I Built a Free Domain Authority Checker

I built a free Chrome extension that shows the Ahrefs Domain Rating of any site or any link, without opening Ahrefs and without a login. Click the icon for the current tab, or right-click any link on the page and get the score without visiting the URL. Every “domain authority checker” I found was quiet about which metric it showed, and the paid tools gate the lookup behind a subscription.

Domain Authority and Domain Rating are two different scores

Moz owns Domain Authority, DA. Ahrefs owns Domain Rating, DR. Two different companies running two different crawlers over the web, keeping two different link graphs, and applying two different scoring functions on top of them. A DA of 40 and a DR of 40 do not describe the same site, and they never will, because neither the input data nor the maths on top of it is the same.

You would think a tool called a “domain authority checker” would say which one it shows.

Most do not. Half of them show DR and label it DA, because “Domain Authority” is the phrase most people type into Google, so the category name settled around what searchers wrote rather than around what the tool computes.

This extension shows the Ahrefs number and says Domain Rating on the button. If you need the Moz score, you need a different tool.

Neither number is a Google ranking factor, and both are third-party estimates computed off each vendor’s own crawl of the web. Use them as a reading, not a verdict.

Why I built it

I check DR five or ten times a day. Backlink prospecting, guest-post outreach, sanity check on whatever a link in someone else’s article is pointing at.

Every one of those checks used to be: open Ahrefs, paste the URL, wait, close the tab.

The friction adds up faster than it looks when you do it forty times a week.

Ahrefs’ own free DR checker on their marketing site works, except you have to leave whatever page you were reading to use it, and by the time you have swapped tabs and pasted the URL you are already out of the flow the check was supposed to serve. A browser extension moves the tool to where the URLs already are.

Install it and pin it

1. Open the Chrome Web Store listing and click Add to Chrome.
2. Confirm the permissions prompt. It needs to read the URL of the current tab and add the right-click item.
3. Pin the icon. Click the puzzle piece in the Chrome toolbar, find the extension, click the pin. It stays visible after that.

Two ways to check a score

The tab you’re on. Click the icon in the toolbar, click Analyze Domain, read the score in the popup. Three clicks and no page reload.

Any link on the page. Right-click the link, choose Check Domain Authority, and get the DR of the destination without loading the destination. The workflow that pays off fastest is on a SERP. Read the top ten results with the DR sitting next to each one, and you know inside a glance whether you are looking at ten established sites or a two-DR blog that snuck through the ranking.

I use it on competitor SERPs, on outreach lists, and on any link-building post that names domains I want to check against the DR the author claims for them.

What it doesn’t do

The honest list, because this matters more than the features list.

• It doesn’t tell you why the number is what it is. For that you open Ahrefs Site Explorer, and no free tool substitutes for that view.
• It doesn’t log or store browsing. For the lookup shown in the video, it takes the domain, calls the DR endpoint, returns the score. No account, no history.
• It doesn’t change your ranking. DR is Ahrefs’ estimate of a backlink profile. Google does not compute it and does not read it, and no amount of checking a number moves the number.
• It’s rate-limited. The endpoint the extension calls is a public one, and if you hammer it, it throttles you. Confirmed on 2026-09-01 against the endpoint. Don’t build a bulk checker on top of it.

If you use Firefox or Edge and want a build for either, comment on the video and I will do it.

DR is one number one company computes. It’s a reading, not a verdict.