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Free domain authority checker
Type a domain and get its link-authority reading — no account, no card, no email. It does one job: telling you roughly how much link weight a site carries, which is the thing you want to know at the moment you're deciding whether a blog, a journalist's site or a guest-post target is worth your pitch.
Check a domain
Free, on the house — Paul reads it from live backlink data, and holds each domain's reading for a month.
Which number this is
The reading above is DataForSEO's authority rank on a 0–1,000 scale, built from an index of the web's links. It is not Moz's Domain Authority — that metric is Moz's own, runs 0–100, and lives in Moz's tools — so a figure here won't match a DA someone quoted you, and isn't meant to. What it's good for is the comparison: whether this site is stronger or weaker than the last one you checked.
What all these scores share is that Google publishes none of them. They're outside estimates of something Google keeps private, no version of the number is a ranking factor, and chasing one directly is a well-worn way to waste a quarter. Our guide to backlinks and domain authority covers that ground properly, so this page won't do it twice. One quirk to know while you read the figure: these scales are weighted so early gains come easily and the top end barely moves, which is why a young site can climb quickly in a good quarter while an established one sits still for a year.
Treat it as a way of comparing two sites, never as a target to hit.
Reading it when you're vetting outreach targets
The moment most people want a domain authority checker online free is mid-list: you have twenty possible blogs, guest-post hosts or journalists' sites in front of you, and you need a fast read on which are worth the time it takes to write a proper pitch. That is a genuinely good use of the number, with one discipline attached — it goes third, not first.
Relevance comes first. Does this site actually cover what you do, for the people you sell to? A niche blog with a modest reading is worth more than a huge general site whose audience will never buy from you. Reachability comes second. A named human with a findable address beats a contact form every time. Authority is the tiebreaker — when two prospects are equally relevant and equally reachable, the stronger profile is the better use of your one good email.
Run the order the other way and you get the classic bad list: sorted by score, aimed at sites that were never going to care, with a reply rate near zero. It's the same trap as buying links because the score should rise — the number moves and nothing else does.
So the authority reading is one column in the sheet. These are the others worth having beside it before anyone writes a word:
| What to check | Why it decides the pitch |
|---|---|
| Relevance to what you do | The clearest predictor of both a reply and a link that carries weight |
| Signs anyone's home | A blog last updated years ago won't publish you, whatever the score says |
| Contactability | A named person who writes the posts beats a generic contact form every time |
| Whether they link out at all | Some sites never link externally; the score won't warn you |
| What your link would sit next to | Ten paid links a page is a neighbourhood to avoid, high score or not |
| The authority reading | A rough sense of whether a mention there is worth the effort |
Anyone selling "DA 50+ placements" is selling the one column that's easiest to game, and the only one they can quote a price against.
Where this fits in Fly Away Paul
Paul ranks prospects the way you would — relevance, then reachability, then weight
This tool is one reading of one domain. Inside the app, that signal is one input among several: Paul finds businesses that match your market, reads each site to judge whether they're worth your own words or a campaign, hunts a real named contact, drafts in your voice, and paces the sending. A backlink reading helps decide the order; it never decides the list.
See how Paul builds a list →What a single number can't tell you
A domain authority free checker gives you a figure and stops. Four things it leaves out, all of which matter more once you're past vetting a stranger's site and looking at your own:
Who the links actually are. A score of 300 could be six genuinely earned links from respected sites, or sixty directory listings — very different situations, identical number. Whether it's moving. One reading is a photograph; the useful version is the trend, because a profile quietly shedding links is a different story from one steadily gaining them. Whether you're leaking. Links pointing at pages of yours that now return an error hand their weight to nothing. Whether the audience is yours. No link metric knows who reads a site.
That's why Fly Away Paul reports your own backlinks as a named list rather than a score: the domains carrying real weight, spelled out, with the ones you gained and lost since last month, plus any of your pages that still collect links while answering an error. Our guide to backlinks and domain authority covers what earning them honestly involves.
Questions people ask
What is domain authority and how is it calculated?
It's an estimate of how much weight a site's link profile carries, worked out from an index of the web's links: how many separate sites link to a domain, and how strong those sites are in turn. Every provider builds its own version on its own scale — Moz's DA runs 0–100, the reading here runs 0–1,000 — and all of them weight the scale so early gains come easily and the top end barely moves.
Is this the same as Moz's free domain authority checker?
No. Moz's Domain Authority is Moz's own 0–100 metric and lives in Moz's tools; a free Moz domain authority checker is theirs to offer. This reads DataForSEO's 0–1,000 authority rank instead. Same idea, different model, different scale — useful for comparing sites with each other, not for matching a figure someone quoted you from Moz.
How accurate is domain authority as a sign of a site's real influence?
It's a reasonable proxy for one thing — how much of the web links to that domain — and a poor proxy for everything else. It can't tell you whether the audience is the right one, whether anyone still reads the site, or whether a link from it would send you a single visitor. A trade blog with a small reading and exactly the readers you want is often worth more than a general site with a big one.
Should I use it to decide who to send outreach or guest post pitches to?
Use it to order your effort, not to pick your targets. Relevance and whether there's a real reason to write should decide who gets a pitch; the authority reading helps decide who gets it first. Sorting purely by score is how people end up writing careful letters to sites with no bearing on their business.
Is there a limit on how many domains I can check for free?
No account and no card, and the limits are set for a person rather than a script: a few checks a minute, around sixty a day, and no bulk upload. Each fresh reading costs us money at the data supplier, so there's also a daily ceiling across everyone — if it's reached, the tool says so plainly rather than failing quietly.
Why does the reading say it's from a few weeks ago?
Each domain's reading is held for a month. Authority moves slowly — links are earned and lost over weeks, not hours — so a month-old figure is as true as a fresh one, and holding them is part of what keeps the tool free.
Can I see this for my own site, properly?
Yes — that's the app. Your own domain gets the reading monthly, with the movement, the weighty referring domains named one by one, and any of your pages that still collect links while answering an error.
Your own site, read monthly
The number, the trend, and who's behind it
Fly Away Paul checks your backlink profile every month: authority and how it's moved, the domains that carry real weight named one by one, what you gained and lost, and any page of yours that answers an error while links still point at it. It sits alongside the site walk, rank and AI-answer tracking, and the guided SEO queue.
Read your own backlinks →