One currency, and the math is boring on purpose. Place a citation and you earn tokens; receive one and tokens come off your balance. Every figure below is a whole number off a table, not a formula, so you can work out any exchange in your head before you agree to it.
| Tier | What it means | Domain Rating | Tokens to receive one link from them |
|---|---|---|---|
| Emerging | New or small sites with real content and a real business behind them. | 0-19 | 30 |
| Growing | Established enough to rank for their own subject, still building. | 20-39 | 50 |
| Established | A recognised source in their field, cited beyond their own site. | 40-59 | 70 |
| Strong | Widely cited across their vertical. | 60-79 | 90 |
| Authority | Reference-grade sites in their field. | 80-100 | 110 |
Receiving takes the same number of tokens whoever is receiving. A link from an Established site takes 70 tokens off anyone's balance. Taking more tokens from smaller sites for the links they most need would defeat the point of the system below.
What tiers are based on
Ahrefs Domain Rating, used directly: the number behind your tier is the number Ahrefs publishes, and you can look it up yourself.
Traffic does not affect your tier. A specialist journal can be cited across its whole field and still have modest traffic. Traffic is checked once, during review, as a warning sign of bought links; after that it plays no part.
Other sites appear to you as a band, never an exact number. A precise figure beside a topic and a passage would often identify the site. Your own rating is always visible to you.
A site earns more for citing a smaller site than an equal one. This is the most important rule in the economy.
Without it
With it
| Your tier ↓ / You link to → | Emerging | Growing | Established | Strong | Authority |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Emerging | 30 | 25 | 20 | 15 | 10 |
| Growing | 60 | 50 | 40 | 30 | 25 |
| Established | 100 | 85 | 70 | 55 | 45 |
| Strong | 150 | 130 | 110 | 90 | 75 |
| Authority | 220 | 190 | 160 | 130 | 110 |
Green earns above par, gray earns below.
The diagonal is par: citing a peer earns exactly what a link from your tier takes to receive. Everything below the diagonal earns more, everything above earns less.
A Strong site earns 150 citing an Emerging site and 90 citing a peer. An Emerging site earns 10 for linking up to an Authority site. Worth doing when the citation is right, not worth farming.
Tiers are captured when the placement is made and never revised. Moving up a tier later does not retroactively repay past placements, and moving down does not claw them back.
The other half: your giving score
Your giving score fades from the day of your last verified link. Go about six months (176 days, to be precise) without giving one anywhere on the account, and receiving stops until you give again. One verified link resets it in full.
Sites that have not received recently get a boost, so links spread out instead of piling up on whoever is most active.
Priority pages are the pages you most want links pointed at. When your account receives, we give those pages a boost so they are more likely to be picked.
You earn the right to receive by giving. Tokens belong to your account, and plans charge for domains indexed, not links exchanged.
You start with 70 tokens
Enough to receive one mid-tier link before your first link passes our checks. Granted once per account, not once per domain. Otherwise adding domains would mint tokens nobody earned.
It cannot be spent until a domain passes review. Nothing is hidden or held back.
Tokens are held by the account, not by each domain
An agency earning on one client can spend on another.
The account has to give to receive
A wholly passive account (receiving, buying packs, never placing a link anywhere) cannot drain a pool it never fills. If any of your domains has given links recently, every domain on the account can receive. About a third of the giving score is left after every 45 days, and receiving stops at around 176 days with no links given anywhere on the account. The account's first inbound link is exempt so a new subscriber is never stuck.
Every domain is reviewed on its own merits
A long-standing account in good standing adding a new client does not get that client waved through. Plan, standing, and the health of your other domains change nothing about the review.
Plans meter domains: $30 each, or 15 for $200 on Agency
No monthly cap on exchanges. What costs us money is crawling, indexing, and re-auditing domains. Charging for links would be charging for the thing we want more of.
A domain is a domain, whatever its rating, until the two ratings that are not
Page counts play no part and neither does your rating, except at one point. If you run a single site on Starter and it reaches DR 40, it moves to Standard at $99 a month, or you can take an agency plan instead; agencies are not affected by that one. A domain with no rating yet is priced normally until its first monthly review, and crossing the line never removes anything; it bills from the next period. Every plan is on the pricing page.
Removing a client frees the domain, with a cooldown
A removed domain stops receiving, stops being offered as a giver, and keeps its history. Adding it back restores the same record rather than creating a duplicate, after a 30-day cooldown, and it is reviewed again. There is a cap on how many domains an account can add in a period, so cycling clients through fewer paid domains is not a way to pay less.
Next: What is and is not allowed →