Domain Authority

The whole-domain extension of PageRank’s structural intuition, developed by Moz from 2012 onward and paralleled by Ahrefs (Domain Rating) and Semrush (Authority Score). The operational instrument through which the SEO industry measures brand authority for ranking purposes. Difference from AVO: a coarse external proxy used as one datapoint within AVO’s V3.2 vector; does not by itself measure AI-era citation readiness.