forbes.com vs cnn.com: domain authority
forbes.com has the higher authority score (84 vs 81) and forbes.com has 1.6 times as many referring domains. Both are among the highest-authority news & media sites in our data (2026-10-03).
| Metric | forbes.com | cnn.com |
|---|---|---|
| Authority score (0-100) | 84 | 81 |
| Referring domains | 436,043 | 274,211 |
| Web graph rank | #52 | #81 |
| PageRank position | #171 | #340 |
| Majestic Million rank | #76 | #96 |
| Traffic rank | Top 5K websites (Chrome) | Top 1K websites (Chrome) |
Bold = the stronger value. Ranks: lower is better.
Tech stack and AI crawler policy
| forbes.com | cnn.com | |
|---|---|---|
| Tech stack | VWO, DataDome, Ketch and SpeedCurve | – |
| AI crawler policy | Blocks some AI search; GPTBot blocked | Unreadable; GPTBot unknown |
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How the authority score is calculated
The score is the average of two parts, each from 0 to 100:
- Rank part:
100 × (1 − log10(rank) / log10(N))^0.6, where rank is the domain's harmonic centrality position in the Common Crawl web graph (how close it is to every other domain through links) and N is the number of ranked domains (133,241,980). - Link part:
100 × log10(1 + referring domains) / 7, so 10 million referring domains = 100.
It is consistent across all 120 million domains in the data, so it is good for ranking and filtering lists. It is not Moz Domain Authority or Ahrefs Domain Rating. Referring domains count other domains that link to this one, not individual backlinks; no list of linking pages is included.
FAQ
- Which has higher domain authority, forbes.com or cnn.com?
- forbes.com has the higher authority score (84 vs 81) and forbes.com has 1.6 times as many referring domains. Both are among the highest-authority news & media sites in our data (2026-10-03). Scores are from our open-data metric (0-100), not Moz DA or Ahrefs DR.
- How many referring domains do forbes.com and cnn.com have?
- forbes.com has 436,043 referring domains and cnn.com has 274,211 in the Common Crawl web graph (release cc-main-2026-jul-aug-sep).