What is URL Rating (UR)

URL Rating (UR) shows the strength of a target page’s backlink profile on a logarithmic scale from 0 to 100, with latter being the strongest. Both internal and external links are taken into account when calculating this metric (but they’re “weighted” differently).

URL Rating (UR) has a clear positive correlation with Google rankings, meaning that high UR pages tend to rank higher in organic search results.

If you’re familiar with Google’s PageRank formula, then it should be easy for you to understand Ahrefs’ URL Rating (UR). That’s because we use all the same basic PageRank principles to calculate URL Rating (UR).

• We count links between pages;
• We respect the “nofollow” attribute;
• We have a “damping factor”;
• We crawl the web far and wide (which is a critical component when calculating an accurate link‐based metric)

Translation: URL Rating (UR) is a near‐perfect way to gauge the “link popularity” of a page, which is likely the reason it correlates so well with Google rankings.

That said, please don’t think of URL Rating as a direct PageRank replacement. Google’s PageRank formula has evolved a lot since its inception, whereas the calculation for Ahrefs’ UR remains simplistic in comparison. If we were to make this formula more complex, it would become too costly to frequently update for the BILLIONS of pages in our index—a cost that would have to be passed on to the customer.

IMPORTANT: I see a lot of people say things like “The UR & DR of this domain are…” It is wrong to say that. UR is a page‐level metric, whereas DR is a domain‐level metric. When you put a website into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and see its URLRating, that’s the UR the homepage only.