Moz Pro Review: Domain Authority Still Rules. The Toolset Doesn't.
Moz Pro runs $39 to $239 a month. Here is what that still buys in 2026: the authority metric everyone quotes, a keyword database a twentieth of Ahrefs' size.
Moz Pro is the friendliest SEO platform on the market and no longer the most capable one. It runs from $39/month (Starter, billed annually) to $239/month (Large, billed annually), and its real asset is Domain Authority, the score half the link-building industry still prices against. My rating: 3.5/5.
- Domain Authority: still the most recognized third-party authority metric, and free to check via MozBar and Link Explorer.
- Link index: genuinely its own, with Moz claiming 45.5 trillion links. Owning an index beats renting one.
- Keyword research: usable but shallow: roughly 1.25 billion keywords against Ahrefs' 28 billion-plus and Semrush's 26 billion-plus.
- Rank tracking: weekly by default, not daily, which is a real handicap on fast-moving SERPs.
- Site Crawl: a monitoring surface, not a technical audit. It tells a stakeholder something is wrong, not a developer what to fix.
- Hidden cost: extra seats are $49/user/month, so a five-person team on Medium pays about $290/month, not $143.
Buy Moz Pro if you are new to SEO, sell link building, or need DA in a deck. Buy Ahrefs or Semrush if data depth decides your work. For the prioritization Moz leaves to a spreadsheet, our CrawlRaven joins Search Console, GA4, your keyword imports, and a 200-point crawl into one ranked plan, from a one-time $49 at launch.
Moz Pro review, the short version: $39/month at Starter to $239/month at Large on annual billing, still the easiest SEO platform to learn, and the owner of Domain Authority. It has also slipped furthest behind on data depth since Ziff Davis bought it in 2021. Try CrawlRaven free: 1 site, no credit card →
Ask a link builder what a site is worth and they will quote you a DA before they quote you a price. That number is Moz's, it has outlived two ownership changes and its own founder's departure, and it is the single strongest reason anyone still pays for Moz Pro in 2026.
So this review answers a narrower question than “is Moz a good SEO tool?” It asks whether the toolset wrapped around that metric is still worth $39 to $239 a month when Ahrefs and Semrush have spent a decade pulling ahead on data.
The verdict up front
Moz Pro scores 3.5/5. I rated it across seven criteria: Domain Authority ecosystem, link index depth, ease of use, keyword research, rank tracking and AI features, pricing value, and technical site audit. It posts three top scores and one near-failure, which is exactly what a mature product with a narrowing lead looks like.
Moz Pro rated across seven criteria
DA is the authority number outreach contacts recognize on sight
Own crawler-built index, Moz claims 45.5 trillion links
Cleanest onboarding in the category, 4.5/5 on Capterra
Real difficulty model, but ~1.25B keywords vs Ahrefs' 28B+
Weekly updates, not daily. AI Visibility is Medium and Large only
$49/seat/month add-ons push real team cost well past list price
Site Crawl monitors, it does not hand a developer a fix list
Those bars restated in plain text: Domain Authority ecosystem 5/5, ease of use 5/5, link index depth 4/5, keyword research 3/5, rank tracking and AI 3/5, pricing value 3/5, technical site audit 2/5. That averages to 3.5. Pricing and feature facts verified August 2026.
Key Takeaways
- →Best at: making SEO legible. Domain Authority, a clean interface, and the least intimidating onboarding of any major platform.
- →Real price: $39/month at Starter and $143/month at Medium on annual billing, before $49/user/month seat fees.
- →The catch: roughly 1.25 billion keywords against Ahrefs' 28 billion-plus, weekly rank updates, and a Site Crawl that monitors rather than audits.
- →Buy it if: you are learning SEO, doing outreach priced in DA, or running one or two sites that need a single readable dashboard.
- →Skip it if: your work depends on keyword coverage, daily rank data, or a technical audit a developer can act on.
What is Moz Pro?
Moz Pro is a subscription SEO suite covering keyword research, link analysis, rank tracking, and site crawling, delivered as a web app with a browser extension. Moz has been at it longer than almost anyone: founded as SEOmoz by Rand Fishkin in 2004, rebranded to Moz in 2013.
The ownership history matters for how you read the roadmap.
- 2018: Rand Fishkin left the company he founded, taking a lot of the brand's editorial gravity with him.
- June 2021: iContact Marketing Corp, a subsidiary of Ziff Davis (formerly J2 Global), acquired Moz for a reported $67 million.
- Since: Moz has kept shipping (Brand Authority, AI Overviews by Keyword, an AI Visibility beta) without ever closing the data gap on Ahrefs or Semrush.
- Siblings: the same ownership covers Moz Local for listings, the Moz API for programmatic DA and link data, and STAT Search Analytics for enterprise rank tracking.
Delivery is pure SaaS. There is no desktop crawler, no local install, and nothing to configure beyond connecting a campaign to a domain.
Moz Pro key features
Keyword Explorer
Keyword Explorer is Moz's research module, and it is better designed than it is stocked. The scoring model is genuinely useful; the underlying database is where it loses.
- Keyword Difficulty. A real 0 to 100 difficulty model, not a repackaged paid-competition number.
- Priority score. Blends volume, difficulty, and organic click-through rate into one sortable column, which is the fastest triage column in the product.
- Organic CTR. Estimates how much of a SERP's traffic is still available after ads and SERP features take their cut.
- The database. Roughly 1.25 billion keywords, against Semrush's 26 billion-plus and Ahrefs' 28 billion-plus. Long-tail and vertical-specific terms go missing.
In practice that gap shows up as silence rather than error. You search a niche B2B phrase, Moz returns nothing, and you cannot tell whether the term has no demand or Moz simply never saw it.
Link Explorer and Spam Score
Link Explorer runs on Moz's own crawler-built index, with Moz claiming 45.5 trillion links. Owning the index is the structural advantage here: several competing suites resell someone else's link data.
- Spam Score. A 0 to 100 risk read on a linking domain, the fastest disqualifier in any outreach workflow.
- Link Intersect. Domains linking to competitors but not to you, which is still the highest-yield prospecting report in the product.
- Anchor text and lost links. Standard, competent, and enough for most link audits.
- The ceiling. Ahrefs indexes more and refreshes faster, so Moz is the second look, not the first, on a serious link investigation.
Site Crawl
Site Crawl is the weakest module and the reason the scorecard bottoms out at 2/5. It finds the classics: duplicate content, redirect chains, broken pages, thin metadata, crawler traps. It recrawls weekly on a schedule.
What it does not do is where the problem sits.
- JavaScript rendering. Not at the depth a dedicated crawler reaches, so JS-heavy templates report cleaner than they are.
- Structured data. Validated only shallowly, which is thin in a year when entity markup carries real weight.
- AI crawler access. No check on whether GPTBot, ClaudeBot, or PerplexityBot can reach and extract your content.
- Prioritization. Issues are counted and categorized, never ranked by likely ranking impact.
The failure mode is familiar to anyone who has exported one of these reports: it convinces a stakeholder that something is wrong, and leaves a developer with no idea what to open first.
Rank tracking and AI Visibility
Moz tracks positions on Google desktop and mobile plus Bing and Yahoo, with local granularity. The cadence is the catch: weekly updates by default, where Ahrefs and Semrush check daily.
- AI Overviews by Keyword. Flags which tracked queries trigger a Google AI Overview, available across plans.
- AI Visibility (beta). Measures brand presence in ChatGPT and Gemini answers, with competitor comparison. Medium and Large plans only.
- Brand Authority. A 1 to 100 brand-strength score, Moz's newer companion metric to DA.
- Keyword limits. 50 tracked keywords on Starter, 300 on Standard, 1,500 on Medium, 3,000 on Large. Extra keywords cost $20/month per 200.
Weekly cadence is fine for a monthly client report and genuinely painful during a migration or a core update, when you want to see movement the day it happens.
MozBar and the free tools
Moz gives away more than most, and the giveaway is strategic: every free DA lookup reinforces the metric that keeps the paid product relevant.
- MozBar. A Chrome extension overlaying DA and PA on live search results, free with a Moz account.
- Link Explorer, free tier. A capped number of queries per month without a subscription.
- Domain Analysis. A one-box DA, linking-domain, and top-keyword summary for any domain.
- Moz Academy and the Beginner's Guide. Still among the best free SEO education anywhere, and a genuine reason beginners land here first.
Domain Authority: the metric that outlived the toolset
Domain Authority is Moz's proprietary 1 to 100 logarithmic score predicting how likely a domain is to rank. It is not a Google ranking factor, Google does not use it, and Moz has never claimed otherwise. It is a machine-learning model trained against SERPs Moz's crawler observes.
What Domain Authority is actually made of
- Linking root domainsHow many distinct sites link to you
- Total backlink volumeRaw link count across the index
- MozRankLink popularity, weighted by source
- MozTrustDistance from Moz's trusted seed set
- Spam Score adjustmentDownweights spam-signal profiles
- Anchor text distributionHow natural the anchors look
- Scale1 to 100, logarithmic
- ModelMachine learning, trained against observed SERPs
- RefreshRoughly monthly, with the index recalculation
- Google uses itNo. It is a Moz metric, not a ranking factor
Restated in plain text, the six link-graph inputs are linking root domains, total backlink volume, MozRank, MozTrust, a Spam Score adjustment, and anchor text distribution. The score runs 1 to 100 on a logarithmic scale and refreshes roughly monthly with Moz's index recalculation.
Climbing from DA 20 to DA 30 takes a fraction of the links that climbing from DA 70 to DA 80 does. That is why a site can double its referring domains and see DA move three points, and why reading DA as a report-card grade misleads people every single month.
The reason DA still matters commercially has nothing to do with accuracy. It is the shared vocabulary of the link economy: guest-post sellers, PR lists, and outreach spreadsheets all price in DA, so knowing your number is table stakes even if you privately distrust it.
Three rules I hold to when using it:
- Compare, never grade. DA is only meaningful against another domain in the same SERP, on the same day.
- Read it with Spam Score. A DA 45 with a 30% Spam Score is a worse prospect than a DA 28 that is clean.
- Do not translate it to DR. Different index, different math. Our Moz DA vs Ahrefs DR comparison covers exactly where the two disagree, and the free DR checker pulls the Ahrefs-side number for any domain.
Moz's real product in 2026 is a unit of account, not a software suite. DA is the industry's shared ruler, and Moz Pro is the subscription attached to it.
That is a defensible business and a fragile one. The day outreach starts pricing in something else, the toolset has to win on its own merits, and on data depth it currently does not.
Moz Pro pricing and plans
A note on sourcing before the numbers. Moz.com blocks automated fetching from our environment, so these tiers were verified in August 2026 against three sources that all agree:
- Tekpon's Moz Pro pricing tracker, which records its own check on March 26, 2026.
- Marketer's Choice's 2026 Moz pricing breakdown, matching on tiers, trial rules, and add-on fees.
- Our own July 2026 reading in Raven Tools vs Moz, which used the same four tiers.
Confirm on Moz's own pricing page before you buy.
What Moz Pro costs over one year and three
| Plan | Monthly | Annual rate | Keywords | Sites | 1 year | 3 years |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $49/mo | $39/mo | 50 | 1 | $468 | $1,404 |
| Standard | $99/mo | $79/mo | 300 | 3 | $948 | $2,844 |
| Medium | $179/mo | $143/mo | 1,500 | 10 | $1,716 | $5,148 |
| Large | $299/mo | $239/mo | 3,000 | 25 | $2,868 | $8,604 |
- Extra user seat$49 per user / month
- Extra campaign (tracked site)$10 / month
- Extra tracked keywords$20 / month per 200
- Extra crawl capacity$15 / month per 50,000 pages
The four public tiers, monthly rate first and annual-billing rate second:
- Starter: $49/month, or $39/month annually. 50 tracked keywords, 1 site. No free trial.
- Standard: $99/month, or $79/month annually. 300 keywords, 3 sites, backlink analysis, scheduled reports.
- Medium: $179/month, or $143/month annually. 1,500 keywords, 10 sites, AI Visibility beta.
- Large: $299/month, or $239/month annually. 3,000 keywords, 25 sites.
Annual billing saves roughly 20%. The 7-day free trial covers Standard and Medium only, requires a credit card, and is limited to one per customer.
The add-ons are where quoted price and paid price separate:
- Extra user seat: $49 per user per month, which is a whole Starter subscription per colleague.
- Extra campaign: $10 per month per tracked site beyond your plan's limit.
- Extra keywords: $20 per month per 200 tracked keywords.
- Extra crawl capacity: $15 per month per 50,000 pages.
The 1-year and 3-year math
Pre-calculated at annual-billing rates, so you do not have to:
- Starter: $468 for one year, $1,404 over three.
- Standard: $948 for one year, $2,844 over three.
- Medium: $1,716 for one year, $5,148 over three.
- Large: $2,868 for one year, $8,604 over three.
- A five-person team on Medium: $143 plus three extra seats at $49 = $290/month, or $3,480 a year.
Set that against one-time pricing. CrawlRaven lifetime licenses launched at $49 for 3 sites, roughly one month of Moz Standard, paid once rather than every month. Lifetime pricing steps up as licenses sell, so check the pricing page for the current batch. See current pricing. There is also a free plan for 1 site.
Moz Local, Moz API, and STAT
Moz Pro is one of four products under the same roof, and none of them bundle. Each is a separate subscription.
- Moz Local. Listings management and review monitoring, priced per location, commonly quoted from around $14 to $33 per location per month depending on tier and billing.
- Moz API. Programmatic access to DA, PA, Spam Score, and link data, sold separately from Moz Pro with entry plans commonly quoted near $49/month.
- STAT Search Analytics. Enterprise daily rank tracking at scale, quoted from around $720/month, which is the answer to Moz Pro's weekly cadence if you can afford it.
Treat those figures as directional: Moz publishes Pro pricing openly and is far less transparent about the rest, so confirm with sales before budgeting.
Performance in practice
Reading the module list tells you what Moz has. Watching where it breaks tells you who it is for. Four patterns show up repeatedly in independent reviews and in our own use across client work.
- Volume estimates drift from reality. Reviewers consistently report Moz's keyword and traffic numbers diverging from Search Console more than Ahrefs' or Semrush's do. Treat them as relative, not absolute.
- Niche verticals return thin results. The 1.25 billion keyword database thins out fast on specialized B2B terminology, and Keyword Gap analysis caps at three competitors where Ahrefs allows ten.
- Weekly rank data lags decisions. During a core update or a migration, a seven-day-old position is a historical record, not a signal.
- Link data holds up. Spam Score and Link Intersect are the two reports I would genuinely miss, and DA benchmarking remains fast and dependable.
The honest summary: Moz is accurate enough to steer by and not precise enough to bet a quarter on.
UX and interface
This is where Moz still beats everybody, and it is not a small thing. Setup is a campaign wizard: add a domain, pick keywords and competitors, wait for the first crawl. There is no credit system to reason about and no dashboard maze to learn.
- Onboarding. Minutes, not an afternoon. Nothing in the flow assumes you already know what a canonical is.
- Vocabulary. Every score is explained inline, which is why Moz is what agencies show clients even when they research elsewhere.
- Reporting. Custom reports and scheduled PDFs on Standard and up, covering Moz's own data only. No cross-channel ingestion, no true white-label workflow.
- The trade-off. The same simplicity that makes it teachable makes it shallow. There is no equivalent of Ahrefs' filtering depth or Screaming Frog's custom extraction.
If your team includes people who will never love an SEO tool, Moz is the one they will actually open.
Moz Pro pros and cons
- ✓Domain Authority and Spam Score are the most widely recognized third-party link metrics, which makes outreach and client reporting frictionless
- ✓Runs its own crawler-built link index, with Moz claiming 45.5 trillion links, rather than reselling someone else's data
- ✓Easiest onboarding of any major SEO platform: no credit system, no configuration, campaign live in minutes
- ✓Keyword Explorer ships a real difficulty model plus a Priority score blending volume, difficulty, and organic CTR
- ✓Entry pricing of $39/month billed annually undercuts Semrush Pro at $139.95/month by a wide margin
- ✓Free layer is unusually generous: MozBar, limited Link Explorer, Domain Analysis, Moz Academy, and the Beginner's Guide
- ✗Keyword database of roughly 1.25 billion terms against Ahrefs' 28 billion-plus and Semrush's 26 billion-plus, so niche verticals come back thin
- ✗Rank tracking updates weekly by default, not daily, which is a real handicap during migrations and core updates
- ✗Site Crawl is monitoring rather than a technical audit: no deep JavaScript rendering, shallow schema validation, no AI crawler access checks
- ✗Extra seats cost $49 per user per month, so a five-person team on Medium pays about $290/month rather than the listed $143
- ✗No free trial on the $39/month Starter tier, and the Standard and Medium trial requires a credit card
- ✗AI Visibility remains a beta and is restricted to the Medium and Large plans
- ✗Keyword Gap analysis compares only three competitors at once, where Ahrefs allows ten
Who is Moz Pro best for?
Best for the buyers whose job the interface actually fits:
- SEO beginners and small businesses. The clearest path from zero to a working keyword and link workflow, at $39/month annually.
- Link builders and digital PR teams. DA plus Spam Score plus Link Intersect is a complete prospecting loop, and DA is the number your prospect already quotes.
- Consultants who present to non-SEO stakeholders. Moz's scores explain themselves in a meeting, which saves ten minutes every time.
- In-house marketers with one or two properties. Standard at $79/month annually covers three sites and 300 keywords comfortably.
Not ideal for the jobs the data cannot carry:
- Competitive research at depth. The keyword and link gap against Ahrefs and Semrush is structural, not a settings problem.
- Technical SEO teams. Site Crawl will not survive contact with a JavaScript-rendered ecommerce template.
- Agencies needing white-label client reporting. Moz has no cross-channel branded report workflow. Raven Tools vs Moz covers that gap in detail.
- Anyone who needs daily rank data. That is STAT's job at around $720/month, or a dedicated tracker's.
What reviewers say
Moz's third-party scores are solid on the software platforms and noticeably weaker on the consumer review site, which is the usual signature of billing friction rather than product failure.
- G2: 4.3/5 from 606 reviews, against Ahrefs and Semrush at 4.5/5.
- Capterra: 4.5/5 from about 350 reviews, with ease of use at 4.3 and customer service at 4.5.
- Trustpilot: 3.7/5 at our July 2026 check across 203 reviews; the profile now lists 242 reviews, and the recurring complaints are billing and cancellation, not the tooling.
“Moz allows me to easily identify and prioritise keywords to create content for, track and improve rankings for existing content and monitor competition.”
★★★★★Capterra · Moz Pro
“The keyword and traffic stats weren't accurate compared to what GSC showed us.”
★★★★★Capterra · Moz Pro
Moz alternatives worth comparing
Four alternatives, sorted by which part of Moz you are actually replacing.
- Ahrefs, from $29/month Starter and $129/month Lite. The upgrade path for anyone leaving Moz over data depth: a larger backlink index, a keyword database more than twenty times the size, and Domain Rating updating within hours. Our Ahrefs review covers what the credit system costs you in practice.
- Semrush, from $139.95/month Pro. The broadest all-in-one, adding PPC and content tooling Moz has no answer to, at roughly triple the entry price. See our Semrush review for where the feature gating bites.
- Majestic, from $49.99/month. If DA is really the only thing you use Moz for, a pure link index with Trust Flow and nearly two decades of link history is the specialist trade. Detail in our Majestic review.
- Raven Tools, from $39/month annually. Not an SEO upgrade, but the answer if the missing piece is branded multi-channel client reporting. Head-to-head in Raven Tools vs Moz.
- CrawlRaven, lifetime licenses from a one-time $49 at launch. Not a keyword or link-index replacement, and not pretending to be. It covers the layer Moz stops short of: Search Console and GA4 joined to your imported keyword lists and a 200-point technical crawl, returned as one ranked plan of what to write, update, and fix first. Lifetime pricing steps up as licenses sell, so check the pricing page for the current batch.
Frequently asked questions
Basics
- What is Moz Domain Authority? A proprietary 1 to 100 logarithmic score predicting ranking likelihood, built from six link-graph inputs by a machine-learning model. It is not a Google ranking factor, and it refreshes roughly monthly with Moz's index.
- Who owns Moz? iContact Marketing Corp, a Ziff Davis subsidiary, which acquired Moz for a reported $67 million in June 2021. Founder Rand Fishkin left in 2018.
- Does Moz run a real technical audit? Not at developer depth. Site Crawl catches duplicates, redirect chains, and broken pages weekly, but skips deep JavaScript rendering, thorough schema validation, and AI crawler access checks.
Pricing
- How much is Moz Pro? Verified August 2026: Starter $49/mo ($39 annually), Standard $99/mo ($79), Medium $179/mo ($143), Large $299/mo ($239). Annual billing saves about 20%.
- What are the hidden costs? Extra seats at $49/user/month, extra campaigns at $10/month, extra keywords at $20/month per 200, and extra crawl capacity at $15/month per 50,000 pages.
- Is there a free trial? Seven days on Standard and Medium only, credit card required. Starter has none. The free tools (MozBar, limited Link Explorer, Domain Analysis) need no subscription.
Comparisons
- Moz or Ahrefs? Ahrefs for depth and speed; Moz for approachability and DA currency. The keyword databases are not close: roughly 1.25 billion against 28 billion-plus. Detail in our Ahrefs review.
- Is DA the same as DR? No. Different indexes, different math, different refresh rates. See Moz DA vs Ahrefs DR and check any domain with our free DR checker.
- Does Moz replace CrawlRaven, or vice versa? Neither. Moz researches the wider web; CrawlRaven joins Search Console, GA4, your keyword imports, and a 200-point crawl of your own site into one ranked plan. They pair rather than compete.
Final verdict
Moz Pro: 3.5/5. It is the most teachable SEO platform on the market, it owns the industry's shared authority metric, and it is priced to match its position rather than its ambition. It is also, on data depth, a tier below the tools it used to define the category against.
- Buy it if you are learning SEO, doing DA-priced outreach, or running one or two sites and want a dashboard your stakeholders can read. Starter is $39/month billed annually.
- Buy Ahrefs or Semrush instead if keyword coverage, link freshness, or daily rank data decides your work. Start with our Ahrefs review and Semrush review.
- Buy neither alone if the real question is “what do I fix first?” That is the job CrawlRaven was built for: Search Console, GA4, your keyword imports, and a 200-point crawl joined into one ranked plan, from a one-time $49 at launch, with a free plan for 1 site, no credit card required. Lifetime pricing steps up as licenses sell, so check the pricing page for the current batch.
Sources
- Moz Pro official pricing: the vendor page, which blocks automated fetching from our environment
- Tekpon Moz Pro pricing tracker: tier, limit, and add-on figures, recorded as verified March 26, 2026
- Marketer's Choice Moz pricing 2026: matching tiers, trial rules, and add-on fees
- Moz Pro on G2: 4.3/5 from 606 reviews
- Moz Pro on Capterra: 4.5/5 from about 350 reviews; quoted reviews sourced here
- Moz on Trustpilot: 3.7/5 across 203 reviews at our July 2026 check, 242 reviews listed August 2026
- Search Engine Land: Moz acquired by iContact, a J2 Global (now Ziff Davis) subsidiary, June 2021
- Ziff Davis Form 10-Q, FY2021: the acquisition as reported to the SEC
- Spike AI Moz Pro review: link index and keyword database sizes, Keyword Gap competitor cap
- Ahrefs pricing: Starter $29/mo, Lite $129/mo, for comparison figures
Frequently asked questions
Is Moz Pro worth it in 2026?
Moz Pro is worth it if you are learning SEO, doing outreach where Domain Authority is the shared currency, or running a small site that needs one clear dashboard. It is not worth it if keyword and backlink depth decide your work: Moz's keyword database sits near 1.25 billion terms against Ahrefs' 28 billion-plus and Semrush's 26 billion-plus, and its rank tracking updates weekly rather than daily. My rating is 3.5 out of 5.
How much does Moz Pro cost?
Moz Pro has four public tiers, verified August 2026: Starter at $49/month or $39/month billed annually (50 keywords, 1 site), Standard at $99/month or $79/month annually (300 keywords, 3 sites), Medium at $179/month or $143/month annually (1,500 keywords, 10 sites), and Large at $299/month or $239/month annually (3,000 keywords, 25 sites). Annual billing saves roughly 20%. Extra user seats cost $49/user/month and extra campaigns $10/month.
Does Moz Pro have a free trial?
Yes, but not on every plan. Moz offers a 7-day free trial on the Standard and Medium plans, and it requires a credit card. The $39/month Starter tier has no trial. Moz does run permanently free tools outside the subscription, including the MozBar browser extension, a limited Link Explorer, Domain Analysis, and the Keyword Explorer preview.
What is Moz Domain Authority and is it a Google ranking factor?
Domain Authority (DA) is Moz's proprietary 1 to 100 logarithmic score predicting how likely a domain is to rank, built by a machine-learning model over six link-graph inputs: linking root domains, total backlinks, MozRank, MozTrust, a Spam Score adjustment, and anchor text distribution. It is not a Google ranking factor and Google does not use it. It is a comparison tool: useful for ranking link prospects against each other, misleading when read as a grade.
Is Moz DA the same as Ahrefs DR?
No. Both are proprietary 0 to 100 logarithmic scores, but they run on different indexes and different math. Ahrefs Domain Rating measures backlink profile strength from dofollow referring domains and updates within hours; Moz Domain Authority is a ranking-prediction model that includes spam and anchor signals and refreshes roughly monthly. A DA 50 site is not the same as a DR 50 site, and the two disagree constantly.
Who owns Moz now?
Moz was founded as SEOmoz by Rand Fishkin in 2004, rebranded to Moz in 2013, and lost Fishkin as an active leader in 2018. In June 2021 it was acquired for a reported $67 million by iContact Marketing Corp, a subsidiary of Ziff Davis (formerly J2 Global). Moz Pro, Moz Local, the Moz API, and STAT Search Analytics all sit under that ownership today.
Is Moz better than Ahrefs or Semrush?
For raw data depth, no. Ahrefs holds the larger backlink index and keyword database, and Semrush covers more ground across SEO, PPC, and content. Moz beats both on approachability and on Domain Authority's outreach currency, and its $39/month annual entry price undercuts Semrush's $139.95/month Pro plan. Most practitioners who outgrow Moz move to Ahrefs or Semrush rather than adding a second tool.
Does Moz Pro do a full technical SEO audit?
Not at the depth a developer needs. Moz's Site Crawl finds duplicate content, redirect chains, broken pages, missing metadata, and crawler traps, and it recrawls on a weekly schedule. It does not render JavaScript the way a dedicated crawler does, validates structured data only shallowly, and does not check whether AI crawlers such as GPTBot or ClaudeBot can reach your content. Treat it as monitoring and run a dedicated audit tool alongside it.
Can I use Moz Pro with CrawlRaven?
Yes, and they barely overlap. Moz supplies the outward-facing research layer: keyword ideas, link prospects, Domain Authority. CrawlRaven joins your Google Search Console and GA4 data with your imported keyword lists and a 200-point technical crawl of your own site, then returns one ranked plan of what to write, update, and fix first. Lifetime licenses launched at a one-time $49 for 3 sites, and there is a free plan for 1 site with no credit card required.
15+ years of growing SaaS websites through SEO | Author, 200-Point Audit Checklist
Aditi has spent 15+ years helping SaaS companies scale organic traffic through technical SEO and content strategy. She is the author of the CrawlRaven 200-Point Audit checklist used by agencies and in-house teams to systematically improve search performance.