Domain Popularity Checker

Neither, and it does not try to be. Those are backlink scores sold behind a subscription. This is a popularity score derived from Tranco, an open research ranking of the top million domains by traffic. It answers a different question - how many people actually visit this site - and it is free.

It maps the Tranco rank onto 0-100 on a log scale: rank 1 scores 100, rank 1,000 scores about 50, rank 1,000,000 scores 0. Most working SaaS sites land between 20 and 50.

Because it is outside the top million domains by traffic. That is normal for a young product and says nothing about content quality - it just means the popularity data has nothing to report yet.

No. Google does not use Tranco or any third-party score. It is useful as a rough sanity check on how big a competitor really is, not as a target to optimise.

Ahrefs DR measures backlinks from a proprietary crawl. This measures traffic from an open research ranking. A site can score high on one and low on the other, and neither is a Google signal.

None - it is not a target. Use it as a comparison: if every site ranking for your keyword scores above 55 and you score 10, the keyword is a long project rather than a quick win.

Tranco publishes a new list daily, averaged over the preceding 30 days, which is what makes it stable enough to compare week to week.

It means people visit, which makes the link worth having for referral traffic alone. Whether it passes ranking value depends on relevance and whether the link is followed.