Ahrefs DR4: What the New Domain Rating Means for Startups (Data From 111 Sites)
November 8, 2026 · Website Rating
On November 5, 2026, Ahrefs previewed DR4, a new version of its Domain Rating model. It becomes the default score in the Ahrefs interface on December 1, 2026. Website Rating switched to DR4 on November 7, so every score on this site, and in our free DR checker, is already on the new model.
Because we had tracked the old DR3 score for every listed startup weekly, we could do something most people cannot: put the two models side by side for 111 real startup websites. The short version is that most scores went down, the youngest sites went down the most, and the model is better for it.
What changed in DR4
Ahrefs explains the design in its DR4 announcement. The three changes that matter for a startup:
- Links from sites with real search traffic count more. DR4 weights a link by whether the linking site is estimated to get organic traffic. A link from a site nobody visits is worth much less than before. Ahrefs says roughly half as many domains receive a DR4 score at all.
- Spam is discounted. Domains Ahrefs labels as spam lost a median of 15 to 20 points in the DR 30 to 70 range, while non-spam domains barely moved.
- Subdomains are scored on their own. A subdomain no longer inherits its root domain’s authority. Ahrefs’ own example is help.ahrefs.com, which went from DR 91 to DR 75 while ahrefs.com stayed in the nineties. Anything hosted on a shared platform subdomain is affected the same way.
Ahrefs also reports that DR4 correlates more strongly with top-10 Google positions than DR3 did, which is the point of the exercise: a score that is harder to inflate with cheap links is a more honest proxy for authority.
What happened to 111 startups
We compared each startup’s last DR3 snapshot (November 1) with its first DR4 snapshot (November 7). Rounded to whole points.
| Startups compared | 111 |
| Went down | 86 |
| Unchanged | 12 |
| Went up | 13 |
| Median change | -3 |
| Average change | -5.6 |
| Dropped 10 points or more | 20 |
The average hides the real story, which is that the change depends almost entirely on how established the site was.
| Old DR3 band | Startups | Median change |
|---|---|---|
| 61 to 100 | 97 | -2 |
| 11 to 60 | 11 | -24 |
| 0 to 10 | 3 | about -1 |
Established companies barely moved. Attio went from 78 to 74, Airwallex from 81 to 80, Metabase from 79 to 77. Thirteen sites went up: Osano from 83 to 92, Gorgias from 82 to 86, Yotpo from 88 to 91. These are companies with press coverage, integrations and customers linking to them from sites that have their own traffic. DR4 rewards exactly that.
Young startups took the hit. Of the eleven sites that sat between DR 11 and DR 60 on the old model, eight lost more than half their score. SendHQ went from 37 to 8, Anyway from 32 to 8, Tradehand from 35 to 21. Six sites that had DR 15 to 26 on DR3 now score 0, among them Formpaste, Wiki and Finance Calendar API. A couple of larger drops sat higher up: Railway went from 87 to 76 and Easypanel from 71 to 46.
This pattern is what you would expect if DR4 is doing its job. A startup that is a few months old typically has a backlink profile made of directory listings, launch-day posts, a handful of forum threads and perhaps some paid placements. Many of those sources get no search traffic themselves. On DR3 they still added up to a respectable looking 20 or 30. On DR4 they add up to very little, because the model now asks whether anyone actually visits the sites doing the linking.
Why this is good news for founders
A lower number is not fun to look at, but three things make DR4 better for the people building startups.
It is harder to game, so it means more. A DR 25 on the old model could be bought in an afternoon from a link marketplace. A DR 25 on DR4 suggests real sites with real readers chose to link to you. When your score climbs now, it climbs for reasons that also move Google rankings.
Everyone reset at once. Your competitors’ cheap links were discounted on the same day yours were. Relative position within a category is what matters, and for most categories it barely changed.
A low score on a young site is now normal, not a warning. Under DR4, most early-stage startups will sit between 0 and 10 for a while. That is the expected starting point, not a sign that something is broken. The sites that pull ahead will be the ones that earn links from places people actually read.
What this means on Website Rating
A few practical notes about how the switch shows up on this site:
- Every score is DR4. Startup profiles, category pages, the homepage board and the DR checker all use the new model. We never mix the two models in one history, because a drop caused by a model change is not a loss of authority and should never show up as a “weekly move”.
- The weekly trend restarted. Movement is measured from the first DR4 snapshot on November 7, so the sparklines and the “Rising this week” list rebuild over the following weeks as new snapshots land.
- Ahrefs still shows DR3 until December 1. If you check your domain in the Ahrefs interface before then, you will see the old score, which can be higher than the number here. After December 1 the two match.
What to do about it
The advice in our guide to Domain Rating has not changed, but DR4 raises the price of ignoring it.
- Stop counting links, start counting readers. Before pursuing a link, ask whether the linking page gets any search traffic. If it does not, DR4 will mostly ignore it.
- Prefer a few curated listings over hundreds of directories. Mass directory submissions were already a weak signal; under DR4 most of them are close to worthless. Pick the directories that rank for terms your customers search.
- Own your domain. If your product lives on a platform subdomain, DR4 scores that subdomain on its own merits. Moving to your own domain stops being a cosmetic choice.
- Earn the links that are hard to fake. Integrations, partner pages, original data, customer stories and press are the sources DR4 weights most heavily, and they have the useful side effect of sending customers.
Want to see your startup’s DR4 tracked weekly, with movement shown against startups in your category? List it in the directory →
Domain Rating data on Website Rating is provided by Ahrefs. Figures above compare the November 1, 2026 DR3 snapshot with the November 7, 2026 DR4 snapshot for the 111 startups that had both.