Authority

The Authority tab covers the half of ranking that does not come from your own pages: what other websites linking to you add up to.

The page says as much at the top: "What other websites linking to you add up to — the half of ranking that doesn't come from your own pages."

Why it matters more than it looks

Everything else in the SEO section is about your own site, and your own site is entirely within your control. Authority is the part that is not.

It is also the ceiling. A page on a site nobody links to can be perfect and still lose to a worse page on a site the web trusts. That is why the tab exists even though there is no button on it that changes anything.

The score and its bands

A number out of 100, with a band naming it in plain words and a sentence explaining what that band means in practice. At the bottom of the scale, "Barely known", with the explanation that almost nothing on the web points at you, so Google has little reason to trust the site over anyone else's.

The bands run up from there to weight most sites never reach, where new pages tend to rank on the strength of the domain alone.

The score is labelled honestly. It is Ahrefs' own Domain Rating rather than an estimate of it, and the page says so, with the date it was measured. It also says what it is not: "A third-party measure of your link profile, not a Google ranking score." Google does not publish a number like this. This is a third party's model of the same idea.

The figures beside it

Sites linking to you, the count of different websites. This is the one that matters. Variety counts far more than raw link count: ten links from ten sites beat a hundred from one.

Links in total, including several from the same site.

Spam score, how risky the links pointing at your domain look, with a word for the level. Lower is safer. Worth knowing that this is a description of what is already pointing at you rather than a penalty, and a high score is a prompt to look rather than a judgement.

Under them, whether anything changed since the previous reading.

When it is measured

Every audit. The page says so: "Refreshed with every audit. Authority moves over months, not days."

That second half is the important one. Running two audits in an afternoon will not move this number, and it is not supposed to. A site that gains a good link this week may see it here next month, because the whole web has to notice first.

Before the first audit the tab says nothing is measured yet, and offers the audit.

What is on the rest of the tab

Where the data is available, the tab also shows who links to you, what wording those links use, and which of your pages carry the most links. The last one is useful in an unexpected way: it tells you which pages other people think are your best, which is not always the page you would have picked.

Findings about lost referring domains and a high spam score appear in the Fixes tab alongside everything else.

What actually moves it

Nothing on this tab. There is no button here that earns a link, and any product offering one should be treated with suspicion.

Three things move it, and Rankbench helps with two of them.

Other sites linking to you because you wrote something worth linking to. Slow, and the only durable one.

Backlink exchanges, where you and a related site agree to link to each other. See backlink exchanges on Rankbench.

Guest posts, where you write for somebody else's site and the article carries a link back. See guest posting on Rankbench.

Automatic backlinks does the first of those on a schedule, inside articles your calendar was already writing. See Automatic backlinks.

Where to go next

Competitors shows how your authority compares with the sites beating you. Backlink exchanges on Rankbench is the fastest thing you can actually do about it.