The question arrives in chat from someone senior. Here is the order in which to answer it, so you do not drown them in SEO terms.
RankWiser research team ·
Step zero: look it up
Enter a bare domain like example.com. The widget calls the free domain action, with no key and no charge.
Branch 1: what is the score?
Start with the band. Below 15 usually means few or no referring domains in our index. Between 15 and 40, there is a real link profile but a modest one. Above 55 needs around 10,000 referring domains on this formula.
Next, ask whether that is odd. Age and size of the business matter here, so look at both. A three-month-old launch at 12 is ordinary. A ten-year-old company at 12 deserves a question about where its links went, perhaps a domain change or a lost redirect map.
None of this speaks about the name itself. How good is my domain name depends on length, spelling, trademark risk and memorability, which no link score covers.
Branch 2: what do I do with it?
If you see
Then
Do not
Score under 15 on a new site
Plan a list of partners and directories where you have a real presence
Treat it as failure
Score is flat for 6 months
Compare with three rivals in one bulk_dr call
Blame the last campaign yet
Score dropped 5+ points
Check whether the domain or redirects changed
Panic before the next monthly refresh
Score far below a rival
Pull their refdomains and see which sources you lack (2 credits)
Copy their links blindly
Rival has a similar score but more sales
Look at product and pricing, not links
Keep optimising the metric
Branch 3: say what it cannot tell you
A DR lookup is a flashlight, not a verdict. It cannot say how much traffic a site gets, how well it converts or whether its backlinks come from sites that matter.
Our data refreshes about once a month. Own metric. It is built from the referring-domain count in our index. Comparable in spirit to Ahrefs DR or Moz DA, not the same number. If your agency quotes one of those, ask which, and keep the columns apart.
Finish by offering the next step: a one-line monthly check, set up once, so the question never needs to be asked in chat again.
The tree in one line
Score it, compare it, explain it, schedule it
Four verbs cover almost every version of the question. Skip the schedule and you will be asked again in six weeks.
Score: free lookup
Compare: up to 20 domains per compare call, 1 credit
Explain: the public formula
Schedule: monthly, per the setup guide
Writing the answer back to the person who asked
Keep it to four lines. Your score, a rival's score, what the gap means and the date of the next check. Skip the formula unless asked, and put it in a footnote if the room is technical.
If they want to know whether to spend money, send them to the board runbook instead of improvising. If they want to know what the tool costs, the pricing breakdown has the numbers.
Stay cheerful about low scores. Everyone starts near zero, and a log scale rewards the first hundred referring domains more than any later hundred.
Edge cases people raise
A brand-new domain can show a very low score for a while, simply because our crawler has not seen links to it yet. Wait for the next monthly refresh before you read anything into it.
A site that moved domains, for example from a .io to a .com in 2025, starts with a count of its own. Redirects pass some value in the eyes of search engines, but a link count tied to the new name rebuilds slowly. Check the board runbook for how to footnote that.