Website Comparison
Put your site next to a competitor and see the whole picture at once: on-page SEO, Domain Rating, metadata, structure, links, and speed. Every check shown, nothing hidden behind a score.
How to run a useful comparison
- 1
Pick a competitor you actually compete with
Not the biggest name in your category. Choose a site that ranks for the searches you want, at roughly your stage. Comparing a six-month-old product to a decade-old incumbent produces a gap you cannot act on.
- 2
Compare like for like
Enter the same type of page on both sides. Homepage against homepage, or pricing page against pricing page. A homepage against a blog post will differ on word count and links for reasons that mean nothing.
- 3
Read the scoreboard first
The two panels show the on-page score, Domain Rating, response time, and how many metrics each side leads on. That is usually enough to tell whether you have a technical problem, an authority problem, or neither.
- 4
Work the failed checks, not the score
Each side lists exactly which checks failed and why. Those are your to-do list. Fixing a missing canonical or an absent meta description moves the score for a real reason, rather than for its own sake.
- 5
Re-run after you ship the fixes
Come back once the changes are deployed and confirm the checks flipped. Technical fixes show up immediately here, unlike ranking changes which take months.
Reading the results like an SEO
A big DR gap with a small score gap is good news
It means their advantage is accumulated authority, not better execution. You cannot buy years of backlinks quickly, but you can out-execute on the things this tool measures, and that is where a newer site actually wins.
Missing tags here often mean JavaScript rendering
We read the HTML your server returns, without running scripts, which is close to what a crawler sees first. If your title or canonical shows as missing but looks fine in the browser, it is being injected client-side and is worth moving into the server response.
Compare against three competitors, not one
One comparison shows a difference. Three show a pattern. If all three declare a sitemap and you do not, that is a gap. If only one does, it is a preference.
Internal links are the cheapest gap to close
A site with far more internal links is usually just better organised, with category hubs and related-content sections. It is the least glamorous item on this list and often the fastest ranking improvement available.
Response time here is server speed, not page speed
We measure time to first byte with no assets loaded. If this number is good but your site feels slow, the problem is front-end weight, and Lighthouse is the right next tool.
Frequently asked questions
What does the on-page score measure?
Eighteen weighted checks on the page we fetch: title and description presence and length, a single H1, canonical tag, HTTPS, mobile viewport, Open Graph and Twitter card, structured data, robots.txt and sitemap declaration, image alt text, indexability, response time, HTML lang, and content length. Every check is listed with its result, so you can see exactly where a score comes from instead of trusting a number.
Is this the same as a Lighthouse or Core Web Vitals score?
No, and the distinction matters. Lighthouse measures rendering performance in a real browser. This compares the SEO fundamentals in the served HTML plus a single server response time. They answer different questions: use Lighthouse for speed work, use this for "is the page set up correctly and how do we compare to them".
Why is my response time different from what I see in my browser?
We measure time to first byte from our server to yours, without loading images, fonts, or scripts. It is a clean signal of server responsiveness, not a page load time. Geography matters too: our server may sit further from your origin than you do.
Where does Domain Rating come from?
Ahrefs' public Domain Rating endpoint, the same source as our other DR tools, cached for 24 hours. It scores the strength of a domain's backlink profile from 0 to 100 on a logarithmic scale, so gaps at the top are far larger than they look.
Why does a site show as failing checks that clearly pass in my browser?
We read the HTML your server returns, without executing JavaScript, which is roughly what a crawler sees on first pass. If your title, canonical, or meta tags are injected client-side, they will show as missing here, and that is genuinely worth knowing rather than a false alarm.
Can I compare my site against a competitor?
That is the intended use. Nothing here requires access to either site, since it only reads public pages and robots.txt exactly as any visitor or crawler would.
What is a good on-page score?
Above 85 means the fundamentals are in place and further gains will come from content and links rather than tags. Between 70 and 85 usually means a handful of quick wins are sitting there. Below 70 normally indicates something structural, such as missing metadata across templates or a rendering problem.
Why does a huge site sometimes score lower than mine?
Because this measures one page against a fixed checklist, and big sites often carry legacy decisions: no meta description because they rank anyway, no sitemap declaration in robots.txt, images without alt text at scale. A newer site built recently often does score higher on the technical basics while losing badly on authority. Both facts are true at once, which is why we show DR beside the score.
Does a higher score mean I will outrank them?
No, and this is the most important caveat. On-page correctness is necessary but not sufficient. Rankings are driven mostly by content relevance and backlink authority, which is why we show Domain Rating alongside. Treat the score as "have I made any unforced errors" rather than a ranking prediction.
Are the results stored or shared?
No. Comparisons run on request and nothing about your site or the comparison is saved or published. Domain Rating values are cached for 24 hours to avoid repeat lookups, which is the only thing retained, and that is a public metric about a domain rather than anything about you.