Domain authority checker: a free 0‑100 score from the link graph, compared with competitors

What you get for free

The email does not unlock anything on the page: you see the whole result without it. Every score comes with its data source and the graph release.

What is domain authority

Domain authority is a conventional measure of a website’s strength in the web of links. A link from another website works like a recommendation: the more strong websites point to your domain, the easier it is for a search engine to treat it as a trustworthy source. Google does not publish its own authority number, so the SEO industry relies on measures from tools, and each tool calculates it from its own link database.

We calculate our score ourselves from the public Common Crawl link graph. It is a number from 0 to 100: the higher it is, the closer the domain is to the centre of the network and the stronger the domains linking to it. A score of 0 means that the data contains no links to the domain or that the domain is not in the graph at all.

Next to the score we also show the domain’s rank among the 1,248,204 .pl domains in the graph and its percentile, that is the share of .pl domains with a worse position in the graph. For domains with other endings we give the position in the whole graph, which has 134,979,706 domains.

How we calculate the score from Common Crawl data

Common Crawl is a US non-profit foundation that regularly crawls public web pages and makes the data available for free. From the links found on those pages it builds a graph: a node is a domain and an edge is a link from one domain to another. The current release, cc-main-2026-aug-sep-oct, was built from three crawls from August-October 2026 and has 134,979,706 domains and 1.8 billion edges between them. The file with domain positions was published on 22 October 2026. Source: Common Crawl release note.

For every domain Common Crawl gives two ranking positions, and we turn them into a score in four steps:

1. Harmonic centrality. For every domain, the inverse distances from all other domains, counted in hops along links, are added up. A domain that most of the network reaches by short paths ranks high. A link farm does not shorten those paths, so it is hard to inflate this position with one. According to Boldi and Vigna’s study “Axioms for Centrality”, it is the only measure compared there that satisfies all three proposed axioms.
2. PageRank. A link from a domain that itself receives many links weighs more. This measure reflects the number and strength of links better, but it is easier to inflate with spam links.
3. The weaker of the two signals. We take the worse of the two positions. Spam raises PageRank but not centrality. A single link from a very central website raises centrality but not PageRank. Only a domain with both signals strong gets a high score.
4. A 0-100 scale. We turn the position r into a score = 100 × (1 − (log r / log r0)³), where r0 is the number of domains with at least one incoming link (122,245,823 in this release). Position 1,000 is 95 points, 100,000 is 76 and one million is 59.

The scale is logarithmic and gets harder towards the top: at the bottom, 10 points mean roughly a twice better position in the graph, between 40 and 60 points 2.5-3 times for every 10 points, and between 80 and 90 almost 10 times. The formula has the version cc-hcpr-v1. If we change it, the new version will get a new number.

Common Crawl does not calculate this score and is not responsible for it; we use the data it publishes for everyone. We look the domain up in our own copy of the calculated data, so the address you enter is not passed to an outside company.

How it differs from Ahrefs Domain Rating and Moz Domain Authority

We checked how our score agrees with Moz data on its list of the 500 most popular domains (Moz Top 500, 441 matched domains, 12 November 2026). The Spearman rank correlation with the number of linking domains according to Moz is about 0.57, and with DA alone about 0.37. That is moderate agreement: the measures order domains similarly, but not in the same way. PageRank alone agreed with Moz better (0.72), but it gave inflated scores to small Polish domains with spam links, so we do not use it on its own. We have not yet measured the agreement in the middle of the scale, where most businesses are.

Four domains from our tests, including our own ai-seo-company.pl, show the difference: all of them score 9 with us, while their DR according to Ahrefs measurements from 11 November 2026 ranged from 0 to 54, depending on the domain and the DR version. Two of them owed their high DR to spam links. So do not convert our score into DR or DA. Compare domains using one metric and stick to it in later checks.

How to read the result against competitors

The number alone says little. A score of 25 can be strong for a clinic in a mid-sized city and weak for a shop competing for nationwide keywords. That is why the tool compares you with up to three competitors right away, with no email.

Who to enter as a competitor

The companies in Google’s top 10 for your most important keywords, not the biggest brands in your industry. Search for the phrase customers use to find you and take the domains from the first results, skipping portals and directories. If you compete locally, compare yourself with companies in the same city.

Score levels

• 0-9, very low: typical of new and small websites. About 60% of .pl domains in the graph score 10 points or less.
• 10-24, low: the domain already has links, but few from strong sites. Often enough for local and niche keywords.
• 25-44, medium: a solid position in the web of links. About 5% of .pl domains score more than 30 points.
• 45-69, high: a strong position, the level of well-known companies and large shops. Less than 1% of .pl domains score more than 50 points.
• 70-100, very high: the largest websites. About 340 .pl domains score more than 70 points.

The level thresholds are ours, set on the distribution of .pl domain scores in the cc-main-2026-aug-sep-oct release. Treat them as a guide: the comparison with competitors is what decides.

Example scores for reference

Large shops come out lower with us than portals: x-kom.pl and mediaexpert.pl score 67-68 and rossmann.pl 52, although they are well-known brands with many links. Their weaker signal is centrality, and the score takes the weaker signal. If you compare yourself with a shop, keep in mind that its lead in links may be bigger than the score shows.

How we describe your gap to the strongest competitor

• You have the highest score: on links these companies are not ahead of you. You build an edge with content and with links to the pages that sell.
• A gap of up to 5 points: content and how well a page matches the question decide rankings more often than the link profile.
• 5 to 20 points: a clear advantage in links for the competitor. You need links from industry sites and media, not only better content.
• More than 20 points: the scale is logarithmic, so this takes months. Start with keywords for which the competitor has no strong pages.

The 5 and 20 point thresholds are also ours and approximate. They are a starting point for decisions about links, not a ranking forecast.

How to increase domain authority

The order below comes from our SEO playbook, which we follow with clients: from the actions that bring the most at the lowest risk.

Tactics in order of return

1. Digital PR based on your own data. A report, study or ranking from company data, offered to trade and general media. It brings the highest quality links and brand mentions, which also count in AI answers.
2. Resources that earn links on their own. Calculators, tools, benchmarks and templates earn links without outreach.
3. Unlinked mentions. Find pages that mention your company without linking to it and ask for a link. It is the most effective request in all outreach.
4. Link recovery. Redirect links that point to 404 pages, for example after a redesign, to the right addresses, or ask for a correction.
5. Guest posts and partnerships, but selectively. Only on sites with real traffic on your topic.

Local businesses have extra link sources: sponsorships, local media, trade organisations and business partners. A Google Business Profile and directories with an identical name, address and phone number build the base, although the links from them are weak.

How to judge a link before you get it

• The site gets Google traffic for keywords from your industry.
• It is related to what you do.
• The link sits in the body of an article, not in the footer or sidebar.
• The site is not a directory that sells links to anyone.

Avoid link networks (PBN), mass link exchanges and link exchange systems, and forum comments at scale. The risk of a penalty is real and the value of such links is close to zero. A high score on a site that sells posts guarantees nothing either: check it here and see whether it has real traffic.

What to measure

• The number of domains linking to the pages that sell, not to the whole site.
• Brand mentions and searches for your company name: a good proxy for authority.
• Traffic from the publications you earned.

Check our score after every new data release, with the same list of competitors. New links show up in it with a delay: the Common Crawl robot first has to visit the page with the link, and the graph covers three months of crawling.

How to use the result

• Compare your score with companies that rank in the top 10 for your most important keywords. A big gap means content alone may not be enough.
• Check the score after every graph release. A drop while the number of domains in the graph stays similar usually means lost links, for example after a partner’s site shuts down.
• When choosing places to publish, check the site’s score: a link from a strong, thematically related site is worth more than dozens of weak ones.
• After a website migration or a domain change, compare the score with the release from before. A drop signals that some links point to addresses that no longer exist.

Linking domains: what we show and how to read it

For .pl domains we show, next to the score, the number of linking domains: different domains with at least one link to yours. We do not count links themselves: a hundred links from one site are one domain. We also show the five strongest linking domains, ordered by our score, and the same number for competitors in the comparison table.

The range is very wide. In this release 129,587 .pl domains have no link at all, and almost every second one of the rest (44%) has just one linking domain. The biggest portals have tens of thousands. So read the number together with the score: twenty-odd domains from a farm of cheap domains give a count but no strength, and the score sees that. Look at the five strongest: if they are sites you know and trust, the profile is healthy; if they are random addresses, the number means little.

Importantly, this is not a full backlink index. The data comes from one quarterly Common Crawl crawl and covers only domains the robot visited, so the real number is usually higher. We do not know page addresses, anchor texts or dofollow attributes, and we do not give numbers for domains outside .pl. Do not compare the number with commercial tools, because each has its own database.

Limits: what the score does not show

• The state of a release, not of today. The data covers crawls from August-October 2026. A link you earn today will show up in the next graph release at the earliest.
• New domains are not in the graph. A domain that no page visited by the Common Crawl robot links to gets 0 and the label “not in the graph”.
• No full list of links. For .pl domains we show the number of linking domains and the five strongest, but this is a lower bound from one crawl, not a full index. We do not know page addresses, anchor texts or dofollow attributes, and we do not guess them. We do not give the number for domains outside .pl.
• The robot does not see the whole web. Links from pages the Common Crawl robot did not visit do not count in the score.
• Small domains differ little. Many small websites have a similar position, so they get the same score. Our four test domains all score 9, although their link profiles differ.
• Large shops come out lower. Some well-known e-commerce brands score 49-68 with us, less than their number of links would suggest.
• Domains outside .pl from the top only. We keep all .pl domains, and from the rest only the top 5,000,000 positions in the graph. For other domains outside .pl we show “≤ 44”.
• A domain, not a page. The score describes the whole domain. Subdomains such as blog.company.com count together with company.com, because that is how the Common Crawl graph groups them.
• An indicator, not a cause. Google does not use our score. The ranking of a specific page also depends on the links to it and its content.
• A limit. Up to 20 domains per day from one IP address. Each competitor counts as one domain.

We analyse the full link profile, that is who links to you, which links are risky and what you lack compared with competitors, as part of our SEO services. You can check the technical side and content of your own website in the free SEO audit.

Guides for this tool

• B2B Link Building for Marketers: Strategies and Checklist: how to earn links in B2B and what to check before you publish
• SEO Competitor Analysis: A Step-by-Step Guide: how to pick the competitors to compare and what to check
• ChatGPT optimization: where ChatGPT finds the companies it recommends: brand mentions that build authority also count in AI answers