What Is Authority in SEO?

Authority is one of the core concepts in SEO. It’s a general assessment of how credible and trustworthy a website looks to search engines, driven mainly by the quantity and quality of backlinks the site earns from other reputable sites, along with content that shows experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (what Google calls E-E-A-T).

Authority matters because sites with strong authority signals tend to rank better, which means more traffic and more conversions. Picture two pages publishing the same sourdough recipe: one on a baking site that newspapers have linked to for a decade, the other on a blog launched last month. The established site usually wins. The difference isn’t the recipe; it’s the links vouching for the site behind it.

Is authority a Google ranking factor?

Not as a single number. As of July 2026, Google’s guide to its ranking systems describes ranking as working at the page level, using a variety of signals and systems to rank individual pages, with site-wide signals also contributing. The same guide lists link analysis, including PageRank, among Google’s core ranking systems, but none of it is published as a site score. Google’s John Mueller said it directly in October 2016: Google doesn’t have “anything like a website authority score.” Age doesn’t buy authority either; in April 2017, Mueller answered a flat “no” when asked whether domain age matters for rankings.

Numeric authority scores are a different thing. Domain Authority is Moz’s 1–100 estimate of how likely a site is to rank, calculated using backlink data, and Moz itself notes it’s not a direct ranking factor. Treat scores like it as predictions about ranking, not levers inside Google.

Checking your authority score

Three third-party metrics dominate, each on a 100-point scale and each built its own way: Moz’s Domain Authority is calculated using backlink data, Ahrefs’ Domain Rating grades the strength of a site’s backlink profile, and Semrush’s Authority Score combines link power with organic traffic and spam checks. Because the formulas differ, the numbers aren’t interchangeable: compare Moz to Moz, never Moz to Ahrefs. Moz’s Link Explorer shows any site’s Domain Authority free with a Moz Community account.

Use the score as a pointer, not a target. Pick one tool, look up the sites that outrank you for the queries you care about, and compare within it. If competitors score consistently higher, dig into why: how many reputable sites link to them, how relevant those linking sites are, and which pages earned the links. Closing the numeric gap isn’t the goal; winning the query is, and the score only tells you where to start looking.

Building your site’s authority

Authority accrues slowly, and there’s no switch to flip. Publish original content other sites want to cite (data, tutorials, tools), then earn links from reputable, relevant sites through deliberate link building. Expect months of steady work, not weeks.

One shortcut to skip: buying links violates Google’s spam policies and can cost you rankings instead of raising them. For the full playbook, read our guide How To Get Backlinks: 12 Strategies That Work.