The scoreboard isn't the game

Why I think Authority Score is the wrong number for small businesses to chase, and what Google actually rewards instead

You've probably had the call. Or the email, or the LinkedIn message. Someone offering to get you to page one of Google, mentioning a number called "domain authority" you've never heard of, and explaining that for a twelve-month commitment they can lift it.

If you've ever signed up, you might be one of the many small and medium business owners I've spoken to who are sitting somewhere between confused and suspicious about what they actually paid for. Did it work? Was the number real? Was the whole thing a polite scam dressed up in a tidy report?

These are fair questions. The honest answer is more layered than yes or no, and it starts with understanding what that number is, what it isn't, and why, for most small businesses, it's probably the wrong scoreboard to be measured by in the first place.

This is one of the quiet problems with how SEO is sold to small businesses. The numbers we're asked to care about aren't always the numbers that move the business.

What Authority Score actually is

Authority Score is a 0 to 100 metric created by Semrush, a software company that sells SEO tools. It blends three things: the quantity and quality of links pointing to your site, the estimated traffic your site gets from Google, and a set of checks designed to catch sites that have gamed the system. Higher is better. A score in the 80s belongs to a national brand. A score of 24 might belong to a very good bookkeeper.

It's a useful piece of information for what it is: a software company's estimate of how a website might rank. Other tools sell their own version. Moz has Domain Authority. Ahrefs has Domain Rating. They are, structurally, the same kind of thing: a vendor's prediction, packaged as a score.

The part that doesn't get said often enough

Google does not use Authority Score. Or Domain Authority. Or Domain Rating. They are not signals in Google's ranking systems.

Google has said so directly. John Mueller, who has been the public face of Google Search for the better part of a decade, has been asked this question more times than anyone could reasonably count. The answer is consistent: Google doesn't have a "website authority" score, doesn't import one from a third party, and doesn't use anything called domain authority when it crawls, indexes, or ranks pages.

So when an agency lifts a client's Authority Score from 24 to 38, what has actually happened is this. Semrush's prediction of how the site might rank has improved, on Semrush's own dashboard. Whether Google's view of the site has changed is a different question, with different evidence.

When the measure becomes the target

There's an idea from economics, often called Goodhart's Law, that goes something like this: when a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure.

If we decide a teacher will be paid based on test scores, the test scores will rise. We will also find that the scores no longer tell us much about whether the children are being taught well.

Authority Score isn't a bad piece of information. The problem is what happens when it becomes the goal.

The work that lifts the score most efficiently (chasing backlinks from any site with a decent domain rating, regardless of whether it has any real relationship to the business) is rarely the same as the work that grows the business. The score is measurable, improvable, and reportable. So the score gets chased. And small businesses pay for the chase.

I should be careful here. I'm not suggesting Semrush is doing anything wrong. They built a tool, and it does what it says it does. I'm suggesting that an entire industry has chosen a vendor's prediction as its preferred KPI, and that the structural incentives of that choice favour the vendor and the agency rather than the business owner footing the bill.

The maths is rigged for small businesses

Even setting all of that aside, Authority Score has a structural quirk that makes it the wrong number for small and medium businesses to be measured by.

One of its three pillars is organic traffic. Traffic, at a domain level, scales with size. A national legal firm with offices in every capital city will have organic traffic in the millions. A small practice serving one suburb will not. The two will never compete on this pillar, no matter how much money the small practice spends, because the small practice serves a postcode.

It's a bit like grading a corner shop and Woolworths on the same revenue scale. The small business loses by definition, and the loss has nothing to do with the quality of the work.

For a hairdresser, a builder, a lawyer, a retailer (in other words, the businesses we work with at Grove Seven), chasing a higher Authority Score against a national benchmark is a goal designed to be unreachable.

What Google has actually said matters

Google publishes its own guidance, in plain language, about what helps a page show up in search. Two pages worth reading are How Search Works and Page Experience. Stripped of the technical detail, the message is consistent.

Google rewards pages that are useful to the person searching. That sounds soft. It isn't. In practice, it breaks down into a handful of unglamorous things.

Helpful, original content written for people, not for search engines. Content that shows real experience and real expertise. Not five hundred words stuffed with the right keywords, but a clear answer to a question your customers are already asking, written by someone who actually knows the answer.

Pages that load quickly, work on a phone, and don't shift around as you try to read them. Google measures this with what it calls Core Web Vitals. Broadly, the main content should appear within about two and a half seconds, the page should respond to taps and clicks in under a fifth of a second, and the layout shouldn't visibly jump as it loads.

A site that uses HTTPS, doesn't bury the content under pop-ups, and clearly separates the article from the advertising.

A clear local signal for any business that serves a place rather than the whole country: a properly maintained Google Business Profile, accurate addresses and hours, real photographs, and reviews from real customers.

None of this produces a shiny score that goes up and to the right on a slide. All of it is the work.

Better numbers for a small business to watch

If Authority Score is the wrong scoreboard for a hairdresser or a builder, what are the right ones?

The honest answer is that the most important KPI for a small business has never really been a number. It is whether you are attracting the customers you actually want, and keeping them. The numbers worth watching are the ones that point most directly at that.

Calls and direction requests from your Google Business Profile. Bookings or enquiries that came from a search visit. Conversion rate on your most important page. Branded search volume (how many people are typing your business name into Google month over month), which is the cleanest signal that your reputation is growing. Local pack visibility for the few search terms that actually bring you customers, in the suburbs you actually serve.

These numbers are smaller. They are also yours. They tell you whether the work is working.

Here is what that loop looks like in practice. We worked with Mason James Hair, a hair salon in Castle Hill, Sydney, on a piece for their journal called The difference between a barber and a men's hairdresser, explained. It wasn't written to chase a keyword. It was written because they had a genuine desire to attract the kind of clients who would value what they offer. The article now ranks. More importantly, it brings them customers who are specifically looking for what they do. One of them left this Google review:

"Have struggled to find an actual hairdresser for men's hair. Not a barber. Someone who actually knows how to use scissors. Gave Mason from Mason James Hair a try and it's the best haircut I've had. A proper hairdresser experience and not just an in and out rush that so many non-qualified 'barbers' attempt to do. Can't thank Mason enough for a fabulous experience and he has a loyal and repeat customer from me."

He had been searching for exactly that difference. His review now helps other men find Mason the same way.

That's the actual scoreboard. A useful piece of content, a customer searching for exactly what you offer, an experience worth a review, a review that brings the next person in. None of it shows up in Authority Score. All of it shows up in the business.

A note on AI

Most of this conversation, until recently, was about Google. By 2026, it isn't only about Google. AI overviews and large language model search are a real part of how customers find businesses now.

Their behaviour isn't identical to traditional search, but the underlying logic is similar. These systems pull from sources that are clear, well-structured, well-known, and trusted. The work that helps a small business show up in an AI summary is, in most cases, the same work that helps it rank in Google. Useful content. A consistent presence across the web. Real reviews. A site that loads cleanly and explains what you do without making the reader hunt.

Authority Score is no more relevant in that world than it was in this one.

A quieter way to think about this

If you've been told your Authority Score is the number to chase, this isn't a piece written to make you feel foolish. The number is presented with confidence, the dashboards look credible, and the reports are well-designed. It is an easy thing to be sold.

What we'd suggest instead is a quiet shift in attention: from a vendor's score to your own business. Whether the phone rings. Whether the calendar fills. Whether the right kind of customer is finding you, and choosing you, and coming back.

The work that moves those numbers is the work that's worth paying for. Everything else is theatre.