Knowledge base
What the authority metrics mean
Trust Flow, Citation Flow, referring domains — what each one measures and which to believe.
These numbers come from third-party crawlers, not from Google. They are useful for comparing sites; they are not what Google uses.
Referring domains
How many different sites link to this one. The most useful single number on the page, because it is hard to inflate: one site linking a thousand times still counts once.
Trust Flow
An estimate of link quality — how close the site's links are to a set of known-good sites. High Trust Flow with few referring domains usually means a small number of very good links.
Citation Flow
An estimate of link quantity, regardless of quality. Citation Flow far above Trust Flow is the classic signature of a site with many low-value links.
Topical Trust Flow
The subject areas those links come from. A site with authority in the wrong subject is worth much less to you than the headline number suggests.
What to actually do with them
Compare like with like. A figure is meaningful against another site in the same niche and meaningless on its own. And treat a sudden jump with suspicion — it is more often a crawler updating its index than a site improving.
⚠️ A brand-new site has no figures at all, and that is correct rather than a fault. The crawlers have not seen enough links to say anything yet.
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