Moz Pro: Domain Authority, tools, India limits and pricing

This guide is for people who know the basics of SEO and keep running into Moz. A client quotes their "DA". A freelancer is choosing a first paid tool. An in-house marketer has inherited a Moz login. If terms like backlink and keyword difficulty are new to you, start with SEO for beginners.

By the end you'll know what Domain Authority, Page Authority, Brand Authority and Spam Score really measure, and what Moz itself says they don't. You'll be able to read Keyword Explorer and Link Explorer, set up a campaign for an Indian business and compare two competitors' links. You'll also know how to work around the reports that have no Indian data. And you'll know which plan, if any, is worth paying for.

The chapters follow the order you'd meet the tool. First what it is and how to set it up, then the authority scores, the two research tools and the campaign tools (crawl, rankings, page grading and AI tracking). Then come four real tasks, and finally pricing, pros and cons and alternatives. A 10-question quiz and an FAQ close the guide. Every Moz price comes from Moz's own pricing page and help centre, checked 18 October 2026.^[1] Moz lists prices in US dollars only, so the rupee figures are our estimates.

One company, several products

Moz started as SEOmoz in 2004, a blog and community. It bought the rank tracker STAT in 2018 and has been part of Ziff Davis since 2021.^[2] Today "Moz" can mean five different things, and people mix them up:

Moz Local is a separate product with its own bill, even if you already pay for Moz Pro.^[1] Since its pricing page shows only the US, Canada and the UK, an Indian shop or clinic can skip it and use Google Business Profile directly (see our Google Business Profile guide).

How big is Moz's data, next to Ahrefs and Semrush?

Each vendor publishes its own figures, counted its own way. On links, Moz's number is the biggest; on keywords, it's far smaller.

Sources: Moz's Link Explorer and Keyword Explorer pages,^[10] Semrush's Data and Metrics page^[8] and backlinks page,^[11] and Ahrefs' big data page.^[9] Treat the link numbers as marketing, not a ranking. "Links", "backlinks" and "external backlinks history" aren't the same count, and none of the three is independently audited. Even Moz's own menus disagree: one says "over 40 trillion links", another "over 44 trillion".^[1]

The keyword gap is real, though. Moz's keyword suggestions come to less than a twentieth of what Semrush and Ahrefs claim, and Ahrefs alone lists 1.4 billion keywords for India.

The India problem

This is the first thing to know before you pay. Several Moz Pro reports use data from only four countries:

• Ranking Keywords (Explore by Site), the report that shows what a site ranks for: US, UK, Canada and Australia.^[12]
• Domain Overview: the same four.^[13]
• True Competitor: supported markets are US, GB, CA and AU.^[14]
• Brand Authority: "currently driven by US, UK, CA, and AU data", in Moz's words.^[15]

Keyword Explorer's scores are "English-language centric", and its click-through modelling comes from US English clickstream data.^[16] Link data is global, so Link Explorer, Domain Authority and Spam Score work for Indian sites as well as any. Rankings in a campaign are tracked for the Google search engine and location you pick at set-up; check that Google India is in the list during the trial. So for an Indian site, Moz Pro is mostly a link tool and a rank tracker, with keyword research you'll want to check against Google's own numbers.

Who it's for, and when you don't need it

Moz Pro suits a freelancer or small agency that wants clear link metrics clients recognise, weekly rank tracking with three competitors per site, and a gentle interface. It suits sites aimed at the US, UK, Canada or Australia best, because every report works there.

You don't need it if you run one local business site in India. Search Console gives you your real queries and clicks, Google Business Profile covers local, and the free Moz account covers the occasional DA check. You also don't need it for keyword research in Indian markets: Google Keyword Planner is free, and Semrush or Ahrefs have far bigger India databases.

Set-up step 1: a free Moz Community account

A free account needs only an email address you verify.^[7] It gives you, each month:

Source: Moz's comparison of Community and paid access.^[18] Ten link queries is enough to check your own site and two competitors once a month. It isn't enough to research link prospects.

Set-up step 2: MozBar

MozBar is a free extension for Chrome and Firefox.^[19] It has three levels:

• Not logged in: on-page elements, markup, HTTP status and link highlighting, but no metrics.
• Free Community account: Domain Authority, Page Authority and page-level link counts in the toolbar, DA and PA over Google results, and a 1,000-query limit. Moz's example: a page visit uses 2 queries (one for DA and PA, one for Brand Authority), and results are cached for 48 hours.
• MozBar Premium: included with any paid plan or trial; adds Brand Authority, Domain Overview, Ranking Keywords and Page Optimization.

Install it, log in through the extension's Settings tab, and add sites you don't want metrics for (your email, your bank) to Excluded Domains, so you don't waste queries.^[19]

Set-up step 3: the free trial, read the small print

Moz's free trial is for the Medium plan, monthly billing, and needs a credit card.^[20] Its length has changed over the years and Moz's help and pricing pages don't state it, so check the end date in your account's subscriptions section on day one. Four rules matter more than the length:

• It renews into a paid Medium plan automatically. Cancel at least 24 hours before the trial ends.^[20]
• Upgrading to Large or buying any add-on ends the trial at once and you're billed.
• Moz "does not offer refunds of any kind" under its terms.^[18]
• Moz takes Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Discover, credit or debit, but not PayPal, prepaid cards or payment apps.^[21] Check that your Indian card is enabled for international recurring payments before you start.

So plan the trial: have your site, three competitors and a keyword list ready on day one, and put a reminder in your calendar two days before it ends.

Day-one settings once you're in

1. Allow Moz's crawlers. Site Crawl uses a bot called Rogerbot; the link index uses Dotbot.^[22] If your robots.txt or firewall blocks Rogerbot, Site Crawl comes back empty.
2. Set your brand name. The campaign name becomes a brand rule that tags keywords as branded or non-branded.^[23]
3. Label keywords as you add them. Search Visibility is an average of all tracked keywords, so labels stop new keywords from muddying the trend.^[24]
4. Set the crawl limit to roughly the number of pages on your site, so other campaigns keep their share of the plan's limit.^[23]

Chapter 5 walks through the full campaign set-up for a Delhi dental clinic. Next, the scores Moz is famous for.

Domain Authority (DA)

Domain Authority is a score from 1 to 100 that predicts how likely a whole site is to rank compared with competitors. Moz calculates it with a machine-learning model fed mostly by link data: how many root domains link to the site, how good those links are, and other signals that correlate with rankings.^[25]

Four things about DA trip people up:

• It's relative. If a giant site gains a billion links, everyone else's DA can drop. Moz's own example is Facebook.^[25]
• It's harder at the top. Going from 20 to 30 is much easier than going from 70 to 80.^[25]
• It moves without you doing anything, when Moz's index changes, when other sites' scores shift, or when Moz updates the model (Domain Authority 2.0 arrived in 2019).^[25]
• New sites start at 1. There's no "good" DA in general; Moz says a DA of 30 may be exceptional in one industry and low in another.^[25]

So the right question is never "what's my DA?" It's "how does my DA compare with the sites ranking above me, and is the gap closing?" Moz itself recommends comparing with competitors and watching your count of linking root domains alongside it.^[26]

Page Authority (PA)

Page Authority is the same idea for a single URL: a 1 to 100 score, on a logarithmic scale, that predicts how well that page will rank. It looks at dozens of link factors, including linking root domains, followed and nofollowed links, anchor text and redirects. Moz's page is clear that PA "is not an acknowledged Google search engine ranking factor".^[27]

Use PA to compare pages that compete for the same keyword. A Pune coaching centre's "NEET coaching" page with PA 15 against rivals at 30 to 40 tells you the gap is links to those pages, not the domain as a whole.

Brand Authority (BA)

Brand Authority is a newer 1 to 100 score for the strength of a brand, built largely from branded searches: people searching the name, and the products linked to it.^[15] Like DA it's non-linear, so 10 points near the top is a bigger gap than 10 points near the bottom. Moz suggests comparing BA with DA. A site with high DA and low BA may have links but little real demand for the brand. A well-known shop with weak DA has room to grow in search.

For India, there's a catch you'll find only in the small print: Brand Authority "is currently driven by US, UK, CA, and AU data".^[15] A Kanpur sweet shop that's a household name locally may score low simply because Moz doesn't count Indian branded searches. For Indian brands, look at branded clicks in Search Console's branded queries filter instead (our Search Console guide shows how).

Spam Score

Spam Score is the percentage of sites with similar features that Moz found to be penalised or banned by Google. It doesn't score the links pointing at you; it scores the site itself, from 27 signals Moz's model found common among penalised sites.^[28]

The signals are blunt. They include a domain with numerals or many hyphens, no phone number or email on the page, no favicon, no HTTPS by default, very long or very short titles, and spam-topic words.^[28] A small, honest Indian business site can trigger several of them. Moz says a high score "doesn't mean this site is necessarily spammy", and that if you haven't had a penalty, a low or medium score is nothing to worry about.^[28] Spam Score updates quarterly, and you can't see which signals your own site triggered.^[29]

Two smaller scores you'll see

• Minimum Domain Authority: in Keyword Explorer, the lowest DA among the sites ranking for a keyword.^[16] If a DA 9 site ranks on page one, a small site has a chance.
• Rivalry: in True Competitor, a 1 to 100 score combining both sites' DA, keyword overlap, volume and your rankings.^[14] It covers only the US, UK, Canada and Australia.

With the scores clear, chapter 3 opens the two tools where you'll meet them most: Keyword Explorer and Link Explorer.

Keyword Explorer: four ways in

Keyword Explorer has four sections you'll use: Explore by Keyword (metrics and SERP for up to 100 keywords at once), Keyword Suggestions (related keywords grouped by topic), Keyword Lists (saved sets you can sort), and Explore by Site (what a domain already ranks for).^[16] Pick the locale and language from the drop-down before you click Analyze.

Explore by Site is the one that won't help an Indian site: its Ranking Keywords data covers only the US, UK, Canada and Australia.^[12] The other three let you pick a market, so check India is in the list before you rely on them.

The keyword metrics

Moz's help page says keywords get "significantly tougher" around Difficulty 40, and that a brand-new site may struggle even in the 20s and 30s.^[31] That's how we'd read it too: Difficulty is an average site's view, and yours may be weaker or stronger.

Volume for India deserves the same caution. Moz's own help says its CTR modelling uses US English clickstream data, so Difficulty and Opportunity "will both be more English-centric".^[16] For Indian volumes, check the same keywords in Google Keyword Planner (see our Keyword Planner guide) and in your own Search Console impressions.

SERP Analysis

Click one keyword and scroll down to SERP Analysis. For each result you get the rank, title, URL, any SERP feature, the page's PA, the domain's DA and Brand Authority, the number of root domains linking to that page, and a Page Score from the On-Page Grader.^[16] If an AI Overview appears, the SERP features column shows a preview of it and the URLs it cites.

This is the most useful screen in Keyword Explorer. Read it like this:

1. Look at "LRDs to page" first. If the top five pages each have links from 2 to 10 domains, a good page plus a few real links can compete.
2. Check DA second. A DA 15 site in the top 10 tells you DA isn't deciding this result.
3. Look at Page Score. Low scores near the top mean the pages are thin on the basics, which you can beat on content.
4. Note the SERP features. A local pack or an AI Overview changes what "ranking" is worth.

Keyword Suggestions and lists

Keyword Suggestions starts from one seed keyword and groups results in a Topic Tree Map, sized by total monthly volume.^[32] Three suggestion types matter: Top suggestions, Questions (good for blog posts and FAQs) and Similar SERPs (keywords the top pages for your seed also rank for). Filter by Difficulty band and volume, then select keywords and use Add to keyword list or Add to Campaign.

Lists are where the plan limits bite. Standard allows 5 lists of 100 keywords; Medium allows 30 lists of 500.^[1]

Link Explorer: what it shows

Link Explorer is Moz's backlink checker. Enter a root domain, subdomain or exact page and you get DA, PA, Spam Score, inbound links, linking domains, anchor text, top pages by links, and linking domains discovered and lost.^[7] The free account allows 10 queries a month.

How fresh is it? Moz says newly found links appear within about 3 days, it tries to recrawl high-quality pages at least every 90 days, and most links come from pages crawled less than 6 months ago.^[26] Links don't drop out because they're old; they show as Lost when Moz can't find them on a recrawl. DA and PA change only when Moz finds new or lost links to that site.

Moz's index won't show every link. Its crawler, Dotbot, ignores non-canonical pages and respects noindex and robots.txt blocks.^[26] Expect your Search Console Links report to list some links Moz hasn't found, and the other way round.

The three Link Explorer screens worth your queries

• Compare Link Profiles: up to five sites side by side (three on Starter, one competitor on a free account), with linking domains, followed links and a 12-month chart of DA, PA or linking domains.^[36]
• Link Intersect: sites linking to up to five competitors but not to you, labelled A to E by which competitors they link to, sortable by DA and Spam Score.^[37]
• Discovered and Lost: new and lost linking domains over time, which is how you spot a lost link from a good page before it hurts.

Link Tracking Lists let you save prospects from Link Intersect and watch whether a link appears.^[37] Starter has none;^[38] Standard has one list of 100 links; Medium has 30 lists of 500.^[1]

For what makes a link worth having in the first place, see our intermediate guide's chapter on link building that works. Chapter 5 here runs a full competitor comparison step by step.

What a campaign is

A campaign is one site (a domain, subdomain or subfolder) plus up to three competitors, tracked across up to four search engine and location settings.^[1] The site URL can't be changed after you create it, and campaigns can't be copied.^[23] Starter has 1 campaign,^[38] Standard 3, Medium 10 and Large 25.^[1]

Inside a campaign you get Site Crawl, Rankings, Links, Page Optimization and, if you connect Google Analytics, traffic from search. Most of it updates weekly.

Site Crawl

Moz's crawler, Rogerbot, crawls your site once a week, on the weekday you created the campaign; you can't change the day.^[39] On the first run it does a quick crawl of about 250 pages, then a full crawl straight after. Issues are grouped into five types:

1. Critical Crawler Issues: 5xx server errors, 4xx errors and redirects to 4xx pages. Fix these first.^[40]
2. Crawler Warnings: noindex and nofollow, in a meta tag or an X-Robots header.^[41] Check each one was meant.
3. Redirect Issues: temporary (302 and 307) redirects, redirect chains and meta refresh.^[42]
4. Metadata Issues, such as a missing or overlong title.^[43]
5. Content Issues: duplicate content and titles, thin content, slow load time and missing or invalid H1.^[44]

On WordPress, tag pages often show up as duplicate content. Moz suggests using Ignore so they stop being flagged each week;^[44] whether to noindex them is a separate decision for your SEO plugin.

Each 4xx error shows the referring URL, the page holding the broken link. That's where the fix goes: the dead page itself usually doesn't need anything, the link pointing at it does.^[40] Mark an issue as Fixed and Moz checks it on the next crawl.

Four limits worth knowing before you rely on it:

• Recrawls on demand need Medium or higher, and the allowance is shared across the account.^[39]
• Each new crawl overwrites the last one. You see past counts on the charts but can't open or export old crawls.
• Site Crawl doesn't show outbound links, so broken links to other sites won't appear.
• Rogerbot starts from the http version of your site and you can't point it at https.^[23] A site with a clean redirect to https is fine; a misconfigured one shows up as redirect issues.

When a 5xx error shows up, check whether real visitors see it too. Moz's help suggests a third-party status checker for this;^[40] ours checks up to 10 URLs and shows every redirect hop.

Rankings and Search Visibility

Rankings update weekly for the keywords you track, for your site and your three competitors.^[45] Moz can track Google, Google Mobile, Bing and Yahoo nationally; city or postcode tracking works for Google and Google Mobile only.^[45] Each extra location counts as another keyword against your limit, so 10 keywords in 2 cities use 20.^[23]

Moz's locations come from a postal code database, and its examples are all US, UK and Australian.^[45] Type your city or area into the location box in the trial; if it doesn't appear, track India as a whole.

The headline number is Search Visibility: the share of clicks Moz estimates you get from your rankings, across all tracked keywords, from 0% to 100%.^[24] Moz says it's rare to score above the mid-40s on non-branded keywords, so a 12% site isn't failing. The number drops when you add keywords, change search engines or move to https, so label keywords and compare groups, not the whole total.

Rank Checker is the one-off version: check any keyword and URL in a chosen engine and country, once a day per pair, with a year of history.^[46] Standard and Medium get 200 checks a day, Large 500,^[1] Starter none.^[38] It can't do local tracking.

On-Page Grader and Page Optimization

On-Page Grader scores one URL against one keyword out of 100, using 27 on-page factors, and lists what's hurting and helping the score.^[47] Moz is upfront that 100 doesn't guarantee a ranking. Page Optimization is the same report inside a campaign, rechecked weekly, with a Discover tab that suggests keyword and page pairs.^[48]

One gap: the grader doesn't read Open Graph tags, so it won't tell you how a page looks when shared on WhatsApp or LinkedIn.^[48] Our free Meta Tag Analyzer checks title, description, Open Graph and Twitter tags of a page.

AI features

Moz has added three AI tools to Pro:

• AI Visibility (Standard and up, and the Medium trial): enter your brand domain, add up to three competitors and up to five brand terms, and Moz tracks prompts in ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode and Perplexity weekly.^[49] It shows whether each brand is mentioned, who's mentioned first, and which pages are cited.^[50] Standard tracks 150 prompts on 3 dashboards; extra prompts cost $50 per 100.^[1]
• AI Content Brief: a brief for a keyword with audience, structure, keywords to include and questions to answer, editable and exportable as PDF.^[51] Standard gets 2 a month, Medium 10.^[1]
• AI Overviews by keyword: Keyword Explorer marks keywords that show an AI Overview and lists the URLs it cites.^[16]

The citations view is the part we'd actually use. It lists the domains AI answers cite for your prompts, with their DA and Spam Score.^[52] Those domains are your outreach and PR list. Treat the mention counts as a sample, though: they're your own prompts, run weekly, and AI answers change from one run to the next.

Before paying for AI tracking, check that AI crawlers can reach your site at all, and set up the free reports first. Our GEO guide covers both in Measuring AI visibility.

The businesses here are examples. Plan limits are from Moz's pricing page, checked 18 October 2026.^[1]

Task 1: compare two competitors' link profiles and find prospects

A D2C brand selling block-print kurtas from Jaipur wants to know why two rival brands outrank it, and which sites might link to it too.

Task 2: find keyword gaps for an Indian site

A NEET and JEE coaching centre in Pune wants to know which searches its two biggest local rivals rank for and it doesn't. Moz's quickest tools for this, Ranking Keywords and True Competitor,^[14] use only US, UK, Canadian and Australian data.^[12] So for Pune you build the gap yourself and let a campaign check it.

If you need gaps across thousands of Indian keywords, this is the wrong tool. Semrush's Keyword Gap and Ahrefs' Content Gap work from their India databases directly; see our Semrush and Ahrefs guides. For a dozen pages and two rivals, the method above is enough. Our intermediate guide explains how to judge each keyword's intent and difficulty in Keyword research in depth.

Task 3: set up a campaign for a Delhi dental clinic

Rankings start after the next weekly update, and Site Crawl sends an email when the first crawl is ready.^[39] For the map pack itself, Moz Pro isn't the tool: Google Business Profile's own Performance report is. Our local SEO chapter covers what moves it.

Task 4: grade a page against its keyword

A Kanpur sweet shop's "soan papdi online" page isn't ranking. This one takes 10 minutes.

A score of 100 still doesn't guarantee a ranking, as Moz says itself. Once the basics are green, the work moves to content and links. Chapter 6 covers what each plan costs, and when something cheaper or free does the same job.

The plans, checked 18 October 2026

Moz's pricing page shows US dollars only, with no option for rupees.^[1] The rupee column is our estimate at ₹96 to the dollar, the X-Rates monthly average for 1 to 16 October 2026.^[55] Your card statement will differ with your bank's rate and any foreign transaction fee. Moz says prices are list price plus sales tax where it's required to collect it; its tax page lists only US states and Canadian provinces.^[56]

Sources: the pricing page for Standard to Large,^[1] Moz's Starter plan article for Starter,^[38] and its Community vs paid comparison for the free account.^[18] Medium is the plan Moz marks "Most Popular", and the only one with a free trial. The yearly prices say "billed for your first year" ($950, $1,719 and $2,868), so check the renewal price before you commit. On 18 October the page also showed a banner offering "up to 40%" off, ending that day; offers like this come and go.

The other limits that decide which plan you need:

The jump that matters most is keyword queries: 150 a month on Standard against 5,000 on Medium. Every Keyword Explorer search uses one, so Standard suits link work and rank tracking, not regular keyword research.

Add-ons

From the pricing page FAQ: extra user seats are $49 a month each (₹4,704). Extra limits cost $10 a month per campaign, $15 per 50,000 pages crawled, $20 per 200 tracked keywords, $10 per 10,000 keyword queries, and $25 per 5 keyword lists or 5 link tracking lists.^[1] AI add-ons are $20 per extra AI Visibility dashboard and $50 per 100 extra prompts. A two-person team on Standard pays $148 a month, close to Medium's $179, which already includes two users.

Trial, cancelling and refunds

• The trial is Medium, monthly, card required, and renews automatically (chapter 1).^[20]
• Cancel at least 24 hours before renewal. Cancel on the renewal day and the charge goes through with no refund; Moz "does not offer refunds of any kind".^[18]
• After cancelling, campaigns are archived and Moz keeps the data for 12 update cycles (12 weeks for weekly data).^[18] You can't open the reports until you resubscribe, so export first.
• Moz doesn't offer a student discount, only the 20% yearly saving and a separate offer for registered US 501(c)(3) non-profits.^[1]

Pros and cons

Alternatives, starting with ours

Our free tools cover the site-health side of a Moz campaign without an account. They don't do backlinks, volumes or rank tracking; for those, use the free options below or another paid suite.

The closest paid rivals: Semrush's SEO plan is $139 a month (about ₹13,344), and it has a free plan.^[57] Ahrefs starts at $29 a month (Starter) and $129 for Lite, with Ahrefs Free for your own verified sites.^[58] Both have far larger India keyword data. Our guides cover each one: Semrush, Ahrefs, SE Ranking and Mangools. For the full free list, see Best free SEO tools.

Which one when

If you'd rather hand the research over, our SEO service does it for you, and you can get a quote in a couple of minutes. Otherwise, open a free Moz account this week, compare your site with one competitor in Link Explorer, and decide from that whether the trial is worth starting.

Test yourself

Ten questions on the whole guide. Pick an answer, check it, and see your score at the end.

Frequently asked questions

Sources