How Reach Authority scores a website
Every vendor score you have been shown is a black box. This is the whole method: 13 weighted signals, how each one is normalised, what happens when a provider has no answer, and how to tell a complete assessment from a thin one. The weights below are read from the scoring code itself.
1. The problem
A buyer choosing where to place a link is handed a single number by whichever tool they happen to use. Domain rating and domain authority are both trained on link graphs, which means both can be raised by acquiring links and neither reads a word of the content or checks whether anyone visits. That is why a site can show a domain rating in the seventies and receive almost no organic traffic: someone built the profile and the rest of the site never followed.
Relying on one vendor number therefore has two failure modes. It can be manipulated directly, and it says nothing when the vendor has no data — at which point most tools quietly show a zero, which is indistinguishable from a genuinely terrible site.
2. What Reach Authority does differently
Reach Authority combines 13 signals drawn from four independent providers plus registry data, weighted so that no single vendor can dominate the result. Three rules govern it:
- Only current evidence scores. A signal counts at full weight when the provider returned a value inside the freshness window of 150 days. Older data is marked stale and excluded from the calculation.
- Missing evidence is neutral, never zero. A signal the provider has not returned is held at 50 out of 100. A site is not punished for data we failed to collect, and it does not benefit either.
- Coverage is published with the score. Every result states how much of the weighting was backed by current data, so a partial assessment can never be mistaken for a full audit.
3. The signals and their weights
Grouped by what they measure. The weights sum to 100.
Authority
47% of the total weightRisk and maturity
16% of the total weightLink profile
25% of the total weightAudience
12% of the total weight4. Normalisation
Signals arrive on incompatible scales — a 0–100 authority score, a count of 400,000 inbound links, a domain age in years — so each is mapped onto 0–100 before it is weighted.
- Scores that are already 0–100 are clamped and used directly.
- Counts are log-normalised against a ceiling, because the difference between 100 and 1,000 referring domains matters far more than the difference between 100,000 and 101,000. Linking domains reach the ceiling at 10,000, inbound links at 1,000,000, ranking keywords at 100,000.
- Domain age is normalised against a 20-year ceiling, which credits maturity without letting an old parked domain outrank a strong young publication.
- Spam is inverted, so a low Moz spam score produces a high safety signal. A Moz response of −1 means unavailable and is treated as missing rather than as a perfect zero.
5. The two numbers
Each result publishes two figures, and the difference between them is the point.
Authority score
(Σ normalised × weight + 50 × missing weight) ÷ 100
The comparable number. Missing weight is filled at the neutral baseline of 50, so two sites can be compared even when different providers have answered for each.
Current-evidence score
Σ normalised × weight ÷ current weight
How the site performs on the evidence we actually have, ignoring everything unmeasured. On a thinly covered profile this can sit well above or below the authority score.
When the two diverge sharply, the coverage figure tells you which to trust. A site scoring 78 on current evidence with 40% coverage is a site we know little about, not a strong site.
6. Reading a result
Score bands
- 75 and above — Strong authority
- 55 to 74.9 — Established authority
- Below 55 — Developing authority
Confidence bands
- 85% or more of the weight current — High evidence coverage
- 60% to 84.9% — Good evidence coverage
- 35% to 59.9% — Partial evidence coverage
- Below 35% — Limited evidence coverage
7. Known limits
Two of the 13 signals — Ahrefs referring domains and the Semrush Authority Score — require paid provider tiers BlogReach does not currently subscribe to. They report as pending on every profile and sit at the neutral baseline, which is why no published score is backed by 100% coverage today. That is a disclosed limitation rather than a hidden one, and closing it is on the roadmap.
Reach Authority also predicts nothing. It is a structured reading of third-party evidence about a domain, not a forecast of what a placement will do for your rankings. Nobody can offer that honestly, ourselves included.
8. Why this matters to a buyer
Link buying is an information problem. The seller knows what their site is; you do not, and the number you are usually shown is the one that flatters them most. A score that states its inputs, its weights, its freshness window and its coverage can be argued with — you can look at the same evidence and disagree. A score that arrives as a single figure with no working cannot.
That is the whole case for this method: not that it is more accurate than a vendor number, but that it is checkable.