Ahrefs previews DR4, the Domain Rating that replaces DR3 on 1 December

What changes on 1 December

Ahrefs announced the change on 5 November in a post by Glen Allsopp, its head of marketing strategy and research. Domain Rating is the 0 to 100 score Ahrefs gives a site for the links pointing at it, measured against every other site in its index. DR4, the fourth version, replaces DR3 in the Ahrefs interface on 1 December, and the API keeps serving DR3 for a short time after so the two can be compared.

• Subdomains get a score of their own instead of borrowing the root domain's. help.ahrefs.com goes from 91 to 75, while ahrefs.com itself rates 92.
• Links count for more when they come from sites Ahrefs estimates get organic search traffic. That shrinks the pool: about half as many sites have a DR4 score as have a DR3 one.
• Domains Ahrefs labels as spam fall furthest. Those rated 30 to 70 under DR3 lost a median of about 15 to 20 points in its tests, while other domains barely moved.
• Sites on free hosting subdomains can lose almost all of it: a test site on notion.site went from 92 to 0, and github.io as a whole drops 32 points.

Of the 1,000 domains with the most estimated organic traffic, 64.3% gained under DR4, 15.8% stayed the same and 19.9% dropped, by a median of 4 points. Ahrefs says a lower score is no judgement on a site's content: it only reflects the links Ahrefs can see.

How to check your score before it changes

Add version=dr4 to a request to Ahrefs' free Domain Rating API to get the new number; without it, the API still answers with DR3. Allsopp also built a demo page at detailed.com/dr-v4 that takes any domain or subdomain. Ahrefs has opened a feedback form for anyone whose score looks wrong, linked from its announcement.

What it means for a small product

A product that lives on a free subdomain, a Notion page or a GitHub Pages site, is scored on its own links from 1 December, not its host's. A product on its own domain is scored as before, against a smaller pool of linking sites.

The directories a founder lists on move too. We read DR3 and DR4 for 30 launch directories through the same API on 6 November: five lost 42 to 49 points, while Product Hunt, Capterra and Crunchbase stayed at 91. The full table, and how to pick the directories that send visitors, are in our guide Domain Rating explained.