How to Check a Lead's Website Before You Pitch a Redesign

October 29, 2026 · 3 min read

"No website" is an easy lead to qualify: the field is empty, or it isn't. A business that already has one is a different, slower question — is it actually working for them, or just there? Two free, public numbers get you most of the way to an answer before you ever open the site yourself.

The two numbers worth pulling

Domain Rating is a 0–100 score (Ahrefs publishes it for free) built from how many other sites link to a domain, and how reputable those links are. It is not a ranking of the site's design or its content; it is closer to a credit score for the domain's own reputation. A 20-year-old plumbing company's domain with a handful of local press mentions will often outscore a slick six-month-old site with none.

Monthly visits is an estimate of real traffic, not of search ranking. A site can have a decent Domain Rating and basically no visits, or the other way around, if most of its customers come from a map listing or word of mouth rather than a search.

Neither number says anything about whether the site looks good, loads fast, or converts a visitor into a call. They tell you whether anyone besides the owner currently sees the thing at all.

Read them together, not apart

Domain Rating	Visits	What it probably means
Low	Low	A real gap — the pitch is "nobody finds this," not "this needs a fresh coat of paint"
Low	Decent	Traffic comes from somewhere other than search (a map listing, social, word of mouth) — a redesign pitch should say so explicitly
Higher	Low	An old domain that used to get links but isn't being found right now — worth asking what changed
Higher	Decent	The site is doing its job; the pitch is a different one entirely

One thing to rule out first

Both numbers are measured per domain, and plenty of small businesses don't have one of their own at all — their "website" field is a Facebook page, an Instagram profile, or a Linktree. Running either check against facebook.com/theirpage tells you about Facebook, not about them. Skip the check entirely for a listing-page or social-profile link; it's not a smaller version of a website, it's a different thing to pitch.

Don't lead with the number

A Domain Rating is a useful thing to know before you write, and a bad thing to put in the first message. "Your Domain Rating is 4" means nothing to someone who has never heard the term, and it reads as a scare tactic from someone who has. Use it to decide whether to write at all, and to shape what you say — not as a line in the pitch itself.

How AyePin uses it

AyePin looks each lead's website up in the background, one domain at a time so it never hammers the measuring service, and skips the check entirely for a listing or social-profile link rather than scoring the platform instead of the business. A result already looked up recently is reused rather than asked for again, and a lead list can be sorted by either number once they're in. Nothing in the score or priority changes because of either figure — they're there to read, not to decide anything on their own.