This Semrush backlink checker is also a bulk authority score checker: it shows you a domain's Semrush Authority Score next to its backlink profile: total backlinks, referring domains, follow and nofollow links, new and lost links, referring IPs and subnets. Paste up to 500 domains and every number comes straight from Semrush's own backlink database. You don't need a Semrush subscription, only a free dachecker.io account and a few credits.
I've been checking link profiles for more than eight years, and Authority Score is the metric I reach for when I want a second opinion on a site that Moz and Ahrefs disagree about. It's built differently from both, which is exactly why it's useful. This page explains what the score measures, what a good one looks like, and how to read the backlink numbers that sit behind it.
What Is Semrush Authority Score?
Authority Score (AS) is Semrush's 0 to 100 rating of a domain's overall quality and SEO strength. Semrush shows it at the top of almost every domain report, and it's the number people usually mean when they search for a "Semrush domain authority checker" or a "Semrush DA checker". Strictly speaking Semrush doesn't publish a DA at all. Domain Authority is Moz's metric, and Semrush's equivalent is Authority Score.
Like every third party authority metric, it's a prediction rather than a Google signal. Google has said many times that it doesn't use DA, DR or AS. What the score gives you is a quick, comparable read on how strong a site looks to one of the largest link indexes on the web, which is enough to sort a prospect list or size up the sites ranking above you.
How Semrush Calculates Authority Score
Semrush rebuilt the formula in 2023, and the current version blends three things:
- Link Power: the quality and quantity of the domain's backlinks, weighted by how strong the linking sites are themselves.
- Organic Traffic: Semrush's estimate of the monthly search traffic the domain receives.
- Spam Factors: signals that the link profile looks manipulated or unnatural, which pull the score down.
That traffic component is the big difference from Moz DA and Ahrefs DR, which are almost entirely about links. In practice it means a site with a modest link profile but real search traffic can carry a higher AS than its DR suggests, and a site that buys a pile of links without ever earning traffic tends to score lower in Semrush than elsewhere. I like that. It makes AS harder to inflate with link schemes alone.
It also explains a question I get a lot: why did my Authority Score drop when I didn't lose any links? Usually the answer is traffic. A core update that costs you rankings shows up in Semrush's traffic estimate, and the score follows a few weeks later.
What Is a Good Semrush Authority Score?
There's no universal pass mark, because the scale isn't linear. Moving from 10 to 20 takes far less than moving from 60 to 70, so a single point at the top of the scale is worth much more than a point at the bottom. These are the rough bands I work with:
| Authority Score | What it usually means |
|---|---|
| 0 to 10 | New or tiny sites, very few links and almost no search traffic |
| 11 to 30 | Established small businesses, niche blogs and local sites |
| 31 to 50 | Strong niche sites and well known regional brands |
| 51 to 70 | Major publishers and national brands |
| 71 to 100 | The biggest sites on the web |
The better question is how your score compares to the pages you're competing with. Pull the top ten results for your target keyword, run those domains through the checker, and look at the median. If you're within ten points of it, links probably aren't what's holding you back. If you're thirty points under, they are.
Authority Score vs Domain Authority vs Domain Rating
Semrush, Moz and Ahrefs each crawl the web with their own crawler, keep their own link index and score domains their own way. That's why the same site can show AS 35, DA 28 and DR 42 on the same day. None of them is wrong; they're measuring slightly different things.
| Semrush Authority Score | Moz Domain Authority | Ahrefs Domain Rating | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scale | 0 to 100 | 1 to 100 | 0 to 100 |
| Based on | Links, organic traffic and spam signals | Links, through a machine learning model | Links only |
| Includes traffic | Yes | No | No |
| Best used for | A balanced quality check | Comparing with clients who report in DA | Pure link strength |
My rule is to never judge a site on one metric. When AS, DA and DR all agree, I trust the picture. When one of them is far out of line with the other two, that gap is the interesting part, and it usually points to bought links or a traffic collapse. You can get Moz's side of the same list in our domain authority checker and compare the two columns.
Reading the Semrush Backlink Numbers
Authority Score is the headline, but the backlink figures next to it tell you why the score is what it is. Here's our own site, dachecker.io, as a real example from one check: Authority Score 20, 2,124 backlinks from 1,058 referring domains, 1,190 follow and 934 nofollow, 338 new links and 853 lost.
- Backlinks vs referring domains: about two links per linking site is healthy. When a site has 40,000 backlinks from 200 domains, most of those links are sitewide footer or sidebar links, and they count for far less than the total suggests.
- Follow vs nofollow: a natural profile always has some nofollow links from social sites, forums and comments. Ours is roughly 56% follow. A profile that's 99% follow tends to have been built rather than earned.
- New vs lost: lost links aren't automatically bad news. Pages get deleted and directories expire. What matters is the trend over months. If lost keeps beating new, rankings usually slide later.
- Referring IPs and subnets: these show how many separate servers the links come from. A thousand referring domains on 30 subnets is the fingerprint of a private blog network.
If you want to see the actual linking pages rather than the totals, run the domain through our free backlink checker, which lists each link with its anchor text and the Ahrefs DR of the site it comes from.
How to Use the Authority Score Checker in Bulk
Checking domains one at a time inside Semrush works for a quick look, but it falls apart when you're vetting a list of 200 guest post prospects. That's the job this bulk authority score checker is built for:
- Sign in to your dachecker.io account. A free account works and includes credits every month.
- Paste your domains into the box, one per line. Full URLs are fine; we strip them down to the domain.
- Click Check Semrush Data. Domains are checked 50 at a time, and results appear as each batch lands.
- Click any column to sort, then export the table to CSV for your outreach sheet.
Each domain is one check and one credit buys four checks, so a list of 100 domains costs 25 credits. Checks left over from a credit wait on your account for next time, and a domain that fails to load gives its check back. Our credits page has the prices and what's included with each plan.
Using Authority Score for Link Prospecting
This is where a Semrush website authority checker earns its keep. When I'm building a prospect list, I sort by Authority Score first and set a floor, usually AS 20 for a small niche and 35 or more for competitive commercial terms. Anything under the floor goes.
Then I look at the gap between Authority Score and the backlink numbers. A site with plenty of referring domains but a low AS is often getting no search traffic, which tells me Google doesn't think much of it, whatever its link count says. Those are the sites that sell links to anyone, and a link from them does very little.
Finally I cross check the shortlist with a second index. Majestic's Trust Flow is the quickest spam filter I know: a site with high Citation Flow and very low Trust Flow has lots of links and almost none of them trusted. Our bulk Trust Flow checker takes the same list in one paste.
How to Improve Your Authority Score
Because the score combines links, traffic and spam signals, improving it means working on all three rather than just buying links:
- Earn links from sites that have real traffic. One link from a site with an active audience moves AS more than ten links from sites nobody visits.
- Grow organic traffic. Better content on pages that already rank on page two is the fastest way to lift the traffic half of the formula.
- Keep the profile natural. Avoid sudden bursts of exact match anchors and networks of sites on the same servers. Those are the spam factors that hold the score back.
The tactics that raise Moz DA work for Authority Score too, because both reward the same kind of link. I covered them step by step in our guide on how to increase domain authority.
A Semrush Checker Without a Semrush Subscription
Semrush is an excellent all in one suite, but the entry plan costs well over $100 a month, and the free account limits you to a handful of reports a day. If what you need is Authority Score and backlink totals for a list of domains, paying for the full suite is a lot of money for one column of data.
Here you pay per check instead. You get the same Authority Score and backlink figures Semrush shows, for as many domains as you need, with nothing to cancel. What you don't get is the rest of Semrush: keyword research, rank tracking, traffic analytics and site audits. If those are part of your daily work, a Semrush subscription is still worth having. If you mostly vet domains, this is the cheaper way to do it.
Semrush Checker Quick Answers
| Question | Short answer |
|---|---|
| What does Semrush Authority Score measure? | A domain's overall quality from 0 to 100, based on backlinks, organic traffic and spam signals |
| Does Semrush have a DA score? | No. DA is Moz's metric; Semrush's equivalent is Authority Score |
| Does Google use Authority Score? | No. It's a third party estimate, useful for comparing sites |
| What is a good Authority Score? | One close to the median of the sites ranking for your keyword |
| How many domains can I check at once? | Up to 500, checked in batches of 50 |
| What does a check cost? | One credit covers four domains |