Moz vs Semrush (2026) — Which is Better?

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Semrush vs Moz: which tool is better for your SEO and AI visibility projects? In this post you’ll find an in-depth comparison of the two products that explains their features in a friendly, easy-to-understand way.

I’ll start by giving you a quick pros and cons summary for both tools, and then I’ll move on to my deeper dive.

Let’s begin with a look at the background of Semrush and Moz.

Semrush and Moz: the background

Semrush and Moz are two of the best-known SEO tools on the market — but they have quite different backgrounds.

Semrush is the younger of the two solutions. Founded in 2008 by SEO enthusiasts Oleg Shchegolev and Dmitry Melnikov, it was designed specifically to be an SEO tool.

Moz has a rather different history. Founded in 2004 by SEOs Rand Fishkin and Gillian Muessig, it began life as a blog and online community that discussed SEO (“SEOMoz”). This in turn evolved into an SEO consultancy, and finally into an SEO tool — Moz Pro.

Despite their different backgrounds, however, both Moz and Semrush share a key aim: to provide you with data that lets you craft effective SEO campaigns.

They essentially do this by giving you a lot of data — information that you can use to:

That’s just scratching the surface though — there are lots of other nifty things that Semrush and Moz can do to help you climb up the search rankings. You’ll find out more about these as you progress through this comparison.

Domain analysis

One of the most useful things you can do with Moz and Semrush is domain analysis. This means getting a basic overview of how a domain is performing in search results.

Typically, domain analysis is performed on:

Carrying out domain analysis is easy enough with Semrush and Moz — in both tools, it’s a case of navigating to a ‘Domain Overview’ section, where you’ll find the relevant data.

In terms of the data you get in a domain overview, both tools give you the key data you’d expect to find, namely:

It’s worth noting that Semrush gives you a key additional piece of data here, though — an estimate of the monthly traffic to the domain you’re analyzing.

Unfortunately, Moz doesn’t do this —  the best you can do on this front with the tool is connect your Google Analytics account to the tool and view your stats within the dashboard.

This is fine for monitoring traffic to your own site (or a site for which you have access to Google Analytics), but no use at all for conducting competitor traffic analysis.

Now, based on my own testing of Semrush’s traffic analysis feature, I didn’t always find the figures returned to be 100% accurate — especially where smaller websites with lower levels of organic traffic were concerned.

For me, the best way to think about Semrush’s traffic estimates is as a way to identify trends (i.e., is site A more popular than sites B and C?). Don’t take them as absolute gospel.

Another domain analysis feature that you get in Semrush but not in Moz is ‘search intent’ data.

When you analyze a domain with Semrush, you are shown a table containing data about why people click on search results for it — to research something, find a specific page, purchase something etc.

(Search intent data in Moz is only available in its ‘Keyword suggestions’ tool, which I will discuss a little later.)

A particularly useful recent addition to Semrush’s Domain Overview is AI visibility data.

Alongside its traditional SEO metrics, Semrush now shows you a domain’s:

This means that from a single domain overview, you can get a snapshot of how visible a brand is both in conventional search results and in AI-generated answers.

Moz now provides AI visibility functionality too, through its separate AI Research tools. However, at time of writing, this data isn’t incorporated into its Domain Overview in the same way.

This gives Semrush an advantage if you want to perform a quick, all-in-one assessment of a competitor’s visibility across traditional search and AI search.

(I’ll explore the dedicated AI visibility features of both platforms in more detail later.)

And finally, some advertising data (pictured below) is included in the Semrush domain overview tool — paid keywords used by a domain, paid position distribution etc. This isn’t included in the Moz equivalent.

Overall then, Semrush gives you the more comprehensive domain overview. Its combination of organic traffic estimates, search intent information, advertising data and — increasingly importantly — AI visibility metrics gives you a broader picture of how a site is performing across search.

However, there are a couple of handy metrics that Moz provides in its domain overview for which there are no Semrush equivalents.

First up, there’s Moz’s ‘brand authority’ score. As its name suggests, this feature gives you an idea of how well-known the brand behind a website is — something that Google is placing an ever-bigger emphasis on when considering how to rank websites.

The brand authority score is based on data from the US, UK, Canada and Australia.

There’s also a ‘domain search theme’ indicator in Moz. This tells you, in a few words, what a site is chiefly ‘about.’ For example, if you perform domain analysis on the Style Factory site, you are told that the main focus of the site is ‘digital marketing tools’ — which is reasonably accurate.

Now, let’s take a look at keyword research features — a very important part of both Moz and Semrush.

Keyword research features

Keyword research is generally about four things: 

Both Semrush and Moz make it easy enough for you to find out all the above information.

You just enter a keyword into the Semrush and Moz keyword analysis tools — ‘Keyword Overview’ and ‘Explore by Keyword’ respectively — and you’ll get the key information you need immediately: search volume, keyword difficulty score, the sites that are currently ranking for it, and a list of related keywords.

Both platforms use a score out of one hundred to indicate keyword difficulty, with a higher score indicating that it will be harder to rank for a given keyword.

However, Semrush has a big advantage over Moz here, because Moz caps the number of keyword suggestions you can view at just 1,000, regardless of plan. With Semrush, keyword suggestion limits scale much more generously across its three main paid plans — they start at 10,000 suggestions on entry-level plans, and rise to 30,000 and 50,000 on its higher tiers.

Prioritizing keywords

Moz and Semrush both provide you with data to help you focus on the keywords that you have the best chance of ranking for.

Generally speaking, you do this by looking at the search volume of a particular keyword (i.e., the number of searches for it in Google each month) along with its keyword difficulty score, and then deciding whether to try ranking for it based on those two key pieces of information.

However, both tools give you additional metrics to assist you with this process.

In the case of Moz, this comes in the form of its ‘Minimum DA’ score. This is the domain authority score of the site with the least authority in the top 10 results for that keyword.

If your site has a domain authority score that’s higher than the ‘Minimum DA’ score figure, this is an indication that you have a good chance of ranking for your target keyword.

Semrush gives you a related metric which is arguably more useful, however — in the form of an estimate of the number of referring domains you’ll need to have pointing to your content in order for it to rank for a particular phrase. (In the screengrab below, I’ve highlighted this with an arrow.)

This piece of information gives you an immediate indication of the amount of link building you’ll need to do in order to rank highly for a target keyword. It’s an extremely useful metric that enables you to make quick (but informed) decisions regarding whether or not you should target a particular keyword in an SEO campaign.

Both Semrush and Moz also give you search intent data in their keyword tools; this tells you if a particular keyword you’re researching is ‘informational’, ‘commercial’, ‘navigational’ or ‘transactional.’

These labels can be understood as follows:

Now, these search intent features are extremely useful when you’re filtering keyword suggestions.

When you enter a phrase into Semrush’s ‘Keyword Magic’ tool or Moz’s ‘Keyword Suggestions’ tool, you’ll often end up with a very long list of suggested phrases. But both platforms supply you with a ‘search intent’ dropdown menu that lets you exclude a lot of irrelevant stuff really easily and focus on the phrases that are most likely to be revenue generating.

You also get a useful ‘trend’ graph in Semrush’s keyword overview results that gives you an at-a-glance indication of the popularity of a particular keyword over time:

So, overall, both platforms give you a lot of useful data to help you prioritize keywords. But, because it gives you a bit more contextualization information, I’d argue that the winner here is Semrush.

For a quick guide to how the keyword research process works in Semrush, you can watch the video below.

Personalized keyword difficulty score: a Semrush USP?

One of the best aspects of Semrush’s keyword overview tool is its new AI-powered ‘personalized data’ option. This lets you get a sense not just of how generally difficult it will be to rank for a particular keyword, but how difficult it will be for your site to rank for it. Semrush works this out based on how authoritative your site is, and how topically relevant it is for the keyword you’re examining.

There’s nothing comparable from Moz — or indeed other SEO tools I’ve tested to date — and for me this represents something of a Semrush USP.

Creating keyword lists

Semrush and Moz both allow you to create lists of keywords that you can refer to any time you like, using their ‘Keyword Strategy Builder’ and ‘Keyword List’ tools respectively.

These allow you to organize groups of keywords, review metrics such as search volume and keyword difficulty, and export keyword data for further analysis or client reporting.

Semrush goes further with its keyword list functionality, however, by providing topic clustering in its Keyword Strategy Builder.

This aims to help you identify keywords — based on a phrase that you enter — that can help you build up topical authority on a subject (search engines can reward sites that cover all aspects of a particular topic in depth).

Moz now provides some similar functionality in its Keyword Suggestions tool. Its ‘Topics Tree Map’ groups suggested keywords into related subject areas, making it easier to identify subtopics and explore clusters of relevant search terms.

However, this isn’t quite as developed as Semrush’s Keyword Strategy Builder from a content-planning point of view. Semrush’s tool is more explicitly designed to turn a seed topic into a structured set of keyword clusters that you can use to plan content around.

So, while both platforms can now help you group related keywords by topic, Semrush provides the more comprehensive clustering and content-planning functionality.

As with any automatically generated keyword cluster, however, it’s worth reviewing the suggestions carefully, as some can be off target.

Data sources for keyword research

One thing that’s worth noting with regard to both Moz and Semrush is that all the data they provide for keyword research is, generally speaking, based on Google search results.

I say ‘generally speaking’ because when it comes to rank tracking, there are more options available from both platforms.

Moz lets you look at how your site is ranking for particular keywords on other search engines — Bing and Yahoo — if you use its ‘Rank Checker’ tool (a feature that offers you a quick way to see where your site currently ranks for a given keyword).

And Semrush lets you perform rank tracking for Baidu and Bing:

Semrush and Moz’s main focus on tracking keywords for Google is understandable, as it absolutely dominates the search engine market — at time of writing in September 2026, 91%+ of all searches worldwide are carried out using it (source: Statcounter).

However, some users might appreciate search data from other sources — I’m thinking in particular of video content producers, who would find the presence of YouTube data in Moz or Semrush very helpful.

It’s also worth noting that keyword discovery and visibility aren’t limited to traditional search engines alone.

Both Semrush and Moz now provide AI prompt research and tracking tools, allowing you to identify prompts relevant to your brand and monitor how you appear in AI-generated answers.

This represents a significant expansion of what both platforms can do beyond conventional Google keyword research.

I’ll compare their AI visibility and prompt-tracking features in detail in the next section.

AI visibility tools in Semrush and Moz

AI-driven search is changing how people discover brands and content online. Rather than having to click through a list of conventional search results, users are increasingly getting synthesized answers from platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google’s AI-powered search experiences.

Accordingly, both Semrush and Moz now provide dedicated tools for measuring AI visibility — i.e., how prominently your brand and content appear in AI-generated responses.

And there’s a lot of overlap between the two platforms. Both let you:

There are some important differences in how they do all this, however. I’ll walk you through these now.

AI visibility and brand mentions

Moz’s main ‘Brand Visibility’ dashboard is particularly easy to understand. It shows you the percentage of tracked AI responses in which your brand appears, its average position within those responses, and how often it is mentioned before competing brands.

I particularly like Moz’s ‘average mention position’ metric here. This measures how early in an AI-generated response your brand first appears — so the lower the percentage, the better. For example, an average position of 25% means that your brand tends to receive its first mention around a quarter of the way through an AI response.

Semrush takes a broader approach with its ‘Visibility Overview’ dashboard. This gives you an overall AI Visibility score alongside data on mentions, citations and cited pages, and lets you break results down by AI platform and country.

(And, as I mentioned earlier, Semrush also integrates AI visibility data into its regular Domain Overview reports, making it easy to assess traditional SEO and AI search performance side by side.)

The platforms covered differ slightly between the two tools. Semrush provides AI visibility data for ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode and Gemini, while Moz tracks ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini and Perplexity.

So each has one notable source the other doesn’t currently include: Semrush covers Google AI Overviews, while Moz includes Perplexity.

Brand sentiment and perception

Both products also let you examine how AI platforms talk about your brand, rather than simply whether they mention it.

Moz provides an overall sentiment score, identifies the themes driving that score and compares sentiment with competing brands. It also lets you drill into individual “sentiment drivers” to see which aspects of a brand are being portrayed positively or negatively.

Semrush provides similar functionality through its ‘Perception’ and ‘Brand Performance’ reports, but its analysis goes considerably further.

Alongside overall sentiment and competitor comparisons, Semrush breaks perception down by specific feature categories associated with a brand — for example sustainability, product design, shopping experience, customer support, and pricing.

For each category, Semrush shows both the percentage of favorable sentiment and the number of times each brand is mentioned. This is particularly useful because it lets you distinguish between a feature that AI platforms describe positively — and one that actually plays a major role in how the brand is represented.

You can also compare these figures directly with competitor data. So, for example, you may find that your brand receives stronger sentiment for a particular feature — but that a rival is mentioned far more often in connection with it. This is a useful distinction when deciding where to focus your content or positioning efforts.

Overall, Moz gives you a very clear view of brand sentiment and the themes driving it, but Semrush provides the more granular brand-perception analysis, particularly when you want to understand which aspects of your business are shaping AI-generated perceptions and how your brand compares with competitors on each one.

Prompt research and tracking

Both tools also let you discover and track AI prompts.

Moz’s Prompt Suggestions tool takes a keyword or topic and generates a manageable list of questions that users might ask AI platforms about it. These can then be added directly to an AI Visibility dashboard for ongoing tracking.

This makes for straightforward prompt discovery: Moz gives you a very clear workflow where you simply enter a topic, review a focused set of suggested prompts and start tracking the relevant ones.

Semrush’s Prompt Research tool is considerably more powerful, however. It lets you explore very large collections of prompts grouped into topics and provides additional metrics including estimated AI volume, intent, frequently mentioned brands, and commonly cited source domains.

Semrush also publishes considerably more information about the scale of the data behind this research. It says its AI Search database contains more than 317 million unique prompts across 117 regional databases.

Moz doesn’t currently publish a directly comparable figure for the overall size of its AI prompt database, so it’s not possible to make a like-for-like comparison here — but Semrush is certainly more transparent about the scale of the dataset underpinning its prompt research.

In terms of how much prompt monitoring you can actually do, the two platforms are closely matched on allowances. Across their main paid plans, both let you track 50, 100 or 200 prompts, depending on the tier you choose.

There is an important difference in tracking frequency, though. Moz refreshes tracked prompt data weekly, while Semrush updates custom Prompt Tracking campaigns daily.

That arguably makes Semrush a better choice for fast-moving campaigns or for analyzing topics where changes in mentions, citations or positioning need to be spotted quickly. For more routine AI visibility monitoring, however, Moz’s weekly updates should be sufficient for many users.

Citation analysis

Both platforms let you investigate which websites AI tools use as sources.

Moz provides a particularly clear dedicated citation report showing total citations, unique cited pages and cited domains, along with whether your own domain is being cited. It also applies familiar Moz metrics such as Domain Authority and Spam Score to cited sources, making it easy to assess the apparent strength and quality of the domains influencing AI-generated answers.

Semrush provides similarly detailed citation data, but integrates it more deeply into its wider AI research tools. It lets you track citations and cited pages over time, see which domains are most frequently referenced in AI responses, compare your citation footprint with that of competitors, and identify source gaps where rival brands are being cited but you are not.

So which is better for AI visibility?

Since I last updated this comparison, Moz has added a full set of AI Research features covering brand visibility, sentiment, citations and prompt tracking. This closes what was previously a very significant gap between the two platforms, and in several areas I prefer the simplicity of Moz’s reporting.

Moz is also more generous when it comes to the number of AI Visibility campaigns you can run. Its Standard, Medium and Large plans include 1, 2 and 4 projects respectively, whereas Semrush includes just one AI Visibility project across its main plans.

Semrush remains the more comprehensive platform AI visibility overall, though. And its advantage becomes clearest when you move beyond monitoring into deeper research and optimization: its Prompt Research, Competitor Research, Narrative Drivers and AI-focused auditing tools give you considerably more ways to investigate why brands are appearing in AI results and what you can do to improve your own visibility.

Semrush also refreshes custom prompt tracking daily rather than weekly, and it is much more transparent about the scale of the dataset underpinning its AI research tools.

So, for straightforward AI visibility monitoring — particularly if you want to track several brands or sites — Moz is now a very credible option and is more generous in some respects. For deeper AI search research, faster monitoring and broader optimization work, however, Semrush still provides the stronger toolset.

Backlink analysis and building

How well a site performs in search results depends very much on how many backlinks — external sites linking to it — exist for the site in question.

So how Moz and Semrush help you understand your site’s backlink profile — and build new ones for it — is really important.

Backlink database size

With both Moz and Semrush, you can enter a domain name and view a list of all the backlinks to it that each tool can find.

And in order to provide this data to users, both Moz and Semrush maintain their own indices of the web. These contain a large number of domains and keywords.

Semrush and Moz are both fairly open about how much of this data they have — relevant figures are published on their respective websites.

As of September 2026, Semrush reports that there are 28.9 billion keywords, 43 trillion backlinks and 808 million domains in its database.

Moz currently states that it has 45.8 trillion backlinks, 1 billion domains and 8.7 trillion pages in its database, along with 1.25 billion keywords.

So, if these figures are accurate, it suggests that Moz and Semrush should surface roughly the same number of backlinks.

I wanted to put this theory to the test, however, so I did some domain analysis on the website builder and design tools that we typically cover in our ecommerce reviews.

I ran the relevant URLs through both Semrush and Moz to see how many referring domains both tools surfaced for each one. My results were as follows:

As you can see from the table above, it was pretty close — with Semrush providing more data for 6 queries, and Moz winning 4 of the contests.

Backlink reports

In terms of the backlink analysis itself, both Moz and Semrush give you lots of useful information about the backlinks that point to a domain, including breakdowns of:

Semrush also gives you some data that’s not present in Moz, including:

You also get a lot more filters in Semrush that you can use when examining backlink data. In the screenshot below, you can see that with Semrush, it’s possible to filter referring domains by status (active, new, lost etc.); time period; dofollow vs nofollow; industry category; and authority score.

In Moz, as the screenshot below highlights, you can only really filter by link type (dofollow, nofollow, redirect etc.) and link state (active or lost).

I also prefer the way that Semrush presents backlink data — as the screenshot below shows, a series of simple but attractive graphs spell out the key stats in a way that helps you digest them easily.

Clicking on these graphs typically takes you to the data tables they are based on; with Moz, you mostly see tables (some graphing is available, but it’s nowhere near as extensive as what’s provided by Semrush).

So, overall, when it comes to backlink reports, it’s a clear win for Semrush.

Backlink building

Backlink analysis is essential for getting an idea of:

But a key attraction of tools like Semrush and Moz is the facilities they provide you with to actually build links. After all, backlinks remain one of the key ingredients in securing a high search ranking.

So how do both products fare on that front?

Well, Moz and Semrush both provide you with ‘link intersect’ tools. Moz’s is called ‘Link Intersect’, and Semrush’s is called ‘Backlink Gap.’

These allow you to compare a URL from your website against a competitor’s, and give you an exportable list of websites that are currently linking to your competitor, but not to you.

You can then reach out to these website owners, asking for a backlink — and in doing so, ‘close the gap.’

Moz’s link intersect tool has an edge when it comes to the quantity of sites you can cross reference against each other — it allows you to compare your site’s backlinks to those of five others, while Semrush limits the comparison to four other websites.

However, I’d argue that overall, Semrush has the edge on Moz in the backlink building department, because in addition to providing suggestions based on a ‘link intersect’ approach, its dedicated ‘link building tool’ feature can also automatically surface link opportunities by examining the content on your domain.

This link building feature simply outputs a list of URLs from related websites that it might be worth approaching for a backlink. Not only this, but Semrush can also provide you with email addresses that are associated with those websites — and this saves you from having to look up contact information yourself.

What’s also great about this feature is that you’re not just working with a spreadsheet of URLs — you’re dealing with a more ‘CRM’ style interface, with each domain listed as a ‘domain prospect’.

You can click on a button beside each domain prospect to move it into different stages of a link-building pipeline, and send outreach emails directly within the Semrush interface (by connecting a mailbox — Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo etc.). This is a fantastic feature, and there’s nothing comparable in Moz.

Overall, both Moz and Semrush give you good backlink analysis functionality — but for me, because of its automated approach to link building, and its excellent CRM-style backlink building tool, the winner here is Semrush.

Broken link analysis

Broken link building is a pretty important SEO tactic.

It involves a three-step process:

This approach helps you to build up new backlinks to your content — and the more backlinks that point to your website (generally speaking), the better your content performs in search results.

Oddly, broken link building is not something that’s particularly easy to do in Moz — you have to run an ‘inbound links’ report on the site you want to examine for broken links, export the results, go through their status codes (with a 404 status code indicating a broken link), search for a relevant site owner’s contact details online, and finally, send an outreach message from your email program.

The broken link building process is easier in Semrush — you can run an inbound link report and then filter it to get an accurate list of broken backlinks.

Importantly, Semrush lets you identify broken outbound links too (Moz doesn’t facilitate this at all). If your site has a lot of broken outbound links, this can indicate to search engines that your content is out of date — and thus not worthy of ranking too highly!

Ultimately, because it’s easier to perform both inbound and outbound link analysis with Semrush, it’s a win for Semrush in this area.

Backlink auditing — finding toxic links

Semrush provides a metric — an ‘overall toxicity score‘ — to help you identify poor-quality links (i.e., spammy links that can lead to you being penalized in search results).

You can output a list of these links, and then upload them to Google in a ‘disavow’ file (this asks Google to ignore them).

Where possible, Semrush also gives you contact details for the owner of a toxic link, so that you can contact them and request a removal before going down the disavowal route.

Moz does let you find toxic links too (via its ‘Spam Score’ report), but a more convoluted process is involved. You have to export all your links into a spreadsheet first, and then assess them manually for toxicity. No contact details for any toxic links are provided by Moz.

So overall, when it comes to identifying toxic links, it’s another win for Semrush.

However, you should note that to access toxic link reports in Semrush, you will be required to set up a ‘project’ — and, as mentioned earlier, limits apply to the number of these that you can run at once.

Moz, by contrast, lets you generate a spam score for any website without requiring you to use up a project slot.

Site auditing

Both Moz and Semrush provide site auditing features that allow you to evaluate how well your site is performing from a technical SEO and on-page SEO perspective.

In Semrush, the site auditing tool is called — appropriately! — ‘Site Audit,’ and Moz’s is labeled ‘Site Crawl.’

During a site audit, both tools will look out for issues which might be having a negative effect on your search ranking, including:

Both products provide you with a host of really useful suggestions, but I’d argue that Semrush comes out top in the site auditing department.

Its site audit tool is considerably easier to use than the Moz equivalent, giving you all the information you need in one place. And it gives you more information too: for example warnings when structured data is incorrect, JavaScript isn’t minified or hreflang tags are not looking right.

More recently, Semrush has also begun incorporating an ‘AI Search Health’ score into its auditing workflow. This is designed to give you a high-level indication of how well your site and content are performing in AI-driven search experiences.

In Moz, as with its domain analysis tools, it feels as though getting the information you need involves more clicking around the place — you have to flick between a few different sections in the navigation to get at the info (an ‘on-demand crawl’ section, a ‘redirects issues’ section, a ‘page grader’ etc.).

You can definitely surface some really useful technical SEO data with Moz too, however — I particularly like its ‘on-page grader’ tool, which allows you to enter a page’s URL and a keyword and view a very clear list of things you need to do to improve that page’s chances of ranking for that keyword.

(Significantly, you don’t need to use up a project slot to use this feature.)

It’s not quite as good as Semrush’s on-page SEO checker, however, which goes through your whole site (not just one page) and gives you a list of actionable tips for improvement for each page, in order of priority.

These can include suggestions on: 

…and much more.

And, when an issue is identified, Semrush gives you the option to send it to project management software Trello (or, via Zapier, another content management tool), so that your team can work on resolving it.

The Semrush site audit tool is extremely easy to use, and is a really great tool to have in your online visibility arsenal.

The bottom line on site auditing is that both Moz and Semrush give you a substantial amount of high-quality information that you can use to make big improvements to your site’s technical SEO and on-page SEO.

I would argue, however, that Semrush — as is the case with much of the other SEO and AI visibility information it provides — puts more of it in one place, displays things more coherently, and gives you a quicker understanding of the changes you need to make.

Interface and ease of use

When it comes to interfaces, I feel that Semrush’s menus are laid out in a more logical fashion than Moz’s, and its dashboards seem to group pieces of information together in a more coherent way.

And, if you like data visualization, the Semrush approach — with its big emphasis on graphs — will definitely appeal too. With Semrush, you get a really quick ‘at-a-glance’ understanding of SEO information — but in Moz, you often have to do more digging, or clicking about the place, to get at the data you need.

That’s not to say that the Moz interface is particularly hard to use — it’s just not as slick or intuitive as Semrush’s.

Semrush also gives you more contextual help — every piece of data has an icon beside it highlighting what the information provided means; and any error identified by a site audit is accompanied by a ‘Why and how to fix it’ link which, when clicked, provides you with very ‘actionable’ information about your problem, along with potential resolutions (see screenshot below for an example).

But the area where Semrush definitely wins hands down in the ease-of-use stakes is its site auditing feature. This is very simple to use and outputs a really easy-to-follow set of instructions for improving your performance in search results.

And, if the idea of carrying out link building without exporting a lot of Excel spreadsheets appeals to you, then Semrush is definitely a better option. Its CRM-style approach to outreach means that you can work ‘in the box,’ keeping all your data within the product and emailing site owners directly from it.

So for me, in the ease-of-use department, the winner is definitely Semrush.

Pricing and value for money

There’s no getting away from it: compared to a lot of other business apps, Moz and Semrush are expensive (Semrush especially so).

That’s understandable however, as you’re not just paying for functionality, you’re paying for access to a lot of data, including some pretty serious competitive intelligence.

Pricing for Semrush is structured around four core plans, all bundled under its flagship ‘Semrush One’ product:

You can save up to 17% on these plans by paying upfront for a year, and there’s also a free trial for the platform available.

Moz Pro comes in 4 varieties:

A 20% discount is available if you pay upfront for a year.

If you’d like to try any of the plans out, you can do so via a free 7-day Moz trial.

The key thing you’ll note from the pricing information above is that you can get going with Moz much more cheaply than Semrush. This is one of Moz’s advantages over its rival — the platform lets you access a lot of great competitive intelligence and dip your toes into the world of SEO at a much lower price point than Semrush.

But it’s crucial not to only look at the headline pricing figures of each tool — it’s important to understand how much ‘bang for the buck’ both give you. Let’s dig a bit deeper into that, by looking at some of the key limitations on both platforms’ plans.

Number of users

By default, all Semrush plans only come with one user account or ‘seat’.

You have to pay an additional monthly fee to add additional users to a plan — $45 per month per ‘Starter’ user, $80 per ‘Pro+’ user and $100 per ‘Advanced’ user.

Moz is a bit more generous when it comes to users. Although like Semrush its cheapest plan only provides one seat, its ‘Medium’ and ‘Large’ plans come with additional ones (two and three respectively).

Furthermore, the monthly fee per additional user is more reasonable than Semrush’s: it’s $49 per user per month, irrespective of plan type.

Projects

Both Moz and Semrush place limits on the number of projects (or ‘campaigns’) you can create.

This matters because some important functionality on both products is ONLY available if you are working within a project — for example, site auditing, toxic link analysis and rank tracking.

So, for users needing to perform those sort of tasks on a bunch of different websites, project limits can become a headache — although they don’t render multi-website entirely impossible, these caps make things more fiddly than you might like. You’ll normally have to keep a project slot free for any ‘ad hoc’ work.

With Moz, projects (known as ‘campaigns’ in Moz-speak) are capped at 1 on its $49 plan; 3 on the $99 plan; 10 on the $179 plan; and 25 on the $299 plan.

You can increase these limits at a cost of just $10 per month per project, however, and they are negotiable on the Moz Pro Enterprise plan.

Semrush’s equivalent limits are 5 on its $199 plan, 15 on its $299 plan and 40 on its $549 plan; its Enterprise plan lets you work with 50+ projects.

Unlike Moz though, you can’t increase these limits by paying an extra monthly fee (if you need higher limits, you’ll need to negotiate a custom plan with Semrush).

There’s an additional project-related difference worth noting for users interested in AI visibility tracking. Moz includes one AI Visibility project on Standard, two on Medium and four on Large, whereas Semrush includes just one AI Visibility project across its main plans.

So although Semrush generally gives you more standard SEO projects, Moz is actually more generous if you need to monitor AI visibility for multiple brands or websites.

API access

An API, or Application Programming Interface, is a piece of software that acts as a bridge between different apps, letting them pass data to each other.

Semrush and Moz both permit access to their APIs, letting you import SEO data into custom dashboards and reports, or incorporate it into your own applications.

But Moz lets you do this at a much lower price point — in fact you can access its API from just $20 per month. Its full API pricing is as follows:

Semrush only provides API access if you’re on its ‘Advanced’ plan, which involves a $549/mo commitment. And you then have to purchase ‘API units’ separately to use the API. Pricing for these is not publicly available — you need to contact Semrush for a quotation. The bottom line here is that at least for small to medium use cases, API access is much cheaper with Moz (and the pricing for it is certainly a lot more transparent).

Semrush toolkits and add-ons

There are quite a few Semrush features that are not available without purchasing an additional toolkit.

These include:

The ‘SEO Classic’ toolkit is the lowest-cost way to access Semrush’s core, traditional SEO toolkit. Pricing for the ‘SEO Classic’ toolkit varies by tier (reflecting the older ‘Pro,’ ‘Guru’ and ‘Business’ structure), but plans typically start at around $139 per month, with higher tiers available for users who need increased limits and reporting allowances.

The other toolkits come with monthly fees ranging from $20 to $289, depending on the tool and level of access required. For example, ‘Semrush Local’ starts at around $30 per month, while ‘Traffic & Market’ costs $289 per month.

In addition to purchasing one of the Semrush toolkits discussed above, you can also add functionality to your Semrush account by purchasing a third-party app from the Semrush app center.

60+ apps are currently available, with a focus that’s chiefly on analytics and data, and they range in cost from $10 to $249 per user, per month.

Key apps in here include Influencer Analytics, an app that helps you identify relevant influencer/content creator partners for your services, and AdClarity, an app that gives you a holistic view of your competitors’ advertising activity across several different advertising channels (display, social, video etc.).

(There’s also a few free apps available — these include an accessibility checker, a customer persona creator app and a local listings checker).

Moz doesn’t yet provide a similar app store, but depending on your needs, you can use its API to integrate it with other applications.

Reports per day

Semrush is much more generous when it comes to the number of reporting requests you can make each day: even on its entry-level plan, you can pull 3,000 domain analysis / keyword research reports per day.

Moz by contrast places much stricter limits on reporting — on its starter plan you can run just 75 keyword or backlink queries per month.

So when it comes to keyword research, Semrush definitely provides a lot more value for money.

Crawl limits

Both Semrush and Moz place limits on the number of web pages you can crawl for technical SEO errors (as part of your campaigns’ site audits).

In Moz, the limits are considerably more generous than the Semrush equivalents. For example, on the ‘Standard’ plan, you can crawl around 400,000 pages per project, per month; the equivalent Semrush plan limit (for ‘Semrush Starter’) is 100,000.

This disparity in crawl limits continues across all plans. So if you are dealing with a lot of very large websites, Moz may be a better fit for you.

Rank tracking

Rank tracking (also known as position tracking or SERP tracking) lets you track a website’s daily rankings for a custom set of target keywords.

When it comes to entry-level plans, Semrush’s rank tracking limits are a bit more generous than Moz’s: on the Semrush ‘Starter’ plan you can track 500 target keywords, while Moz’s equivalent plan limits you to 300. With the other Moz and Semrush plans, the limits are fairly similar.

However, Moz does have a bit of an edge when it comes to rank tracking in that it also gives you an ‘on-demand’ rank checker that lets you perform 200 ‘ad hoc’ rank tracking queries per day.

Pay-per-click (PPC) data

If you’re working on a mix of SEO and PPC projects, you’ll find that Semrush represents much better value. This is simply because it gives you access to comprehensive PPC data, whereas Moz doesn’t.

Semrush includes detailed CPC competition and distribution data, live ads and PPC campaign planning tools in its dedicated ‘Advertising research’ section (pictured above). There isn’t really anything comparable available from Moz Pro.

Customer support

When it comes to customer support, Semrush provides the more comprehensive offering. It gives you access to three channels of support: phone, live chat, and email. Moz, by contrast, offers two: email support and live chat.

Both tools provide you with easy access to live chat when you’re logged into your account. As for Semrush’s phone support, this can be accessed via a ‘contact us’ button in the footer of the company’s website.

In the case of Moz, support materials are only available in English. But Semrush provides them in 14 different languages.

User feedback and reviews

So far you’ve heard my thoughts on Semrush vs Moz. But I thought it might be helpful to share some user feedback on the two products too.

The table below summarizes user ratings from several well-known software review platforms (figures correct at the time of writing — September 2026). Overall, Semrush holds a narrow lead, with an average user rating of 4.47 out of 5, compared to 4.25 for Moz Pro.

Moz vs Semrush: the verdict

Technically speaking, Semrush is still the stronger overall SEO platform. It has a much larger keyword database, provides considerably more features, comes with more generous reporting limits and offers a broader set of tools for areas such as link-building, competitive research, PPC analysis and content optimization.

It also remains the stronger platform for AI search research and optimization. Moz now provides a genuinely useful AI research suite — with brand visibility tracking, sentiment analysis, citation reporting, prompt suggestions and prompt monitoring — and in some areas I actually prefer the simplicity of its reporting.

But Semrush goes further. Its AI Visibility tools give you deeper prompt research, more extensive competitor analysis, narrative and perception data, AI-focused auditing and a wider set of recommendations for improving your presence in AI-generated answers. Its custom prompt tracking is also updated daily rather than weekly.

That said, Moz has some meaningful advantages of its own.

The biggest is price. Its ‘Starter’ plan costs just $49 per month, making it much cheaper to access a professional SEO toolkit than Semrush, whose main paid plans start considerably higher. The functionality available on Moz Starter is more limited, but it can still be enough to get a small business SEO project off the ground.

Moz is also more generous in some specific areas. Its Medium and Large plans include multiple AI Visibility projects, making it easier to monitor several brands or websites, and its API access is available at a much lower price point than Semrush’s.

So, in broad terms:

I’ll leave you with a summary regarding the relative pros and cons of each — and do feel free to leave any questions in the comments section below. We read them all and will do our best to help.

Alternatives to Semrush and Moz

Semrush and Moz are by no means the only options when it comes to SEO platforms! Some well-known alternative SEO tools include:

We’ve yet to review all of these, but we do have an Ahrefs review, an Ahrefs vs Semrush comparison, an SE Ranking vs Semrush comparison, a Moz vs SE Ranking shootout and a GrowthBar review available.

You might also like to read our Semrush vs Ubersuggest comparison and our Ubersuggest review.

Our Semrush review, Semrush vs SpyFu blog post, Semrush vs Similarweb comparison and our Semrush vs SpyFu video comparison will also give you a sense of how Semrush stacks up against other leading competitors.