Domain Authority

domain_authority is a 0 to 100 score describing how established a domain is: how long it has held a visible presence and how much of a footprint it has accumulated over that time.

The field is returned by the domain and email endpoints on Pro plans, and is available in Gates as domain.authority.

Reading the score

A high score reflects years of continuous presence rather than anything a domain can arrange quickly. github.com scores 96.

A low score is the ordinary state of a registered domain. Most domains have little measurable presence, including plenty of legitimate small businesses, personal domains, and sites that simply do not publish much. A low score means the domain has not accumulated a footprint, not that anything is wrong with it.

Zero is a real score

0 is a normal, frequently returned value, not an error or a missing lookup. It means the domain has no measurable online presence: nothing published, nothing linking to it. Plenty of perfectly legitimate domains score 0, including working company domains whose owners have never built a public website.

Expect to see 0 alongside a null domain_age_in_days, since a domain with no footprint is often one whose registration date has not been retrieved either. The two are unrelated lookups and neither confirms the other.

When the value is null

null means the score has not been determined. That is different from a score of 0, which means the domain was assessed and has no measurable presence.

Two situations produce null, and they are worth telling apart:

• The domain has not been scored yet. A domain seen for the first time can return null and a score on a later lookup.
• The domain is flagged as disposable, relay_domain, or spam. Those are never scored, so domain_authority stays null for them permanently rather than arriving on a later lookup.