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Authority Score: a metric to measure authority

But how do you measure that authority? This is where SEO tools come in. Semrush , for example, has its own metric, the Authority Score , which allows you to quantify the strength of your domain on a scale of 1 to 100.

This is not just an abstract number, but is calculated from three key factors :

• Signals of backlinks: the quantity and quality of links pointing to your website from other domains.
• organic traffic: the estimated monthly visits your website receives from search engines.
• Spam factorsThe presence of indicators of manipulation or suspicious patterns (such as unnatural link growth or too many links from the same IP address) negatively affects your website's ranking.

In practice, a high Authority Score indicates that your website has a strong backlink profile and that Google considers it relevant. However, the actual value of your score will also depend on the segment you compete in and your competitors themselves. This means that if your website has an Authority Score of 30 and other similar websites you compete with have an average of 20, your score is actually quite good, even though it might not seem so at first glance.

How to improve your Authority Score

Once you've analyzed your score and those of your competitors, it's time to work on maintaining a good score or, if you don't have one, striving to improve it. To do this, Semrush recommends the following:

Get quality links: Find and build backlinks from relevant and trustworthy websites within your industry. A link from a reputable site is much more valuable for your authority.

• Get quality linksFind and build backlinks from relevant and trustworthy websites within your industry. A link from a reputable site is much more valuable for your authority.
• Create high-quality contentUse the best on-page SEO practices to achieve better rankings and get more traffic from search engines.
• Monitor your backlink profile regularlyPerform regular reviews and, if you find many unreliable or low-quality links, contact the websites that link to them and request their removal.
• Distribute authority with internal linksUse internal linking to distribute authority across the different pages of your website. This helps Google understand your website's structure and strengthens the relevance of your content.

Of course, we want to remind you that SEO is a complex recipe with many ingredients , so you must ensure that quality is present in all of them. While a high Authority Score can help with better ranking, it alone is not a guarantee of absolute success in search results.

Building authority for generative search engines

Improving your Authority Score isn't just a strategy for traditional SEO; it also prepares you for the future of search . Yes, we're talking about generative search engines—those new systems that feed on website content to generate their results.

Authority is one of the pillars of GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), the practice that focuses on optimizing web content so that generative search engines will cite it in their answers, according to research from Princeton University.

On the other hand, a study by the Rankscale.ai platform analyzed nearly 8.000 citations across 57 different queries performed on ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Gemini to determine which factors influence whether or not these AIs rank content. Authority was one of the common factors, clearly demonstrating that building authority, trust, and reliability on your website will increase the likelihood of being cited by generative search engines.

Ultimately, authority is the currency of SEO, both now and in the future. It's how Google and other search engines recognize experts in each field . And to audit your competitors' backlink profiles, find new link opportunities, and, of course, improve your Authority Score, it's advisable to use SEO analysis and optimization tools like Semrush.