Ahrefs Rank (AR) ranks all the websites in our database in order, by the size and quality of their dofollow referring domains — basically, by their DR.
For example, you can interpret that ahrefs.com is ranked position #942 highest in DR, across all the websites in our database.
The more and higher-quality dofollow referring domains a website has, the higher its DR is, and the closer its AR is to #1.
Right now, Ahrefs Rank #1 belongs to the website with the strongest backlink profile (Facebook.com), #2 belongs to the second strongest (Twitter.com), #3 belongs to the third strongest (YouTube.com), and so on. See the full list here.
FAQs:
Why did my Ahrefs Rank drop if I haven’t lost any links?
Because AR is a relative metric, even if your website didn’t lose any dofollow referring domains, other websites could gain more, or higher quality ones than you. And thus overtake you in rank.
Why did my Ahrefs Rank drop even though my backlink profile is growing?
The same logic as above: because other websites are gaining more, or higher quality dofollow referring domains than you.
Why did my AR drop by a million if I only lost a couple of backlinks?
AR gets more volatile towards the lower end of the scale.
There are only a handful of websites in the world with millions of dofollow referring domains, so it takes exponentially more effort to outrank sites at this level (Think Twitter, YouTube, etc.)
But at the very bottom end of the AR scale, websites tend to have few to no dofollow referring domains. If these websites lose one dofollow backlink, its likely enough to drop its Ahrefs Rank behind hundreds of thousands of websites, or even a million.
On the other hand, if the same websites get just one dofollow backlink, that's likely enough for it to beat hundreds or thousands of other websites in Ahrefs Rank.
