Ahrefs DR4 on 500k+ expired domains. The ugly truth.

Ahrefs is rolling out Domain Rating 4 (DR4): a tighter link graph, less weight on spam and sites with no traffic, and subdomains get their own rating. Ahrefs reports that about half of their sites keep any DR at all under DR4.

Since DR is used a lot to assess expired domains, we wanted to see what the impact is on the domain aftermarket. So we re-scored 637,776 domains, including 468,832 with DR3 ≥ 1.

On that inventory the shift is brutal. 51.5% of studied .coms land at DR4 = 0. Third-level zones that showed DR90 under DR3 mostly collapse. And some DR0 names, including adult and random-looking domains, wake up past DR60.

Below: where the zeros come from, which TLDs hold, why TrustFlow matters more than the DR badge, and what I’d check before bidding.

DR0 wipeout: 51.5% of .coms drop to zero

Ahrefs reported that roughly half of all domains lose all their Domain Rating and drop to DR0.

• Of 468,832 live catalog names with DR3 ≥ 1, 46.3% (216,812) dropped to DR4 = 0.
• On .com alone: 51.5% (117,826 of 228,791) went to zero.

Most of those zeros were already weak under DR3. On .com, 37,653 names moved DR1 → 0 (a delta of exactly −1). Another large block is DR2→0 (−2), DR3→0 (−3), and so on. Of all .com zeros, about 84% started at DR3 ≤ 10.

Extremely large cliffs exist too: about 6% of .com names drop by 20 points or more.

The long tail of low DR domains makes the median oddly low: the delta (DR4 − DR3) is only about −1. With tens of thousands of DR1→0 moves, the middle of the sorted list sits in small negatives even while half the set is wiped.

If you see the median drop of −1, you might assume there is not much change going on. But the opposite is true.

The distribution heavily shifts left. Under DR3 the mass sits in the low bands (our sample starts at DR ≥ 1, so the DR3 “0” point is empty by construction). Under DR4 that mass collapses into a spike at 0.

Higher DR was not safer

If you think of Domain Rating as a quality metric, you'd expect higher bands to survive DR4 better.

They do not.

On all the .com names in the set, the share that lands at DR4 = 0 stays high deep into the mid range:

• DR3 11–20: 41.0% → 0
• DR3 21–30: 46.8% → 0
• DR3 31–40: 39.5% → 0
• DR3 51–60: still 28.5% → 0

.net follows the same shape, usually a few points kinder than .com.

The biggest spike sits at the top of .com: DR3 71–100 goes to zero 80.6% of the time (158 of 196). Most of those are inherited third-levels stored under tld=com.

For example: about.it.com went from DR3 92 to DR4 0. We’ll dig into those inherited names in a bit.

TLD scorecard: .dev and .ai got crushed, .org held up

Not every extension took the same hit. On the live catalog (DR3 ≥ 1), new gTLDs got wiped far harder than classic orgs and many country codes.

• Held up better: .jp 25% → 0, .org.uk 28%, .tv 30%, .org 34%, .nl 34%, .fr 35%.
• Middle of the pack: .co.uk 42%, .net 47%, .io 48%, .com 51.5%, .de 53%.
• Got crushed: .mobi 84%, .dev 73%, .xyz 71%, .app 69%, .store 63%, .ai 60%.

.org is the standout among big classic zones: about 34% → 0 vs 51.5% on .com, and a higher up-rate too (34% of studied .org names rose under DR4).

One pattern that keeps showing up: country codes with a real local web presence tend to keep more DR than trendy new gTLDs. .nl even has a 42% up-rate. .dev and .xyz barely move up.

Inherited DR is mostly gone

Under DR3, a lot of third-level names borrowed the Domain Rating of a strong parent. Think CentralNic-style zones: something.us.com, something.uk.com, something.it.com, something.in.net, plus registry leftovers like .co.de.

Those domains often sat at DR70–92 with almost no real link graph of their own. DR4 now scores the host itself.

• .co.de: 1,952 domains, 99.9% → 0, median delta −74
• .it.com: 136 domains, every one started at DR3 92; 97.8% → 0. Example: about.it.com 92 → 0
• .us.com: 96 names, all at DR3 92. Median delta −91.8. About half land at exact 0; most of the rest collapse to a tiny leftover score. Examples: betting.us.com 92 → 0, article.us.com 92 → 2
• .uk.com / .in.net: same shape. Median deltas around −91 / −92, with a minority that keep some DR4 if they actually have their own links

.us.com rode high in SEO circles for years on the back of the parent’s authority. For the domains in our catalog, the DR92 was never theirs.

People selling links on those domains will see their portfolio clapped.

That is also why the ugly DR3 71–100 spike on .com earlier was mostly junk: third-levels stored under a .com parent, not strong apex names.

TrustFlow beats raw DR

Domain Rating is one compressed score for the link graph Ahrefs sees: strength and quality folded together.

Majestic splits those concepts: TrustFlow (TF) leans on how trustworthy the linking sites look, and CitationFlow (CF) leans on raw link quantity. In our tests, TrustFlow was the best heuristic to predict whether sites would keep their DR.

If we look at the .com domains:

• TF 0 → 68.1% drop to DR4 = 0
• TF 11–20: 35.9% → 0
• TF 21–40: 21.6% → 0
• TF 41+: 9.1% → 0 (small sample, n = 198)

You can also see this when you look at the Domain Rating bands. On .com names that started at DR3 21–40, those with TrustFlow < 10 went to DR4 = 0 63.8% of the time. In that same DR3 band, TrustFlow ≥ 15 cut it to 21.2%.

You can also visualize this pattern in a heatmap when you cross DR3 with TF. A high DR score with TF 0 is fragile, while a decent DR with real TrustFlow holds up much better.

With Ahrefs trying to incorporate quality and traffic signals in DR4, they seem to be shifting closer to Majestic’s CF and TF. Majestic is still not the same database as Ahrefs, though. For example, on the .com names, 752 still landed at DR4 = 0 with TrustFlow ≥ 30, and 696 did so with both TF ≥ 20 and CF ≥ 20. Even among TF ≥ 21, about 21.5% went to zero.

DR0 can wake up (and it often looks ugly)

DR4 does not only erase scores. It also resurrects some names that sat at DR0 under DR3.

We pulled an extra sample of 50,000 live catalog names that already had DR3 = 0, sorted toward high backlink counts (this is a fat-link DR0 slice, not a random DR0 draw).

• 8.0% rose above 0 under DR4 (4,012 of 50,000). The other 92% stayed at 0.
• Among risers, median DR4 is only about 2.7. Most wakeups are tiny.
• There is still a fat tail: 101 names hit DR4 ≥ 40, 14 hit ≥ 60, including random strings and adult / SEO-looking names.

Some of those high wakeups look exactly like the junk people used to chase for “hidden DR”:

Wakeups are more common when the old DR0 name already had stronger side metrics:

• Backlinks: 1k–9k BL rose 7.5%; 10k–99k rose 22.7%; 100k+ still around 21–25%.
• TrustFlow: TF 1–10 only ~5% rose; TF 11–20 rose 14%; TF 21–40 rose 32%.
• TLD mix in this slice: .com only 6.3% rose (it dominates the 50k). Smaller high-BL pockets did better: .net 32%, .org 40%, .co.uk 42%.

What does this mean for you

DR has always been a heuristic. Never base your full strategy solely on a high DR. Not for domains, not for backlinks, not for anything.

• Stop treating DR0 as a hard fail filter
  Half of the domains with DR3 ≥ 1 drop to 0. There is a huge set of domains that will get DR0, but those domains can still be very valuable for a business.
• Check TrustFlow and RD
  Roughly TF ≥ 10–15 on a mid DR name, plus enough referring domains that the score is not one fat link.
• Be careful with third-levels
  Don’t trust high DR3 scores on anything like keyword.us.com, .uk.com, .it.com, .in.net, or .co.de. Most of them don’t deserve their rating.
• Prefer extensions that held up
  In this catalog, .org / many ccTLDs kept more DR than .dev, .xyz, .app, .mobi.
• Treat DR0 → 60+ as a smell
  If a site suddenly jumps to high DR, be careful. These often look like adult, SEO-branded, or random.
• Check spam and history the boring way
  Wayback, topical consistency, link neighborhoods, and the usual red flags are still far more important than a new DR number.

Some lingering thoughts

Ahrefs says they want Domain Rating to lean more on organic traffic, and that DR4 correlates more strongly with Google ranking positions across hosts and subdomains. Fine. But a few things still bother me.

• Organic traffic as the north star might multiply uncertainty
  Ahrefs is not Google Analytics, they estimate your traffic. All tools always have challenges measuring organic traffic. There are plenty of sites with decent traffic that flatline in Ahrefs (and the other way around). Wiring DR tighter to a noisy metric does not automatically make DR better. It might just stack one uncertain model on another.
• DR0 doesn’t mean the same anymore
  Half of the domains drop to DR0. In practice, a domain with almost no links and a domain with a fat but downgraded graph can both sit at 0. Under DR3, if you had a site with a low DR like 7, you still had a rough sense that something was there. Also, from a product point of view, isn’t it just odd that you throw away half of your database? I can’t really grasp this, unless the real goal is update speed and cost. A DR0 domain is cheap to ignore when calculating a pagerank, and the indexed web (plus all the AI slop) is getting enormous.
• Optimizing harder toward Google lets parasite SEO ride along
  For years now we’ve seen the same pattern: Google over-rewards parasite SEO. If DR4 is tuned to track Google positions more tightly, can you game Ahrefs DR the same way? At a quick glance, that seems to hold for domains that bought parasite SEO. Which raises the question: is DR meant to be its own quality metric, or a proxy for Google’s PageRank?
• Google is not the only reference point anymore
  A lot of SEO teams now also care about Bing, for example, because of GEO and AI answers. Tweaking a link metric against Google rankings feels narrow. Entity strength (is this a real brand/entity, or just a URL with links?) still feels underweighted next to raw domain scores.
• Expired domains vs live domains
  DR4 seems to express how does this site look right now, with the current backlink profile and organic traffic built into the score. Expired domains that sit dropped for a while don’t get traffic anymore (Google keeps its SERPs as clean as possible). Buying an expired domain is often a bet that you can restore the old site and leverage the old backlinks on a newly built website, just as you would if the site was temporarily down. Over time, traffic and equity can come back after trust has been restored. A DR4 metric tuned to current traffic will systematically undervalue that rebuild story. Field experience still matters for due diligence: whether a domain can actually be restored.

Nick Vanderhoven

Founder of UpSnatch · Research

November 8, 2026