Domain authority
Also called DA, domain rating, DR, authority score
A third-party score that estimates how likely a domain is to rank, modelled from a link index the tool crawls itself. It is a vendor's opinion expressed as a number, not a measurement Google publishes or uses.
Every large SEO tool publishes a domain-level authority score, and no two of them agree. That is not a defect in any of them. Each score is modelled from that tool’s own crawl of the web, on that tool’s own assumptions about which links count and how much, and the number is a summary of a model rather than a reading of anything.
Google does not publish an authority score, does not consume one, and the metric the industry’s shorthand descends from — PageRank — stopped being visible in 2016.
What an authority score is actually useful for. Comparing two domains inside the same tool, at the same moment. The ordering it produces is usually defensible even when the absolute number means nothing, which is why it survives in pitch decks and competitor shortlists.
What it is not useful for. Tracking over time against a target, or comparing a number from one tool against a number from another. A score that moves because the vendor re-crawled or re-weighted has moved for reasons that have nothing to do with your site.
netweft does not compute an authority score, or any substitute for one. Every number in it either came from a named provider, or is a direct observation, or is a documented rule applied to one — and the interface says which. That is a real trade: if a report has to carry a DA figure, netweft cannot produce one, which is stated plainly on the comparison page.
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