# Domain authority

> Where authority scores come from, why two tools give the same domain different numbers, and why netweft publishes no score of its own.

Source: https://netweft.com/glossary/domain-authority
Updated: 2026-09-12

**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](/compare/moz).