Moz Review – Domain Authority Is Moz’s Score, Not Google’s

What Moz Is

Moz makes SEO software — keyword research, backlink analysis, rank tracking, site crawling and competitive research — plus a large set of free tools and one of the better-known educational libraries in the field. Moz Pro runs from $79 to $239 a month on annual billing.

It is an established, serious product — over twenty years old, with a link index they put at 40 trillion links and a keyword index at 1.25 billion. Most of this review is about pricing and about one number everybody misreads.

All prices checked 8 August 2026.

The Pricing, Checked

We check this on every subscription we review and it frequently does not add up. Here it does, to the dollar.

The Tiers Actually Scale

This is worth calling out because we have recently reviewed software that does the opposite.

Converting to cost per tracked keyword per month:

• Standard: $79 ÷ 300 keywords = about 26.3 cents each
• Large: $239 ÷ 3,000 keywords = about 8.0 cents each

That is how tiering should work, and it is not universal — we recently reviewed an SMS platform whose $25, $75 and $125 tiers all included exactly the same 500 message credits. Moz’s higher tiers genuinely buy you more of the thing you are paying for.

One nuance that makes the sites number more generous than it looks. Moz defines a Campaign as “a process to track a site or URL plus three competitor websites,” across up to four search engines per keyword. So three tracked sites is really three of yours plus nine competitors.

Domain Authority Is Moz’s Score, Not Google’s

This is the most useful thing in this review, and it applies whether or not you ever buy anything from Moz.

Domain Authority is a Moz invention. It is a proprietary score from 1 to 100, calculated from Moz’s own link index, designed to predict how likely a site is to rank. It has become the industry’s common shorthand for site strength, and it appears everywhere from agency pitches to link-selling emails.

To be clear, this is not a criticism of Moz. They built a useful comparative metric and have never claimed Google uses it. The confusion is the industry’s, not theirs.

But it matters for how you spend money. If you buy a subscription to watch a number go up, make sure you understand that the number is a proxy — useful for comparing two sites, useless as a target in itself. Chasing DA is how people end up buying links.

Use it the way it was designed: as a rough comparative signal — is this site stronger than that one — and judge your actual SEO by traffic and rankings, which are the things that pay.

The Free Tools Are Genuinely Substantial

Before paying $950 a year, note how much Moz gives away. A free Community account provides limited access to MozBar, Keyword Explorer and Link Explorer, and there are free Domain Analysis and Competitive Research tools alongside a free Moz Pro trial.

For a small site, that may be the whole answer. If you publish a few articles a month and want to check a keyword or look at who links to a competitor, the free tier plausibly covers it and the $950 does not buy you anything you will use.

We credit them for this properly. A company whose free tools are good enough to satisfy small users is giving up revenue — and it is also how Moz became the default vocabulary of the industry.

Their answer on student discounts is in the same spirit. Asked, they say plainly: “We do not have a student discount, but you’re welcome to take a free trial or sign up for a free Moz Community account.” A straight no with a useful alternative beats a vague maybe.

The New AI Features Are Unproven, and That Is Fine

A large part of the current pricing page is given over to AI and “GEO” features — tracking how your brand shows up in AI-generated search answers.

• AI Overviews by Keyword and an AI Visibility Dashboard
• Tracked Prompts — 50 on Standard, more higher up
• Tracked AI Models — 2 on Standard (GPT, Gemini), 3 on Medium (adding Google AI Mode)
• Weekly prompt tracking, AI prompt suggestions, and AI content briefs — 2 a month on Standard, 10 on Medium

Building this is a reasonable bet. If people increasingly get answers from AI rather than blue links, knowing whether you appear in those answers is worth something, and somebody has to build the measurement before anyone can study it.

So do not upgrade a tier for the AI features alone. Buy the tier you need for keywords, sites and crawl budget, and treat the AI dashboards as an interesting extra rather than the reason.

Cancellation Is Excellent. The Annual Plan Is the Question.

That is plain, unhedged language in a category that usually manages neither, and it is genuinely to their credit. No notice period, no retention call described, no minimum term language.

The gap is what happens to money already paid. The annual plans bill $950 or $1,719 up front for the first year, and we found no statement about whether cancelling mid-term produces a pro-rata refund.

“Cancel any time” and “refund any time” are different promises, and only the first is stated.

“Ends Today”

One small thing. The pricing page carried a banner reading “Last chance to save up to 40% - ends today!”

We have no way to know whether that deadline is real — it may well have been. But the standing, permanently available discount is the 20% for annual billing, which is stated separately in their own FAQ and is not time-limited.

Our general advice on countdowns applies: if a tool is worth $950 a year to you today, it will be worth it next month. Never let a banner move you up a tier or onto an annual commitment you had not already decided on.

Who Needs This and Who Does Not

Worth paying for if you:

• Do SEO as part of your job and need rank tracking, crawl reports and link data regularly
• Manage several sites or clients — the Large tier’s 25 sites is priced sensibly
• Need to justify work to someone else, where the reporting matters as much as the data
• Are already using the free tools constantly and hitting their limits

Do not pay if you:

• Run one small site. The free tools plus Google Search Console, which is free and shows real query data, will cover you
• Are buying to raise Domain Authority. That is a proxy, not a target
• Would use it for a fortnight after launch and never again
• Are choosing the annual plan before proving you will use it monthly

That second bullet deserves emphasis. Google Search Console is free and tells you what people actually searched to reach you. No paid tool gives you that, because no paid tool has it — and for a small publisher it is more valuable than any third-party estimate.

How It Compares

The honest framing is that Moz’s real value is competitor and backlink data — the things Google will never show you about anyone else’s site. For your own site’s performance, the free Search Console is better, because its numbers are not estimates.

Use both. Search Console for what is true about you, a paid tool for what you cannot otherwise see about the market.

Pros and Cons

Limitations of This Review

Our general web search was unavailable, so this is built from Moz’s own pricing page, FAQ and site, read on 8 August 2026. We did not check G2, Capterra, Trustpilot or Reddit, so we cannot tell you about data accuracy in practice, support quality, or how Moz’s index compares to competitors — which for an SEO tool is much of the decision.

We have not used Moz Pro or run a single report. We could not extract the Premium tier’s pricing or the Medium tier’s site, keyword and crawl allowances, and we did not verify the 40 trillion link or 1.25 billion keyword figures, which are the company’s own.

Our statement that Google does not use Domain Authority reflects the long-established position that it is a third-party Moz metric rather than a Google signal — and Moz itself describes it as a prediction of ranking likelihood, not an input. We did not source a specific Google statement for this review.

The per-keyword figures are our own arithmetic on published prices and quotas. Pricing and promotional discounts change.

Frequently Asked Questions

Verdict

Moz does several things we spend most of our time complaining that other companies do not. The advertised annual savings are exactly right to the dollar. The tiers genuinely scale — triple the price and you get ten times the keywords, which is the opposite of software we reviewed last week where every tier included the same allowance. And “cancel at any time — no questions asked” is about as clear as a SaaS contract sentence gets.

They also give away a great deal. The free tools and the free educational library are good enough that a small publisher may never need to pay, which costs them revenue and is the reason Moz became the industry’s common language in the first place.

The thing to be careful about is that language. Domain Authority is Moz’s prediction about Google, not a number Google uses. Moz has never claimed otherwise, but a great deal of money is spent every year by people trying to move a score their search engine cannot see. Do not become one of them.

And do not buy the annual plan first. The 20% saving is real, but $950 goes out up front and nothing published says you get any of it back if you stop. Take a month at $99, find out whether you actually open it, then commit.

If you do SEO for a living or manage several sites, this is a well-run tool priced sensibly at the upper tiers. If you run one small site, start with Google Search Console and Moz’s free tools — between them they will tell you more than you are currently acting on, and they cost nothing.