Anyone can raise a Domain Rating. Nobody can fake an audience for long. When you are handed a shortlist of sites, the job is to work out which of them publish for readers and which exist to sell paragraphs to strangers. Here is the order I work in.
Start with the traffic graph, not the authority score
Open the site in any tool that shows estimated organic traffic over time. A real publisher has a line that moves: it rises, it dips after an update, it recovers. A site built to sell links usually shows a flat line near zero, or a sudden vertical climb with no history behind it. Buying guides name this as the mistake site owners make most often, because Domain Rating and Domain Authority can both be pushed up on a site nobody visits.
Read the last ten posts and look for a subject
Scroll the blog index. If the last ten posts cover payday loans, CBD, a casino, a moving company and a dentist, the site has no subject and no readers. It has clients. A publisher you want to appear on writes about one thing repeatedly, because an audience turned up for that thing.
Check who the writing is for
Open two posts and read the first paragraph of each. Real posts address a reader and assume prior knowledge. Link inventory posts address nobody: they define terms the reader already knows, repeat the title in the first sentence, and arrive at a link about four paragraphs in. You can feel the difference in about thirty seconds.
Run the domain through the Wayback Machine
Look at what the site was three years ago. An expired domain rebuilt to carry links looks completely different across that gap: a shop becomes a marketing blog, a local charity becomes a tech news site. The authority came from the old site and the new one inherited it. That is a rebuilt domain, not a publisher.
Look at the outbound links on a single post
Pick one article and count the external links. Two or three, pointing at sources, is normal. Eight, each to a different commercial site in a different industry, is an inventory page. The pattern is obvious once you count.
What passes
A site passes when it has a subject, a traffic line with a history, posts written for someone, and a sane number of outbound links. That is a lower bar than most sellers pretend and a much higher one than most shortlists clear. Ten minutes per site is enough to apply it, and it is the ten minutes that decides whether the spend was worth anything.