Moz Pro: the tools inside it, what Domain Authority and Brand Authority actually measure, and the jobs it is the wrong tool for

Moz Pro is a subscription search toolkit, and the thing to understand before you buy it or quote from it is that its best known outputs are Moz's own models. Domain Authority, Page Authority, Spam Score and Brand Authority are scores Moz calculates and publishes. Google produces none of them and does not use them. That does not make them useless, it makes them comparative: useful for ranking one site against another on the same scale, misleading the moment somebody treats a number as a target to hit. Everything below about the product line-up was read from Moz's own pricing page on 20 October 2026, since this is a product whose surfaces move.

What is inside it

Surface	The question it answers	Worth knowing
Keyword Explorer	What are people searching, how hard is it, and what else is in the group	Volumes are modelled ranges rather than counts, like every tool of this kind
Link Explorer	Who links to this site, and what are the strongest links	This is the surface that replaced Open Site Explorer, and the index is Moz's own
Site Crawl	What is technically broken across the site	Crawl allowance per plan is one of the two things that sets your price
Rank Tracker	Where am I for the keywords I chose, over time	Keywords tracked is the other thing that sets your price
On-Page Grader	How well does one page answer one keyword	A checklist score. Useful as a prompt, never as a specification
MozBar	What are the Moz scores for whatever I am looking at	A browser extension, and the part of Moz most people have used
Moz Local	Are my listings consistent across directories	Sold separately from Moz Pro rather than inside it
STAT	Daily rank tracking at large scale	The enterprise product, bought by agencies and large sites, priced separately

Moz also runs a free training arm at its own academy address, which is worth knowing before anybody pays for a course elsewhere.

The metrics, which are the actual product

• Domain Authority. A score on a hundred point scale that Moz describes as a prediction of how likely a site is to rank, built from its link index. It is logarithmic in effect: moving from twenty to thirty is ordinary work, and moving from seventy to eighty is a different order of difficulty.
• Page Authority. The same idea for one URL rather than a whole site, which is the more useful of the two when you are deciding which page to strengthen.
• Spam Score. Moz's estimate of how closely a site resembles sites it has seen penalised. Read it as a flag for a closer look rather than as a verdict on a link.
• Brand Authority. Moz's newer score aimed at brand strength rather than links. Treat it the way you would treat any single-vendor brand index: as one reading on one scale.

Two rules keep these honest in a report. Never present a Moz score as a Google figure, because Google publishes no site authority number and an audience that learns the difference later discounts everything else in the document. And compare like with like: your score against three named competitors on the same day is informative, while your score against an industry average is not, because the average depends on whose index produced it.

What it is good at

• A quick read on an unfamiliar site. MozBar plus Link Explorer answers who this is and whether anybody links to them in under a minute, which is why the extension outlived several competitors.
• Link prospecting and cleanup, where a comparative score across a list of candidate sites is exactly the right kind of number.
• Keeping a small site technically clean, with Site Crawl running on a schedule and somebody actually reading it.
• Teaching. The metrics are simple enough to explain to somebody outside marketing, which is a real advantage when you have to justify work to a board.

The jobs it is the wrong tool for

• Precise search volume. No third party tool has counts, Moz included. For planning, Google's own planner is the closer source, with the caveat that it reports Google Search and groups close variants.
• Paid search and competitor ad data, which is not what this product is built for.
• Large scale daily rank tracking, which is what STAT exists for and is a separate purchase.
• Deciding content, as opposed to finding the query. A grader score tells you about form rather than about whether the page answers the question.
• Measuring whether an assistant names you, which is a different measurement from search position and needs a different instrument.

Testing it in a week, rather than reading reviews

• Add your real site and three real competitors, not a demo account.
• Track the twenty keywords you actually care about, and see whether the tracker's numbers match what you see in Search Console over the same week. They will differ, and the size of the gap is the thing to learn.
• Run one full Site Crawl and count how many of the flagged issues you would genuinely fix. This is the test that separates a useful crawler from a long list.
• Pull the link profile for one competitor and check ten of the links by hand. You are testing the index, which is what you are paying for.
• Export something. Confirm you can get the data out as a file, because a subscription you leave should not take your history with it.
• Price it at your real numbers. Keywords tracked, campaigns and crawl allowance set the cost, so put your own figures into the plans on Moz's pricing page rather than reading the entry tier.

How it compares, without the feature table

The sensible way to choose between the big suites is by the one job you use daily, because they all claim the same scope and differ in which index and which interface they are best at. If that job is link analysis, what each tool indexes is the deciding question and it is set out in what each backlink tool indexes. If it is position tracking, the categories and how to pick are in the four categories of position tool. And the specific case of the retired Moz tool people still search for, with the current equivalent, is in what replaced Open Site Explorer.

Questions about Moz Pro

Is Domain Authority a Google ranking factor?

No. It is Moz's own predictive score, calculated from Moz's link index. Google neither publishes nor uses it. Use it to compare sites with each other, which is what it is built for.

What is a good Domain Authority?

The only answer that means anything is relative to the sites you compete with for the queries you want. A score of thirty in a quiet niche can outrank a fifty in a crowded one, which is why the comparison set matters more than the number.

Is there a free version?

The MozBar extension and a limited number of free queries on the public domain analysis page cover a surprising amount of casual checking, and the academy is free. The subscription is for tracking, crawling and volume of queries.

What sets the price?

Keywords tracked, number of campaigns and crawl allowance, rather than the feature list. Price the plan at the numbers you will have in a year, since moving up a tier mid-year is the common surprise.

Is Moz Pro better than the alternatives?

It is stronger on clarity and on the browser extension, and other suites hold larger keyword and ad datasets. Pick on the one job you open a tool to do every morning, then check the index behind it.

Do I need it as well as Search Console?

Search Console is your own data and is free and authoritative about your site. A tool like this adds competitor data and an index of links, which Search Console cannot give you. Most teams run both and treat Search Console as the source of truth about themselves.

The metric none of these suites report

Every score in this product answers a version of the same question: where does this site stand in search. There is a second question now, asked by the same buyers: when somebody puts their need to ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Claude, which companies get named in the answer and what does the sentence beside each name say. It is a readable measurement rather than a mood, it changes without anybody editing a page, and it has no Domain Authority. AI Knows Us asks those buying questions across the main assistants and records which companies get named and what the answers were built from.