Ahrefs Rank (AR) ranks all the websites in our database in order, by the size and quality of their dofollow referring domains — basically, by their DR.
The more and higher-quality dofollow referring domains a website has, the higher its DR is, and the closer its AR is to #1.
Right now, Ahrefs Rank #1 belongs to the website with the strongest backlink profile (Facebook.com), #2 belongs to the second strongest (Twitter.com), #3 belongs to the third strongest (YouTube.com), and so on. See the full list here.
FAQs:
Why did my Ahrefs Rank drop if I haven’t lost any links?
Because AR is a relative metric, even if your website didn’t lose any dofollow referring domains, other websites could gain more, or higher quality ones than you. And thus overtake you in rank.
Why did my Ahrefs Rank drop even though my backlink profile is growing?
The same logic as above: because other websites are gaining more, or higher quality dofollow referring domains than you.
Why did my AR drop by a million if I only lost a couple of backlinks?
AR gets more volatile towards the lower end of the scale.
There are only a handful of websites in the world with millions of dofollow referring domains, so it takes exponentially more effort to outrank sites at this level (Think Twitter, YouTube, etc.)
But at the very bottom end of the scale, websites tend to have few to no dofollow referring domains. If these sites get just one, that's likely enough for it to have higher AR than hundreds or thousands of other websites.