In this paper, a disturbance observer based control strategy is proposed to regulate the dc-link voltage of three-phase two-level pulse-width-modulation active-front-end rectifiers. In the voltage regulation loop, a linear disturbance observer is designed to improve the system performance. The load connected to the dc-link capacitor is considered as an external disturbance and the observer is used to estimate its value. The estimated disturbance is compensated to the PI controller. Simulations are carried out to verify the effectiveness and advantage of the proposed control strategy. Three different loads have been provided to test the robustness of the control strategy. Simulation results show that the proposed control strategy improves the transient response of the dc-link voltage, meanwhile maintains the steady-state performance in term of the output current total harmonic distortion, and has strong robustness against the external load variation.