If you’re paying an agency, there’s a decent chance a number called Domain Authority appears on your monthly report. It’s out of 100. It’s gone up a bit. There’s a green arrow next to it.
Here’s the thing worth knowing: Google doesn’t use it. It isn’t Google’s number. It was invented by a software company called Moz, and Google has spent the better part of a decade saying, repeatedly and publicly, that it plays no part in how search results are ordered.
I explained what Domain Authority actually is back in June. This piece is about why it keeps appearing on invoices, and what you should ask when it does.
What Google has actually said
This isn’t my opinion against an agency’s. It’s on the record, and it’s been on the record a long time.
Gary Illyes, who works on search at Google, said in 2016 that Google doesn’t “really have ‘overall domain authority'”. John Mueller, who spent years as Google’s public face for site owners, has said it over and over:
- In 2016: “Google doesn’t use ‘domain authority’.”
- In 2018, when someone asked whether Domain Authority exists: “Of course it exists, it’s a tool by Moz.”
- In 2019: “We don’t use domain authority, that’s a metric from an SEO company.”
- In 2020: “We don’t use domain authority at all in our algorithms.”
- In 2022: Google “doesn’t use it at all”.
That is about as clear as Google ever gets about anything.
What it actually is
Domain Authority is Moz’s prediction. They look at things they can see from outside, mostly how many other websites link to you and how good those websites look, and they produce a score from 1 to 100 estimating how likely you are to rank.
It’s a weather forecast, not a thermometer. Moz have never claimed otherwise, to be fair to them.
Every tool has its own version. Ahrefs calls theirs Domain Rating. Semrush calls theirs Authority Score. Majestic has Trust Flow and Citation Flow. They all disagree with each other, because they’re all guesses made from different data, and none of them can see inside Google.
Where I’ll be fairer than most people making this argument
I want to be careful here, because the version of this argument you usually hear goes too far and can be picked apart.
It is not true that Google has nothing site-wide. In 2020 Mueller said: “I don’t know if I’d call it authority like that, but we do have some metrics that are more on a site level.” And in May 2024, internal Google documentation leaked onto a public code repository and was found to reference an attribute called siteAuthority. Google confirmed to The Verge that the documents were genuine, while warning against drawing firm conclusions from them. Nobody outside Google knows whether that attribute is used, or how much it counts for.
So the accurate position is this. Something resembling site-level authority probably exists inside Google. Moz’s Domain Authority is not it, has no access to it, and is not a measurement of it. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either confused or hoping you are.
Why it’s on your report anyway
Four reasons, in roughly ascending order of cynicism.
It’s easy to get. It appears in standard reporting tools at the press of a button. No thought required.
It sounds important. “Your authority score has risen from 18 to 23” sounds like progress. Clients nod.
It moves. Rankings can sit still for months while real work beds in, which is uncomfortable to report. Domain Authority drifts upward whenever anyone links to you, so there’s usually something to show.
It can be moved without helping you. This is the one that matters. Because the score is driven largely by inbound links, buying a pile of cheap links will push it up. Your Domain Authority improves, the report looks great, your enquiries don’t change, and you may have quietly taken on risk that bites you at the next spam update. The metric went the right way and the business went nowhere.
That last pattern is the one I see most in sites I audit for people who’ve had a bad experience.
The one legitimate use
I’m not saying the number is worthless. It has a reasonable use, which is rough comparison.
If you’re deciding whether a link from a particular website is worth pursuing, these scores help you sort obviously strong sites from obviously weak ones. That’s a sensible internal working tool.
The problem isn’t the metric. It’s reporting a tool’s internal working estimate to a client as though it were a result. Nobody would accept an invoice from a builder that listed how many times he’d checked the spirit level.
What to ask when you see it
Next time it appears on your report, ask three questions.
“How many enquiries did we get, and how does that compare to the same month last year?” Enquiries are the only number that pays wages. Everything else is a step on the way.
“Which searches are we ranking for that actually bring customers, and where are we on them?” Not a list of a hundred phrases. The five or ten that matter.
“If the Domain Authority went up, what caused it?” You’re asking where the new links came from. If the answer is local press, suppliers, trade bodies, a charity you sponsored, that’s real work and the score moving is a side effect of something good. If the answer is vague, or mentions a network, or involves words like proprietary, you need to look harder.
What a report should lead with
For a small business, in this order:
- Enquiries, calls and form submissions this month, against last month and the same month last year
- Rankings on the handful of searches that bring you work
- What actually got done this month, as a list of changes rather than activity
- What’s happening next month
If a report opens with authority scores, impressions and a graph of total traffic, and you have to hunt for the enquiry count, that ordering tells you something about what’s being measured and why.
To be clear
I’m not accusing everyone who reports Domain Authority of dishonesty. Plenty of decent agencies include it because clients have come to expect it, and they report real results alongside it.
The tell isn’t whether it appears. It’s whether it appears instead of enquiries.
If you’re paying someone and you can’t tell from the report whether the money is working, send me a recent one and I’ll tell you what it actually says. Free, no pitch, and if your agency is doing solid work I’ll tell you that and you can stop worrying.
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