Ask two SEO tools how strong a website is and you can get two completely different answers. RightBlogger checked six sites it runs, with scores checked on November 4 and 5, 2026, and found that Ahrefs and Moz do not even agree on which site is strongest. One site carries an Ahrefs Domain Rating of 70 and a Moz Domain Authority of 31 at the same time. For SEOs who have been treating either number as a fact about a site, that gap should be a wake-up call.
The first thing to understand is that these numbers are not measuring the same thing. Ahrefs DR, or Domain Rating, is a 0 to 100 measure of backlink profile strength, while Moz DA, or Domain Authority, is a 1 to 100 machine-learning prediction of a site's likelihood to rank. Neither score comes from Google, and neither is a ranking factor. They are third-party estimates built on different data and different maths, so it should not surprise anyone that they disagree.
RightBlogger.com illustrates the gap in a single line: Ahrefs DR 70, Moz DA 31, and 7,709 Google clicks in 90 days, covering August 3 to October 31, 2026. A DR of 70 sounds like a powerhouse, while a DA of 31 sounds middling, yet they describe the same site over the same period. Anyone buying links, selling links or judging a prospect by one of these numbers alone is really judging the tool's model, not the site. The honest use of either score is as a rough, relative guide inside one tool, never as a cross-tool fact.
The disagreement goes deeper than a few points here and there. The tools do not even agree on the order: Ahrefs ranks awesomestufftobuy.com near the bottom with a DR of 33, while Moz ranks it first with a DA of 40. If two tools cannot agree which of six sites is strongest, then the idea of a single authority ladder collapses. A site can be a leader in one tool's world and an also-ran in the other's, with no change at all in the site itself.
Independent research backs up the scepticism. Xamsor compared 150 sites in 2024 and found the same domain's scores varied by 26 points on average across tools. Onely's 2022 correlation study measured only weak correlations for both scores against actual rankings, at 0.16 for DA and 0.14 for DR. These are not the numbers you would expect from a metric that decides who ranks. They are the numbers you would expect from a rough proxy, useful for sorting a list and dangerous as a verdict.
Ahrefs itself says that DR correlates with rankings less well than UR, or URL Rating, and that the number of referring domains to a page is the strongest-correlating backlink factor it has found. The lesson is that page-level strength matters more than domain-level strength, and that a strong domain does not lift a weak page. Link builders chasing domain metrics are aiming at the wrong target; the links that move a page are the ones pointing at that page, from real referring domains, not a better score on a dashboard.
One example in the data makes the point painfully well. An article sits on a DR 70 domain but has a UR of 4.7 and links from 11 domains. It ranked position 3 for the query about Ahrefs DR versus Moz DA and was cited in the AI Overview, yet from August 3 to October 31 Google showed the page 40,608 times and it was clicked just 9 times, while Ahrefs estimates 134 visits a month. A top-three ranking, an AI citation and a strong domain produced almost no traffic, because almost nobody searches for the topic. Authority without demand is a trophy, not a business result.
Sources: RightBlogger, November 4-5, 2026.
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