What Replaced PageRank?

When Google retired the public PageRank score, it left a vacuum. Site owners still wanted a simple way to gauge a website's strength. Two very different things filled the gap: Google's own, now-hidden ranking systems, and a set of third-party authority scores built by SEO companies. Understanding the difference between them is essential — and it's where a lot of confusion lives.

First, what Google actually uses

Google never replaced PageRank with a single new public number. Instead, ranking today draws on a large collection of signals working together. Link analysis in the tradition of PageRank is still part of the mix — Google has confirmed as much — but it sits alongside relevance, content quality, freshness, page experience, and more. Google summarises these systems in its How Search Works documentation, and frames quality around E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. The crucial point is that Google publishes no per-site authority score at all. Anyone who claims to show you "your Google authority number" is mistaken.

The third-party authority scores

Into that gap stepped the SEO industry, which built its own metrics by crawling the web and modelling its link graph — much as Google once did. These are the numbers most people now mean when they talk about "authority." The best known include:

• Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA) — a 0-to-100 estimate of ranking strength, at the domain and page level respectively.
• Domain Rating (DR) and URL Rating (UR) — a 0-to-100 score based heavily on the size and quality of a link profile.
• Trust Flow and Citation Flow — a pair of 0-to-100 scores that separate the quality of links (trust) from their sheer quantity (citation).
• Authority Score — a composite that blends link data with estimated traffic and other signals.

This site is vendor-neutral and recommends none of these over the others. They are listed only so you recognise the terms when you meet them.

How these differ from real PageRank

Three differences matter most. First, none of them come from Google — they are independent estimates, and a site can rank well with a modest score or rank poorly with a high one. Second, they are not interchangeable: each company crawls a different slice of the web and weighs links differently, so the same site can score 40 on one scale and 65 on another. Third, they are relative, not absolute — useful for comparing sites within one tool, but meaningless when compared across tools. Treat them the way you should always have treated PageRank: as one rough indicator among many, not a verdict.

The updates that reshaped rankings

One reason no single number could replace PageRank is that Google's ranking grew far more multidimensional over the years, through a series of well-known updates. Broadly, Panda pushed thin, low-quality content down; Penguin targeted manipulative link building, punishing exactly the link-buying that visible PageRank had encouraged; and later "helpful content" efforts rewarded pages written for people rather than search engines. Each shift moved the emphasis further from raw link counts and toward genuine quality and trust. A lone authority score can hint at a site's link strength, but it can't capture whether a site would survive these quality-focused systems — which is why judgement still beats any single metric.

What actually moves rankings

Behind all the scores, the fundamentals are refreshingly stable. Content that genuinely helps people, earned links from relevant and trusted sites, a fast and crawlable website, and clear expertise on your topic are what build durable authority. The metrics are just attempts to estimate those fundamentals from the outside. If you focus on the substance, the numbers tend to follow.

Putting it to use

So the honest successor to "what's my PageRank?" is not another single number — it's a small dashboard of complementary signals, read with judgement. Our practical walkthrough, how to check a website's authority, shows exactly how to combine them, and the glossary defines any term here you'd like nailed down.