DeepSeek Scores Every Website From 0 to 4. We Tested 87 Brands to Find the One Thing That Moves It

Maddie Wang

Founder of OGTool, Ex-Stanford, Bootstrapped to $1M organically

The short answer: get more quality backlinks. We scored 87 websites, from Chobani, Liquid Death and Poppi down to small food blogs, and at every step up DeepSeek's authority scale, the typical site had many more links from real, established websites than the step below.

DeepSeek, one of the world's most-used AI assistants, just made its search engine public. For the first time, anyone can see the authority score it gives every website, from 0 to 4. It's part of how DeepSeek ranks the websites its AI reads before it answers a shopper's question.

So we asked the question every brand should be asking: how do you raise it?

What is a quality backlink?

A backlink is another website linking to yours. A quality backlink is a link from a real, established website, such as a news site, a retailer or a respected blog, rather than one of the thousands of junk sites that link to everything.

Most backlink reports count both. DeepSeek seems to care more about the quality ones: in our data, they predicted the score best, and they decided the close calls.

The finding: more quality backlinks, higher authority

Four example websites from every DeepSeek authority tier. October 2026.

Read the screenshot from top to bottom. As the authority score drops, so does the number of quality backlinks:

• Authority 4: sf.gov, with 10,744 quality backlinks.
• Authority 3: Chobani, Liquid Death, Siete Foods and Poppi, each with 1,000 to 3,400.
• Authority 2: Graza, Fishwife, Omsom and Kea, with 130 to 800.
• Authority 1: smaller sites like WellWhisk and Reporters.io, with 10 to 60.
• Not in DeepSeek at all: sites with 5 or fewer.

The typical (median) site across all 87 websites: 2,294 quality backlinks at authority 3, 559 at authority 2, 13 at authority 1, and just 3 for sites DeepSeek hasn't indexed.

Three rules held across the data:

• Nearly every website with 30 or more quality backlinks was in DeepSeek's index. The only exceptions we found were a three-month-old site and a one-page site with almost no text on it. Below 30, about half weren't indexed.
• No website with fewer than 950 quality backlinks reached authority 3.
• Each step up the scale took roughly 4 to 40 times more quality backlinks than the step below.

Backlinks aren't the only thing DeepSeek looks at. A few sites with plenty of quality links were held back at authority 1, notably food-review site Sporked, Organic Authority, and several CBD brands. DeepSeek seems to make other judgments about some categories and site types. But quality backlinks were the strongest predictor we could measure, and no site climbed the scale without them.

Brand A vs. Brand B

The clearest test is two brands where one has more backlinks and the other has more quality backlinks. Among the 29 websites where we measured both, that happened in 16 pairs of sites with different scores. The site with more quality backlinks scored higher in 14 of the 16. Both exceptions involve Olipop, which has more quality backlinks than Siete Foods and Magic Spoon but scores a 2 to their 3.

More backlinks, lower score: Poppi vs. Graza

Same domain rating, and Graza has about 2,400 more backlinks. But Poppi has more links from real, established websites, and Poppi is the one DeepSeek rates highly authoritative. More links lost to better links.

10,000 more backlinks, still lower: Liquid Death vs. The Feed

The Feed has about 10,000 more backlinks than Liquid Death. Liquid Death has twice as many quality ones, and scores a point higher.

Three times the quality links: Siete Foods vs. Omsom

Two fast-growing food brands in the same aisle. Siete has three times as many quality backlinks and one more point of authority.

In the index vs. invisible: Kea.ai vs. Xoria

The bottom of the ladder is not being there at all. Xoria's website works fine, but with no quality links pointing to it, DeepSeek's search engine never found it. When a shopper asks DeepSeek about that category, Xoria can't be in the answer. Kea.ai, an OGTool client, has 129 quality backlinks and ranks #8 in DeepSeek for "best voice AI for restaurants".

What this means for your brand

1. Find out where you stand. Your authority score is 1, 2, 3 or 4, or you aren't in DeepSeek's index at all. Your team can check in five minutes (the steps are in the technical section below), or we'll do it for you.
2. Count quality backlinks, not total backlinks. Most of a typical brand's links come from junk sites that add nothing. The number that best predicts your score is how many real, established websites link to you.
3. Know your next target. In our data, 30 quality backlinks was almost always enough to be in the index, authority-2 sites typically had about 560, and authority 3 started at about 1,000.
4. Earn them steadily. A burst of links from low-quality sites won't move you. Regular links from real websites will.

curl -s https://api.deepseek.com/v1/tools/search \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $DEEPSEEK_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"query":"yourbrand site:yourdomain.com","count":10}'

{
  "target": "yourdomain.com",
  "mode": "one_per_domain",
  "include_subdomains": true,
  "backlinks_status_type": "live",
  "filters": [
    ["domain_from_rank", ">=", 100], "and",
    ["backlink_spam_score", "<=", 30], "and",
    ["dofollow", "=", true]
  ],
  "limit": 1
}

How OGTool gets you quality backlinks

If DeepSeek's authority score follows quality backlinks, raising it means earning links from real, established websites, steadily, week after week. That is exactly what OGTool does.

Our customer network. OGTool clients are established businesses whose websites average a domain rating of about 150, comfortably above the quality bar in this study. Every client's blog posts earn links from the rest of the network, several times a week. Your quality backlinks grow while your content goes live, without you chasing a single link.

Content that earns its place. We track the questions your shoppers ask ChatGPT every day, find the competitor pages being cited, and turn them into posts on your site. We tell you the day you start getting cited.

Results from our clients:

• Kea.ai: 0% to 70% of leads from ChatGPT
• $280k in revenue from Reddit
• A ChatGPT ranking in 24 hours

Want to know your DeepSeek authority score, how many quality backlinks you have, and how many you need to reach the next tier? We'll run the numbers for your brand and your top three competitors, free.