What Is Authority Score?
Authority Score is Semrush’s compound metric that measures your website's (or webpage’s) overall quality and SEO strength on a scale from 0 to 100.
The higher your score, the better your chances of ranking well in search results.
You can check your website’s authority score by entering your domain into our free Website Authority Checker tool.
Regularly monitoring this metric helps you see if your SEO efforts are paying off.
A score increase suggests your strategy is working. While a decline might indicate issues that need attention.
How Is Semrush’s Domain Authority Score Calculated?
Authority Score is calculated based on three key components:
- Backlink signals: The quantity and quality of links pointing to your website from other domains
- Organic traffic: The estimated monthly visits your website receives from search engines
- Spam factors: The presence of any suspicious patterns that might indicate link manipulation (such as unnatural link growth or too many links from the same IP address)
Generally, your Authority Score should improve if you attract more and higher-quality backlinks, increase your organic traffic, and maintain a natural-looking link profile.
What Is a Good Authority Score?
There's no universal "good" Authority Score—it's entirely dependent on the websites you compete with in your niche.
For instance, an Authority Score of 20 might seem low on its own. But if similar websites in your industry average around 15, then your score is actually strong.
A higher Authority Score is generally better. That said, it’s all relative.
To get an idea of whether your Authority Score is good, compare it with other websites in your niche using Semrush's Backlink Analytics tool.
Enter your domain and click “Analyze.”
You’ll see your Authority Score at the top.
Then, add up to four competitors’ domains in the given comparison fields and click "Compare."
You’ll see a table that displays your Authority Score alongside those of your competitors.
Your site Authority Score is good if it’s comparable to or higher than the scores of your competitors.
How to Use Authority Score for SEO Tasks
Analyzing Authority Scores can help you carry out essential SEO tasks in a few key ways.
1. Gathering Competitive Intelligence
Authority Score instantly shows you which competitors have stronger SEO foundations so you can reverse-engineer their success strategies.
Study their backlink profiles, content strategy, and overall SEO approach to find opportunities to improve your website's authority.
For example, one of the reasons your competitor’s Authority Score is higher could be that they have many backlinks to their content.
If that’s the case, analyze what type of content they create. You might discover that they regularly publish data studies, in-depth guides, or expert roundup posts.
You can create similar types of content for your own site. And attract links.
To find your competitor’s most successful content, use Semrush’s Backlink Analytics tool.
Enter your competitor’s blog subfolder or subdomain (whichever is applicable) and click “Analyze.”
Then, go to the “Indexed Pages” tab.
You’ll see their top posts by backlinks.
2. Evaluating Link Building Prospects
Studying other website’s Authority Scores helps you identify whether it’s worth pursuing backlink opportunities with them.
Not all backlinks are created equal—links from sites with higher Authority Scores may provide more SEO value.
Before reaching out to a website asking for a backlink, check their Authority Score to ensure it's worth your time and effort.
If you use the Link Building Tool to find link building opportunities, you’ll see the Authority Score displayed alongside each prospect.
Sites with higher Authority Scores are usually your best targets.
3. Tracking Performance
Monitoring your site’s Authority Score is a reliable way to measure how effective your SEO efforts are over time.
When you see your Authority Score increasing, it's a strong indicator that your SEO activities are paying off. Conversely, if your score starts to drop, it’s a signal that something is wrong.
You can keep tabs on your Authority Score using our free Website Authority Checker tool. Or with the Backlink Analytics, Backlink Audit, or Domain Overview tools.
How to Increase Your Domain’s Authority Score
Here’s what you can do to boost your website’s Authority Score:
- Build backlinks from relevant and reputable websites in your niche
- Create high-quality content that uses on-page SEO best practices so you can rank higher and get more traffic from search engines
- Regularly monitor your backlink profile to ensure it’s natural. If you find many unnatural links, you can reach out to linking websites and request they be removed.
- Use internal linking to distribute authority throughout your website
And know that building authority takes time.
Even if you follow all these best practices perfectly, you won't see results immediately.
It's also important to understand what doesn't increase your Authority Score.
Simply adding more pages to your site, building more links from the same domain, or submitting your site to hundreds of low-quality directories won't improve your score.
Check Your Score and Improve Your Authority
Now that you know more about Semrush's Authority Score metric, it's time to put this knowledge into action.
Start by checking your current score using Semrush's Backlink Analytics tool. And compare it with other websites in your space.
Understanding where you stand is the first step toward improvement. Once you know your current position, you can start taking action to boost your site's authority.
Semrush offers a suite of SEO tools that help you implement targeted strategies.
Sign up to get started today.