SEO Tool · Retired
Google PageRank Checker
This tool used Google's Toolbar PageRank API to return a score from 0–10 for any URL. Google retired that API in March 2016, making every PageRank checker on the web — including this one — permanently broken. PageRank as an internal ranking signal still exists; the publicly readable number does not.
Why it went away
Google introduced Toolbar PageRank in 2000 as a rough public window into its link-graph scoring. Over time it became a commodity traded by link sellers: sites with a high PageRank score could charge more for links, so the number directly incentivised paid-link schemes that polluted search results. Rather than attempt to keep the public score meaningful, Google stopped updating it altogether in 2013 and removed the API endpoint entirely in 2016. The Chrome toolbar that displayed it was discontinued at the same time.
Internal PageRank — the algorithm that assigns a relative importance score to every page Google has crawled — still runs. It is one of hundreds of signals used in ranking. Google deliberately keeps it private.
What replaced PageRank
Third-party tools filled the gap with their own link-authority metrics. None of them are PageRank, but they all measure something real — the quantity and quality of links pointing at a site or page:
- Ahrefs Domain Rating (DR) — a 0–100 logarithmic scale based on the strength of a site's backlink profile relative to all other sites in Ahrefs' index. Free spot-checks via their Website Authority Checker tool.
- Moz Domain Authority (DA) — another 0–100 score, trained to correlate with Google rankings. Free limited checks via Moz Link Explorer.
- Majestic Trust Flow / Citation Flow — Citation Flow measures link volume; Trust Flow weights links by the trustworthiness of their sources. Majestic's crawler is independent of Ahrefs and Moz, so it can surface links the others miss.
- Google Search Console — the Links report shows which sites link to yours and which pages attract the most links, directly from Google's own index. Free, but only for your own verified properties.
What Google says you should care about instead
Google's public guidance since the toolbar era has been consistent: build content worth linking to, earn links editorially, and don't optimise for any single metric. John Mueller (Google Search Relations) has stated repeatedly that Domain Authority and similar third-party scores are not used in Google's ranking and that chasing them is a distraction.
Metrics worth tracking in Google Search Console instead: total referring domains (a slow upward trend is healthy), clicks and impressions for target queries, and Core Web Vitals — all signals Google has confirmed it uses or at least measures.
If you want a single proxy number for "how authoritative does Google probably think this domain is", Ahrefs DR or Moz DA are reasonable benchmarks for competitive analysis — just don't treat them as targets in themselves.