Free Bulk DR Checker: Check Domain Rating for 20 Sites at Once

You can bulk-check Domain Rating for free. Paste up to 20 domains, one per line, into our free bulk DR checker, and it returns each site's real Ahrefs Domain Rating. You can export the whole list to CSV. No signup, no login, no credits. It is best used for competitor benchmarking and for triaging a list of link prospects fast, before you spend time or money on any of them.

That is the whole answer. The rest of this post shows you how to run a bulk DR check, how to read what comes back, and - the part most guides skip - how to actually use bulk DR results without getting burned. Because DR is a starting filter, not a buying decision.

What is a bulk DR check (and why do it)?

A bulk DR check means pulling the Domain Rating for many sites at once instead of typing them in one at a time. Domain Rating, or DR, is Ahrefs' 0 to 100 score for how strong a site's backlink profile is. Higher means more, and stronger, sites link to it. If you want the full breakdown of what DR measures and how the scale works, we wrote a dedicated Domain Rating explainer.

People search for a "bulk dr checker" or a "bulk ahrefs dr checker" for two very practical reasons, and they almost always come down to not wanting to pay for an Ahrefs seat just to glance at a list of numbers:

• Competitor benchmarking. You have a handful of competitors and you want to see, at a glance, who sits where on the authority scale. Checking eight domains one by one is tedious. Pasting eight domains and getting eight numbers back takes seconds.
• Triaging a link prospect list. You have a spreadsheet of 20, 50, or 200 sites you are thinking about buying links from or pitching guest posts to. Before you invest any real effort, you want to knock out the obvious non-starters and rank the rest. Bulk DR is a fast first sort.

Both jobs are about speed at the top of the funnel. You are not making a decision yet. You are turning a long list into a shortlist.

How to check DR in bulk for free

Here is the whole flow. It takes under a minute.

1. Open our free bulk DR checker.
2. Switch to bulk mode and paste your domains, one per line. You can do up to 20 at a time.
3. Run it. Each domain comes back with its live Ahrefs Domain Rating.
4. Click export to download the results as a CSV so you can drop them straight into your prospect sheet.

A few things worth knowing about how ours works, because not every "free DR checker" online is honest about this:

• It is the real Ahrefs DR. Our tool pulls Ahrefs' official free Domain Rating API, so the number you get is the same Domain Rating you would see inside Ahrefs. It is not a third-party estimate or a made-up score dressed up to look like DR. Attribution is Domain Rating by Ahrefs.
• No signup, no login, no credits. You do not create an account, you do not burn a monthly quota, and you are not upsold before you see a number.
• Clean domains, one per line. Paste bare domains or full URLs. If a big list is not returning what you expect, check for stray spaces, duplicate lines, or typos in the domain.

If you also want to see who is linking to those sites, our free backlink checker is a natural next step once your shortlist is down to a handful.

How to read the results

You get a list of domains, each with a number from 0 to 100. Before you do anything with those numbers, keep three facts about DR in your head, because they change how you should read the column.

The scale is logarithmic, not linear. A DR 60 site is not "twice as strong" as a DR 30 site. The gap between 20 and 25 is small and easy to close. The gap between 70 and 75 is huge and can take years of real links. So do not treat DR like a percentage or average it in a way that assumes even spacing.

A number with no context is just a number. DR tells you the strength of a backlink profile and nothing else. It says nothing about how much traffic a site gets, whether it is relevant to your niche, or whether it is even a real, living site. Two sites can both show DR 55 and be worlds apart - one a genuine industry publication, the other an expired domain rebuilt to sell links.

Look for the mismatches. When you scan a bulk result, the interesting rows are not always the highest ones. A site showing a surprisingly high DR relative to how obscure it is deserves a closer look later, because a big gap between authority and reality is the classic fingerprint of a gamed profile.

So read the bulk output as a rough sort, not a ranking of quality. It tells you roughly where each site sits. It does not tell you which ones to buy.

How to actually use bulk DR - competitor benchmarking and triaging a link list

This is where a bulk DR check earns its keep. Two workflows.

Competitor benchmarking

Paste your competitors' domains, plus your own, and read the spread. What you are looking for is not a single winner but the shape of the field. Are your competitors clustered around DR 40 to 50 while one outlier sits at DR 70? That outlier is probably worth studying - where are their links coming from that yours are not? Our guide on how to find competitor backlinks walks through turning that observation into an actual link target list.

Benchmarking also sets a realistic bar. If everyone in your space sits around DR 45, you do not need DR 80 links to compete. You need to close the gap to your direct rivals, which is a very different, much cheaper goal.

Triaging a link prospect list

This is the higher-volume job. You have a list of sites you are considering buying links from. Run them through the bulk checker and use DR as a coarse filter in two directions:

• Cut the floor. Sites sitting very low with nothing else going for them are usually new, abandoned, or built only to sell links. Bulk DR lets you drop them fast.
• Flag the ceiling. Sites priced for a DR far above what your budget or your link profile needs are often not worth the premium. A brand-new SaaS site suddenly picking up a cluster of very high DR links can also look unnatural, which is its own risk.

What is left in the middle is your shortlist - the sites worth spending real vetting time on. Bulk DR did its one job: it turned a long list into a short one, fast. Now the actual work begins, and that work is not about DR at all.

The honest caveat: DR is not a Google ranking factor

Here is the part I will not let you skip, because it is the whole reason our tool exists alongside a stack of vetting guides instead of on its own.

DR is Ahrefs' backlink-strength metric. It is not a Google ranking factor. Google does not use DR, it does not appear in Search Console, and Google has said plainly that it does not rely on any single site-wide authority score. So a high DR is not a promise that a link will move your rankings. It is one vendor's estimate of how many strong sites point at a domain.

And DR is widely gamed. Because it is computed purely from links, anyone who can manufacture links can manufacture DR. Expired-domain rebuilds, 301 redirect stacking, link exchanges, and private blog networks all pump DR up without the site ever earning a real audience. We break down each of those tricks in how to spot fake traffic, PBNs, and link farms. The upshot for you: a bulk DR list will happily show you inflated numbers with a straight face.

So use bulk DR to shortlist, then screen the survivors on the things DR cannot see:

• Real organic search traffic. A DR 60 site pulling almost no organic traffic is a red flag, not a bargain. This is why we argue that organic traffic beats DR and DA when buying links.
• Topical relevance. A high-DR site in a completely unrelated niche is a weak link for your SaaS, no matter how big the number.
• Legitimacy. A quick manual look at the content and the backlink profile tells you whether a site is a real publication or a shell. Our full checklist lives in how to judge backlink quality before you buy.

Do not buy on DR alone. Ever. Bulk DR gets you to a shortlist in seconds. Traffic, relevance, and a manual check decide the buy. If you want the deeper metric comparison, our DA vs DR breakdown covers how the two big authority scores differ and why neither one is the finish line.

That two-step - filter on DR, decide on traffic and relevance - is exactly how we run our own vetting at Saaslinks, where DR sits next to real traffic and niche fit as one honest data point among several rather than the headline.

The bottom line

A bulk DR checker is a genuinely useful tool for exactly one thing: turning a long list of domains into a short one, fast, for free. Paste up to 20 domains into our bulk DR checker, pull each site's real Ahrefs DR, export to CSV, and use it to benchmark competitors or triage prospects. Then stop. DR is the coarse filter at the top of the funnel, not the buying decision - screen your shortlist on traffic and relevance before you spend a dollar on any link.

Want to skip the manual vetting entirely? Start with sites we have already traffic-checked and vetted, where DR is just one honest number next to the metrics that actually decide whether a link is worth your money.