What is Domain Authority or Domain Rating exactly?

Google and other search engines rely on trust signals when evaluating the value of content and backlinks. Domain authority is a third-party metric, originally coined by Moz, as a way to measure the quality of backlinks and trust signals pointing to a URL. Ahrefs has a similar metric named Domain Rating. It is believed that a higher DA score will increase your chances of being top-of-page for a particular search query. The more engagement you have, the easier it will be to rank faster for a specific term.