry treats the number in practice:

• 0-10 — New or nearly new. Normal for a domain under six months old. Not a problem to solve, just a fact to wait out.
• 10-25 — Established enough to rank for genuine long-tail queries. Most indie blogs and small SaaS sites live here.
• 25-40 — The band where guest-post and affiliate gatekeeping starts to open up. Many programs set their minimum at 25 or 30.
• 40-60 — A serious content operation with years of accumulated links.
• 60+ — Established publishers, large brands, major open-source projects.
• 80+ — Wikipedia, GitHub, major newspapers. Not a realistic target for a business site.

The four things DA cannot tell you

This is the part most "how to check DA" articles leave out, and it is the part that saves you money.

It cannot tell you whether you will rank for a specific keyword. DA is domain-wide. Relevance, search intent and content quality decide individual queries, and a DA 20 site with the best page on the internet for a narrow question beats a DA 70 site with a thin one.

It cannot tell you whether a link is worth having. DA measures the whole domain, so a link from a DA 80 site's abandoned, unlinked, unindexed directory page carries nothing while the DA 80 label makes it look valuable. This is exactly what link-selling gigs exploit.

It cannot tell you whether your traffic will grow. DA and traffic correlate because both tend to rise with the same underlying work, not because one causes the other. Buying links to lift DA without earning relevance produces a higher number and flat traffic — the most common way people waste a quarter.

It cannot be optimised directly, and trying is a bad idea. Services selling "DA 20 → DA 50 in 30 days" are manipulating a third-party model, usually with private blog networks and spam links. Moz's model is not Google's, so the number can move while rankings do not — and the links used to move it are precisely the kind Google's link spam systems are built to discount. You get a prettier metric, no traffic, and a link profile you may have to disavow later.

How often does Domain Authority change?

Moz recalculates DA when it updates its link index, historically every few weeks to a month, and the whole scale is relative — meaning your score can drop without you losing a single link, simply because other domains gained more. Checking it daily is pointless. Monthly is plenty, and quarterly is fine for most sites.

Our own badge reflects this cadence: once we have a real reading for a domain we hold it for about a month rather than re-querying, because the underlying data does not change faster than that.

Is Domain Authority a Google ranking factor?

No. It is a third-party prediction of ranking ability, produced by Moz, and Google has stated plainly that it does not use it. Treat it as an industry-standard shorthand for "how much link authority has this domain accumulated" — useful for competitor comparison and for passing other people's gatekeeping filters, not as a dial that moves your rankings when you turn it.

Can I display my Domain Authority on my site?

Yes, and it is a reasonable trust signal on a media kit, an agency portfolio or a "work with us" page, where the people reading it already use DA as shorthand. Our free DA checker generates an embeddable badge that re-reads its score about once a month. One line of HTML, ten themes, no account — the badge carries a small attribution link back to us, which is how the tool stays free.

Why is my DA lower than a competitor with fewer backlinks?

DA vs DR vs Authority Score: which one to check

Since the three main metrics disagree, it helps to know what each is good for.

Moz DA is the one other people will ask you for. If you are pitching a guest post, applying to an affiliate program or buying a listing, the filter on the other side is almost always expressed in DA. Check it because it is the currency of those conversations.

Ahrefs DR is built on a larger crawl and tends to react faster to newly-earned links. If you want the earliest signal that a link-building push is landing, DR usually moves first.

Semrush Authority Score folds in traffic estimates alongside links, which makes it the closest of the three to "how substantial is this site overall" — and the least comparable to the other two, because a site with strong links and no traffic scores differently here than it would on DA or DR.

A reasonable routine: check DA when someone else's gate depends on it, check DR when you want to know whether your own work is moving, and ignore the third unless a client specifically asks for it.

Step 5 — Write down the date you checked

This sounds like bureaucracy and it is not. DA is relative: Moz rescales when it reindexes, so a score recorded in March and a score recorded in October are not strictly comparable even for the same domain. A number in a spreadsheet with no date next to it becomes misleading within a quarter, and a claim on a media kit becomes false without anyone editing it.

We learned this the slow way on our own site, where a performance claim written in one month sat on a page for weeks after it stopped being true. Record the metric, the tool and the date. Three columns.

Can Domain Authority go down?

Yes, and often without you doing anything wrong. Because the scale is relative, your score can fall when other domains gain authority faster than yours — you stood still on a moving staircase. It can also drop if links pointing at you disappear when a linking page is deleted or de-indexed, or if Moz recalibrates its model, which it has done several times. A few points of movement month to month is normal noise, not a diagnosis.

Does checking Domain Authority cost anything?

Checking it should never cost money. Moz's own Link Explorer includes 10 free queries a month with a free account, and third-party checkers including ours are free at varying daily limits. What costs money is Moz Pro, which you only need for unlimited queries, historical tracking and the rest of the suite. Be wary of any tool that asks for a card before it will show you a single number.

Because the count is not the point — the quality and diversity of referring domains is. Fifty links from fifty different genuine sites outweigh five hundred from one footer template. Moz also folds Spam Score into its model, so a profile full of low-quality links can suppress DA even as the raw count rises. And if your links are recent, Moz may simply not have crawled them yet; check DR as a second opinion before concluding anything.

Related free tools

• Free Domain Authority checker — the parent tool for this guide, with an embeddable badge
• Free DR checker — Ahrefs's Domain Rating, for cross-checking
• Backlinks counter — referring-domain count
• Website trust score — a composite with published weights