Checking one domain at a time is fine when you have one domain. It stops being fine at forty. This tool takes a list, checks every domain in it, and hands you back one sortable table with a CSV export — no account, no credit card, no per-domain credits.
What This Tool Gives You
- Domain Rating for every domain you paste, on the familiar 0–100 scale
- A strength label so you can scan the list without reading every number
- Sortable columns — click Domain Rating to put the strongest prospects at the top
- Average, highest and lowest across your whole list, which is the number most people actually want
- CSV export and copy-to-clipboard, so the results land in your own sheet in one click
Paste domains one per line. Full URLs are fine — the tool strips the protocol, the www and anything after the slash, then removes duplicates before it runs.
Who Actually Needs Bulk Checking
Link builders vetting a prospect list
You scraped 200 sites that accept guest posts. Half are worthless. Checking them one by one is a morning gone. Paste the list, sort by rating, and cut the bottom two-thirds before you write a single outreach email.
Buyers screening a seller’s inventory
A link seller sends a spreadsheet with their own numbers in it. Run the domain column through here and compare. Sellers quote stale figures more often than they quote fake ones, but both show up quickly when you check the whole list yourself.
Agencies auditing a client’s backlink profile
Export the top linking sites from the Links report in Google Search Console, paste them in, and you have a picture of the client’s link profile quality in about a minute. The average across the list tells you more than any single link does, and it’s a number clients understand on sight.
Anyone buying expired domains
Auction lists run to hundreds of names. Bulk checking is the first filter. Everything that survives it then needs the slower checks covered in our guide to checking domain quality before you buy — a rating alone never justifies a purchase.
Competitive research
Take the domains ranking on page one for your main keyword, run the lot, and you have your target range. That number tells you whether the keyword is winnable this year or whether you need to build authority first.
How to Read the Results
| Rating | Strength | What it usually means |
|---|---|---|
| 70–100 | Very strong | Major brands, large publications, category leaders |
| 50–69 | Strong | Established publishers and well-known niche sites |
| 30–49 | Moderate | Competitive in most niches; solid link prospects |
| 15–29 | Developing | Growing sites, small businesses, younger blogs |
| 0–14 | Low | New sites, or sites with almost no links |
Two things worth keeping in mind while you scan that table.
The scale is logarithmic. The gap between 20 and 30 is small. The gap between 70 and 80 is enormous. A list where everything sits between 10 and 25 is more normal than it looks.
Relevance beats the number. A rating of 25 from a site in your industry is usually worth more than a 60 from an unrelated general blog. Use the number to rank your list, then judge the top of that list by hand.
What Domain Rating Actually Measures
Every authority metric in SEO is an attempt to answer one question with public data: how much trust has the rest of the web placed in this website? Nobody outside Google can see Google’s own answer, so the industry builds proxies. Domain Rating is one of the better ones, and understanding what goes into it changes how you read a list of 100 numbers.
It counts websites, not links
The single most common misreading is treating backlink count as the driver. It isn’t. What moves a rating is the number of separate websites linking to a domain, weighted by how strong those websites are themselves.
A site with 50,000 backlinks from 40 domains is almost always a site with sitewide footer or sidebar links — one placement repeated across thousands of pages. A site with 900 backlinks from 600 domains has 600 separate editorial decisions behind it. The second is worth far more, and the ratings usually reflect that.
Strength flows through the graph
A link from a site that is itself well linked passes more strength than a link from an isolated site. This is why one mention in a national newspaper can outweigh 200 directory listings, and why buying links from sites that only link to other paying customers does almost nothing: those sites have no strength of their own to pass.
It also explains something people find confusing in bulk results. Two sites that look equally professional can sit 25 points apart, because one is cited by its industry and the other is only listed in aggregators.
The scale compresses at the top
The 0–100 scale is logarithmic, which has real consequences for planning:
| Moving from | Roughly what it takes | Realistic timeframe |
|---|---|---|
| 0 → 10 | Being online with a handful of genuine listings and mentions | Weeks |
| 10 → 25 | Consistent publishing plus a few dozen relevant referring domains | A few months |
| 25 → 40 | Something citable: data, a free tool, coverage in trade press | Six to twelve months |
| 40 → 60 | Years of accumulated links and genuine brand recognition | Multiple years |
| 60+ | Category leadership, usually with links money can’t buy | Rare for small sites |
When you scan a bulk result, this is the mental correction to apply: a list where most prospects sit between 8 and 30 is a perfectly normal list, not a bad one. The handful above 50 are the exceptions, and they’re usually the hardest to get a link from.
Links decay, so ratings drift
Websites close. Pages get deleted in redesigns. Editors prune old posts. A domain can lose rating points without doing anything wrong, simply because the pages pointing at it disappeared. The reverse happens too: a single feature in a widely read publication can lift a small site noticeably within weeks.
Because of this drift, a rating is a snapshot with a shelf life of roughly a quarter. Lists you checked six months ago deserve a re-run before you use them again.
What it deliberately ignores
- Traffic. A domain can carry a strong rating and receive almost no visitors, which is the classic signature of a rebuilt expired domain.
- Content quality. Nothing in the metric reads the writing.
- Topical relevance. A gardening blog and a fintech publication with the same rating are not equally valuable to you.
- Penalties. A site can be in trouble with Google and still show a healthy number for months.
- The specific page. The rating describes the whole domain, not the article your link would sit inside.
All five of those gaps are why the workflow further down this page ends with human review rather than a number. The tool removes the obvious rejects so your attention goes to the twenty that deserve it.
Red Flags a Rating Will Never Show You
Once your list is sorted, the strongest-looking entries deserve the most suspicion. High numbers attract manipulation, so here is what to check by eye before money changes hands.
Rating without traffic
A site rated 55 that ranks for nothing is the most reliable warning sign in link buying. Real authority produces rankings somewhere. When it doesn’t, the links behind the number were usually built rather than earned, and Google has often already discounted them.
A topic that keeps changing
Open the site’s older posts. If a home improvement blog spent 2021 writing about casinos and 2023 about crypto, you’re looking at an expired domain that’s been rebuilt to sell links. The old rating is inherited; the trust usually isn’t.
Guest post carpet
Scan the last twenty posts. Twenty different author names, twenty unrelated industries and a commercial link in each one means you’d be buying a spot on a noticeboard, not a mention in a publication.
Outbound links outnumbering readers
Count the commercial outbound links on a typical article. Five or more to unrelated businesses means the page exists to sell links. Your link joins a queue, and the value splits accordingly.
Multilingual clones
Sites publishing the same thin article in six languages are farming index space. They often carry decent ratings from network cross-linking and deliver nothing.
No human footprint
No named authors, no about page with real people, no social presence, a contact form and nothing else. Legitimate publications leave traces of the humans behind them.
Checking these six things takes about three minutes per site. That’s affordable for your top twenty and impossible for your top two hundred, which is the entire argument for filtering by rating first.
Where to Get a List Worth Checking
A bulk checker is only as useful as the list you feed it. These sources produce prospects that are relevant before they’re filtered, which is the right order to work in.
Competitor referring domains
The best single source. Any site linking to two or three of your competitors is demonstrably willing to link to businesses like yours. Export those domains, run them here, and work down by rating.
Page-one results for your key terms
Collect the domains ranking for the twenty searches that matter to you. This list serves two purposes: it tells you the authority range you’re competing against, and the non-competitor entries are often publications worth pitching.
Trade bodies, associations and local institutions
Unglamorous and consistently underrated. Membership directories, supplier lists, chambers of commerce, university partner pages and local sponsorship pages tend to carry solid ratings and near-perfect relevance.
Podcasts and interview shows in your field
Every episode page links to its guest. Build a list of shows your customers listen to, check their domains here, and pitch the strongest ones.
Broken resources in your niche
Find dead pages that sites still link to, publish a genuine replacement, and tell the people still pointing at the corpse. Check the linking domains in bulk first so you spend outreach time on the ones that matter.
Your own customers, suppliers and partners
The list nobody builds. Everyone you already do business with has a website, and many have a partners page. It’s the highest-conversion outreach list you’ll ever run, and it takes ten minutes to assemble from your invoices.
Where the Data Comes From
Ratings come from the Ahrefs public Domain Rating endpoint, which measures the strength of a site’s backlink profile against every other site in the Ahrefs index on a 0–100 logarithmic scale. It’s the same metric you’d see in their own tools, and their explanation of how Domain Rating is calculated is worth ten minutes if you use the metric regularly.
Results are cached for seven days, so a domain you check twice in the same week returns instantly. If a domain comes back with no data, it usually means the site is very new, very small, or the domain was mistyped.
Domain Rating vs Domain Authority vs Authority Score
People use these three names interchangeably, and they shouldn’t. Each belongs to a different company and measures something slightly different:
- Domain Rating (DR) is Ahrefs’ measure of backlink profile strength — what this tool shows.
- Domain Authority (DA) is Moz’s prediction of how likely a domain is to rank.
- Authority Score is Semrush’s blend of link power, organic traffic and spam signals.
The same website can score 40, 55 and 32 across the three and nothing is wrong. Pick one and use it consistently. The full breakdown is in our guide to Domain Authority vs Domain Rating vs Authority Score.
A Workflow That Actually Filters a List
- Paste and run. Get ratings for the whole list in one pass.
- Sort descending and cut the tail. Below 10, most prospects aren’t worth the outreach time unless they’re exactly on topic.
- Export the survivors. Download the CSV and work in your own sheet from here.
- Add a relevance column by hand. Score each site 1–3 for how close it is to your topic. This is the column that predicts results.
- Check the top 20 individually. Run each through the full authority checker for referring domains and link-profile detail.
- Look at the site itself. Real articles, real authors, real audience, or a link farm with a payment page? Google’s link spam policies describe exactly what you don’t want to be buying into.
Steps 1 to 3 take two minutes and remove most of the list. Steps 4 to 6 are where the judgement lives, and no tool does them for you.
Turning Ratings Into Decisions: A Scoring Model
Sorting by rating tells you which sites are strongest. It doesn’t tell you which are worth your time or money. For that you need two or three more columns and a rough score. Here is a model that survives contact with real prospect lists.
The four columns that matter
| Column | Scale | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Rating | 0–100 | This tool, exported to CSV |
| Relevance | 1–3 | Your judgement: 3 = same industry, 2 = adjacent, 1 = general |
| Reality | 0 or 1 | 1 if the site shows real rankings and a real audience |
| Cost | Currency or hours | Price quoted, or your estimate of the effort to earn it |
Score each prospect as rating × relevance × reality. Anything multiplied by a reality of zero drops out regardless of how strong it looked, which is exactly the behaviour you want. Then divide the score by cost to rank what to pursue first.
A worked example
| Site | Rating | Relevance | Reality | Score | Cost | Score per £100 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Trade magazine | 48 | 3 | 1 | 144 | £0 (pitch) | Highest |
| Regional news site | 62 | 2 | 1 | 124 | £250 | 50 |
| Guest post network site | 57 | 1 | 0 | 0 | £180 | 0 |
| Niche blog | 21 | 3 | 1 | 63 | £0 (pitch) | High |
| General directory | 44 | 1 | 1 | 44 | £99 | 44 |
Notice what the model does to the third row. On a raw rating sort it was second-best on the list. Once reality is scored honestly, it’s worthless — and it was the only one asking for money up front.
Notice the fourth row too. A rating of 21 looks unimpressive next to 62, but perfect relevance and no cost make it one of the best opportunities on the sheet. Bulk checking is what lets you see rows like that instead of drowning before you reach them.
Setting your own floor
People always want a minimum acceptable rating. There isn’t a universal one, but there is a sensible way to derive yours: run the referring domains of the competitor who outranks you, and look at their median. If half their links come from sites rated under 20, chasing only 40+ prospects means you’re playing a harder game than the site currently beating you.
How Different Businesses Should Use This
Local service businesses
Your competition is usually other local firms, not national brands, so the ratings you’re chasing are lower than the SEO internet suggests. Build a list of local institutions — councils, charities you sponsor, suppliers, trade bodies, local news — and check the lot. Anything relevant and local beats a higher-rated stranger every time.
One caution: a strong link profile with only four service pages on the site is a waste of the work. Coverage comes first. Our guide to domain authority vs page authority explains why the links have to reach the right pages before they turn into enquiries.
Ecommerce stores
Check the domains of every retailer, reviewer and buying guide already ranking for your category terms. Stockist pages, gift guides and product round-ups are the realistic link targets, and they’re easy to identify once you’ve bulk-checked the domains behind them.
SaaS and software
Review platforms, integration directories and comparison sites dominate your searches. Bulk-check them, then work out which ones accept listings and which need a relationship. The average rating in that set is your realistic ceiling for category terms.
Agencies managing several clients
Run each client’s referring domains monthly and record the average alongside their competitor set. Two numbers, same day each month, and you have a link-quality trend line for reporting that clients grasp instantly. The approach fits neatly into the reporting rhythm described in how SEO agencies scale delivery.
Domain investors
Auction lists are the original bulk-checking use case. Filter by rating, then apply the six red flags above, then check history properly. Most of a drop list dies at the second stage.
How Often to Re-Check, and What to Record
Ratings move slowly, so weekly checking is noise. Quarterly is right for prospect lists; monthly is right for your own domain and your main competitors. Keep it in one sheet:
| Column | Why it earns its place |
|---|---|
| Date checked | Ratings shift as the index updates; undated numbers are useless |
| Domain | Root domain only, so rows stay comparable |
| Rating | The headline |
| Relevance (1–3) | Your judgement, and the column that predicts results |
| Status | Not contacted, pitched, replied, live, rejected |
| Link live date | Lets you connect outreach to later rating movement |
After two or three quarters this sheet answers a question most teams can’t: which kinds of sites actually said yes, and what they had in common. That’s worth more than any individual rating on it.
Mistakes People Make With Bulk Results
- Treating the number as a verdict. It’s a filter. The decision happens after it.
- Mixing metrics in one sheet. A Moz score in one row and a rating from here in the next makes the column meaningless. Pick one source per column.
- Checking subdomains expecting domain-level answers. Free blogging platforms and large hosts behave unpredictably; judge those on the specific page instead.
- Ignoring the no-data rows. They’re often typos, and a typo can quietly remove a great prospect from your list.
- Sorting once and never re-sorting. Sort by rating to see strength, then by relevance to see value. Both views tell you something different.
- Buying the top of the list. The strongest sites that accept payment are usually the ones most heavily worked by other buyers.
- Forgetting your own domain. Add it to every check so you always know the gap between you and your prospects.
Terms You’ll Meet in the Results
- Referring domain — a separate website linking to you at least once. The unit that matters.
- Backlink — an individual link. Many can come from one referring domain.
- Dofollow / nofollow — whether a link passes ranking signals. Nofollow links still bring visitors and mentions.
- Anchor text — the clickable words. Natural profiles contain brand names and plain URLs, not the same keyword repeated.
- Link velocity — how quickly links accumulate. Sudden spikes on small sites are a warning sign.
- Expired domain — a lapsed domain bought for its existing links. Sometimes legitimate, often not.
- PBN — a private network of sites created to link to one another’s clients. Sold as premium placements, usually worthless.
- Topical relevance — how closely a linking site’s subject matches yours. The judgement no metric replaces.
Walkthrough: Filtering a 240-Domain Prospect List
Abstract advice is easy to nod along to and hard to apply, so here is the whole process on a realistic list. The numbers below are illustrative, but the shape of the funnel matches what most people find.
Starting point
You export the referring domains of three competitors, combine them, remove duplicates and the obvious junk, and you’re left with 240 domains. Checking these individually at two minutes each is eight hours of work before a single email is written.
Pass one: the ratings, six minutes
Three runs of 100, 100 and 40 through this tool, exported to one sheet. A typical spread looks like this:
| Band | Domains | What you do with them |
|---|---|---|
| 50+ | 14 | Aspirational. Worth a pitch with a genuine story, not a template. |
| 30–49 | 41 | The working list. Most of your wins live here. |
| 15–29 | 78 | Keep the relevant ones, drop the rest. |
| Under 15 | 92 | Drop unless they’re directly in your niche or local to you. |
| No data | 15 | Check for typos, then discard. |
Pass two: relevance, thirty minutes
Score the surviving 133 domains 1 to 3 for topical closeness. This is fast because you’re only glancing at each site. Typically around a third score a 3, a third score a 2, and the rest are general sites that happened to link to a competitor once.
Drop everything scoring 1 unless the rating is exceptional. You’re now at roughly 85 prospects.
Pass three: reality, one hour
Apply the six red flags to the top 25 by score. In most lists, three to six of them fail — usually the high-rating, low-traffic entries that looked like the best prospects on the sheet. Removing them early saves both money and the awkward conversation about why a purchased link did nothing.
What you’re left with
Around 80 workable prospects, ranked, with the strongest twenty already vetted by eye. Total time: under two hours instead of a full day, and the ranking means your first ten emails go to the best ten names rather than whichever ones happened to be at the top of the export.
This is the whole argument for bulk checking. It doesn’t make decisions for you. It removes the 60% of a list that was never going to matter, so your judgement gets spent where judgement actually pays.
What to Send After You’ve Filtered
A filtered list is only valuable if the outreach is worth reading. Three patterns that get replies, in rough order of success rate:
The dead link
You found a broken resource they link to, and you have a replacement. You’re solving their problem first, which is why this converts better than anything else. Name the exact page and the exact position of the link so they can see you actually looked.
The unlinked mention
They already wrote about you, your product or your data, and didn’t link. A short, friendly note usually gets it added, because the writer had no objection to you in the first place.
The genuinely better resource
Hardest and slowest, but it compounds. You publish something with original data, a free tool or first-hand experience nobody else has, then tell the people writing about that topic it exists. Note that this is the same move that built the page you’re reading.
What doesn’t work, consistently: templated flattery, “I read your amazing article” openers, and anything that leads with what you want. Editors receive dozens a day and recognise all of them within one line.
Does Authority Still Matter for AI Search?
A fair question now that a growing share of research happens inside AI assistants rather than a results page. The honest answer is that nobody outside those companies knows the weightings, but two things are observable.
First, AI answers lean heavily on sources that already rank, so the link-earned visibility you build for search tends to carry over. Second, being cited by other sites is itself a signal of being worth citing — which is the same behaviour these metrics try to measure.
What has changed is that machine readability now matters alongside authority. A strong site that blocks AI crawlers or hides its content behind scripts gets quoted less than a weaker site that’s easy to parse. If that’s a concern, run your domain through the AI search readiness checker and see what the crawlers actually get.
How This Compares to Other Free Checkers
| Option | Bulk? | Signup? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| This tool | Yes, 100 at a time | No | Domain Rating, sortable, CSV export |
| Our single-domain authority checker | No | No | Deeper: referring domains, link profile detail |
| Free tiers of major SEO suites | Rarely | Usually | Their own metric, with daily caps |
| Browser extensions | Per page | Usually | Handy while browsing, useless for a list |
| Paid API access | Yes | Yes | The right answer at genuine scale |
Use this one for the list, the single-domain checker for the shortlist, and a paid subscription only when your volume genuinely outgrows both. Plenty of agencies run for years on exactly that combination.
Low-Rated Domains Aren’t Automatically Worthless
Before you delete the bottom of your list, three categories are worth rescuing:
- Local institutions. A village cricket club or a local charity may rate under 10 and still be exactly the kind of link a local business should have.
- New sites with real audiences. A two-year-old publication with an engaged newsletter will rate low and send real customers. Links aren’t only about rankings.
- Niche community sites. Forums, hobby sites and specialist directories often rate modestly and sit precisely on topic.
The rule of thumb: delete low ratings that are also irrelevant. Keep low ratings that are highly relevant. Almost nobody applies that second half, which is exactly why those links remain available.
Limits
- 100 domains per run, five runs per day. That’s 500 domains daily, free, which covers most prospect lists.
- Domain-level only. The rating describes the whole site, not the individual page your link would sit on.
- Backlinks only. Domain Rating says nothing about traffic, content quality or whether a site has been penalised.
- A snapshot. Ratings shift as the index updates. Re-check quarterly rather than reading week-to-week movement as a trend.
After the Filtering: Do Something With the Authority
Here’s the part most link-building projects skip. Authority is only worth what your pages can convert it into. A site with strong links and twelve pages has nothing for that strength to lift.
Before you spend another month on outreach, count how many searches your site actually has a page for: every service, every area you serve, every comparison your buyers run, every question they ask first. Most sites cover under a fifth of their own demand. The PageForge bulk page generator builds that missing page set inside WordPress from a spreadsheet, so the authority you’re working for has somewhere to land.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many domains can I check at once?
Up to 100 per run, with five runs per day per visitor. Paste more than 100 and the tool checks the first 100 and tells you so.
Is it really free?
Yes. No account, no email, no trial. The daily cap exists to keep the tool fast for everyone, not to sell you an upgrade.
Can I paste full URLs instead of domains?
Yes. Paths, protocols and www are stripped automatically, and duplicates are removed before the check runs.
Why does a domain show no data?
Usually a typo, a parked domain, or a site too new to have measurable backlinks. Check the spelling first.
Do the numbers match what I see in Ahrefs?
They come from the same source, so they should match closely. Small differences appear when our seven-day cache is a little behind a fresh index update.
What rating should I accept for a link?
There’s no universal floor. Compare against the sites already linking to your competitors, and weigh relevance at least as heavily as the number.
Does this work for subdomains?
You can enter them, but treat the answer carefully. Subdomains on large platforms inherit signals from the parent in ways that make a single number misleading. For those, judge the specific page and its own links instead.
Why did a domain’s rating change since last month?
Usually because links were gained or lost, or because the index refreshed. The scale is also relative, so a site can drift down while standing still if other sites gain. Look at the quarterly direction rather than the monthly wobble.
Can I check my competitors’ entire backlink list here?
Yes, in batches of 100. Export their referring domains from whichever tool you use, paste 100 at a time, and export each batch. Five runs a day covers 500 domains, which handles most competitor profiles in a single sitting.
Is a higher rating always a better link?
No. A relevant link from a modest site in your industry usually beats a stronger link from an unrelated one, and a link on a page nobody reads beats neither. Rating tells you about the site, not about the placement.
Will checking domains here affect my own rankings?
No. Looking up a domain is a read-only query. Nothing is submitted anywhere and no link is created by checking.
Do you store the domains I check?
Ratings are cached for seven days so repeat lookups are instant, and that cache isn’t tied to you. Your list isn’t saved to an account, because there is no account.
What should I do with the CSV?
Open it in your spreadsheet, add the relevance and reality columns from the scoring model above, and sort by score. That sheet becomes your outreach queue.
Check Your List Now
Paste your prospect list, sort by rating, export what survives. Then run the survivors through the full authority checker for the referring-domain detail that decides whether a link is worth chasing.
