Comparing Semrush vs. Moz? Both help teams research keywords, audit sites, analyze backlinks, and track rankings. While several core features overlap, the more useful comparison is how much data sits behind each feature and how far each platform extends beyond SEO into AI search and other marketing workflows.

Semrush is a brand visibility platform that manages SEO and AI visibility in one workflow. Moz is an SEO-focused platform best known for its Domain Authority (DA) metric and its SEO education resources.

This guide is for marketers and SEO teams deciding between the two, whether you’re buying your first platform or thinking about switching.

Moz vs. Semrush at a glance

Moz is an SEO-focused platform with AI visibility features included from $99 per month. The platform includes a large backlink index and generous site crawl allowances.

Semrush covers the same SEO foundations with a larger keyword and AI research database, daily tracking, and additional toolkits for marketing beyond SEO.

Semrush SEO plans start at $139.95 per month, while combined SEO and AI visibility plans start at $199 per month.

Area

Semrush

Moz

Best for

Marketing teams that want deep SEO and AI research and workflows alongside tools for other marketing channels

SEOs and agencies that want a focused SEO platform with AI visibility at a lower starting price

Key strengths

Larger keyword database: 29.2B+ keywords across 142 international markets
317M+ prompt database for AI visibility research
Daily rank and AI prompt tracking
Specialized toolkits and add-ons beyond just SEO and AI search
45.5T-link index across 1B domains
Crawl allowances from 400K to 5M pages per month for auditing large sites
Includes DA, a commonly referenced SEO metric

Limitations

Higher starting price ($199/month) for combined SEO and dedicated AI visibility
Specialist marketing toolkits cost extra
Lower crawl allowances on some comparable plans
Smaller published keyword dataset (1.25B+ keyword suggestions compared with Semrush’s 29.2B+ keywords)
Weekly keyword and AI prompt tracking, compared with Semrush’s daily updates
AI prompt suggestions in Moz Pro and AI Explorer, but no dedicated prompt research database comparable to Semrush’s 317M+ prompt database
Fewer marketing workflows beyond SEO and AI visibility

Pricing

Starts at $139.95/month for SEO; AI visibility included with SEO from $199/month

Starts at $99/month with SEO and AI visibility included. Standalone AI visibility is also available through Moz AI Explorer, starting at $45/month.

Choose Semrush if you:

Want extensive keyword and competitor research across multiple countries
Want to research AI-search demand before deciding which topics and prompts to track
Need keyword rankings and custom AI prompts updated daily
Want paid search competitor research alongside SEO
Expect to expand into content, local, social, or digital PR work on the same platform

Choose Moz if you:

Want SEO and AI visibility on one plan at a lower entry price
Prioritize backlink research
Manage several websites and need higher campaign allowances at a mid-tier price
Crawl large sites and need generous monthly audit allowances

How does Semrush compare to Moz at a high level?

Semrush is a broad brand visibility platform, while Moz is a focused SEO platform. Both include AI visibility, but they package everything around it differently.

The biggest gap is where SEO and AI search overlap. Semrush's keyword database is over 23 times larger than Moz's (29.2B+ vs. 1.25B+), and its keyword rankings and AI prompt tracking update daily rather than weekly. That means you’ll have more data to find opportunities and track your daily movement across keywords and prompts that matter the most to your business.

Semrush also brings SEO and AI visibility together using its own search data and infrastructure. As more AI visibility platforms turn to external providers for SEO data, this becomes an important advantage.

Beyond SEO and AI visibility, Semrush offers dedicated toolkits for market intelligence, advertising, local marketing, social media, and digital PR. For larger teams, Semrush also provides enterprise-level solutions with more dedicated support.

Moz Pro combines core SEO workflows with AI visibility, while Moz AI Explorer offers AI visibility as a standalone product starting at $45 per month. Moz Local, STAT, Moz API, and Moz Data cover other specialized needs as separate products.

In practice, Semrush leads on keyword and AI research data, tracking frequency, and the range of marketing capabilities. Moz leads on backlink index size, crawl allowances, prompt tracking volume on comparable entry-level plans, and starting price.

Semrush overview

Semrush offers core plans that cover SEO and AI visibility, with additional toolkits for advertising, digital PR, social media, local marketing, and market intelligence.

Its research data includes 29.2B+ keywords across 142 geographic databases, 43T+ backlinks, and 317M+ AI prompts.

One of Semrush’s core strengths is how its tools connect into a single workflow.

To show what that looks like in practice, we ran amerisleep.com through Semrush to trace a traffic decline to the page driving most of the loss, then took action on it.

First, the decline. Domain Overview estimated 98.1K monthly organic visits, down 18% month over month.

We clicked the 98.1K traffic figure to open the Organic Rankings report. Navigate to “Position Changes” tab and check “Top Page Changes” to see which URLs were responsible.

Amerisleep’s mattress size chart and dimensions guide was still generating 54.1K monthly visits, but had lost 19.6K over the previous 28 days.

To investigate the URL further, we clicked “View full report,” which opened the Top Pages tool.

Top Pages showed that the page accounted for 55.15% of Amerisleep’s estimated organic traffic and ranked for 10.3K keywords. Semrush also tied the page to 116 AI prompts and 331 referring domains.

That made it a strong candidate for a content update or full rewrite rather than a new page.

From here, we clicked “Generate SEO brief” below the URL, which launched a brief-building workflow for the content update. The workflow surfaced competing articles we could select as examples, then guided us through setting up the brief’s keywords, structure, and metadata.

In a few minutes, we spotted an underperforming piece of content and built a plan to improve it. That’s just one small example of how Semrush offers connected workflows to quickly go from research to action.

A few more features stand out:

Authority Score measures more than just links.While Moz offers DA to measure a domain’s backlink strength, Semrush Authority score is a compound metric that calculates authority from multiple angles (link power, spam signals, and organic traffic).
AI search research goes beyond prompt tracking. Semrush’s 317M+ prompt database lets teams research AI prompts, questions, and topic opportunities before deciding what’s worth monitoring.
Keyword rankings and custom AI prompt tracking update daily. That matters for teams that need to catch visibility changes sooner than a weekly update allows.
Research can extend beyond SEO. Semrush offers dedicated toolkits that extend into advertising, content, local marketing, social media, and digital PR. These subscriptions cost extra.
Semrush MCP is included with the core SEO + AI Search plans. You can query Semrush data through compatible AI assistants instead of working entirely inside the Semrush UI.

That said, Semrush has some limitations:

Traffic & Market, Advertising, Social, Local, AI PR, and other specialist toolkits offer extended workflows but require add-ons to your subscription
Combined SEO and dedicated AI visibility starts at $199 per month, compared with $99 per month for Moz Pro Standard

Moz overview

Moz Pro is a focused SEO and AI visibility platform with a particularly large link index.

Moz reports 45.5T links across 1B domains, alongside 1.25B keyword suggestions in Keyword Explorer.

One of Moz’s core strengths is turning backlink data into practical link-building opportunities.

To show what that looks like in practice, we used Link Intersect, which finds websites linking to your competitors but not to you.

You can compare your site against up to five competitors, then sort the results by DA (Moz’s estimate of relative ranking strength), Spam Score (which flags patterns associated with lower-quality sites), and the number of competitors each site links to.

That helps narrow a large backlink dataset into a more useful prospect list.

From there, you can open the referring page to understand why the competitor earned the link, then save promising domains for outreach or further review.

Moz recommends treating Spam Score as a signal for further investigation rather than proof that a site is spammy.

Moz also includes AI visibility inside Moz Pro.

Its Standard plan tracks 150 prompts weekly across ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode, and Perplexity, showing whether your brand appears, which sources are cited, and how the brand is described.

Medium increases the allowance to 300 prompts, while Large includes 600.

A few other capabilities stand out:

Moz has a larger published backlink index than Semrush. Its 45.5T-link index spans 1B domains, compared with Semrush’s 43T+ backlink database.
SEO and AI visibility are included from $99 per month. That gives teams a lower-cost entry point if they want both in the same product.
Crawl allowances are generous. Moz Pro includes 400K crawled pages per month on Standard, 2M on Medium, and 5M on Large.
Moz offers separate products for more specialized requirements. STAT supports higher-volume rank tracking, while Moz API and Moz Data provide programmatic and large-scale access to search data.

There are a few areas where Moz offers less depth:

Moz reports 1.25B keyword suggestions, considerably fewer than the 29.2B+ keywords in Semrush's database.
Keyword rankings and AI prompts update weekly, while Semrush supports daily tracking.
Moz Pro tracks keyword rankings only through position 20. Anything lower appears as “21+,” making it harder to measure ranking improvements beyond the first two pages of search results.
Moz offers AI prompt suggestions to help identify relevant prompts, but lacks an equivalent to Semrush's 317M+ prompt database for researching AI-search demand at scale.
Moz Pro focuses on SEO and AI visibility, so teams that need advertising, market intelligence, content, social media, or digital PR tools will need other platforms.

How do Semrush features compare to Moz features?

Workflow

Semrush

Moz

Keyword database size

29.2B+ keywords across 142 global markets

1.25B+ keyword suggestions in Moz Keyword Explorer

Keyword research features

Personalized keyword difficulty, topical authority, ability to refresh metrics on-demand

Monthly search volume, keyword difficulty, organic CTR, search intent, and SERP analysis

Backlink analysis

43T+ backlinks

45.5T backlinks across 1B domains

Rank tracking

500-5,000 keywords, updated daily

300-3,000 keywords, updated weekly

AI prompt research

317M+ prompts across 117 regional databases

Prompt suggestions and AI Overview data within keyword research

AI brand analysis

Visibility, share of voice, mentions, sentiment, narrative drivers, cited sources, and recommended actions

Visibility dashboards with citation and sentiment data

AI prompt tracking

50-200 custom prompts, updated daily

150-600 custom prompts, updated weekly

Technical SEO auditing

100K–1M pages crawled per month, plus AI search accessibility checks and JavaScript rendering (on select plans)

400K-5M pages crawled per month

Website authority metric

Authority Score, a compound metric based on link power, spam signals, and organic traffic

DA, a metric to measure quantity and quality of backlinks

Content optimization

Content research and on-page recommendations, with dedicated Content Toolkit for additional cost

AI Content Briefs (2-50 per month by plan), but no built-in content writing tool

Reporting and API

Scheduled reports and MCP on all paid plans; API on top tier

Reporting in Moz Pro, branded reports on higher plans; API sold separately

Unique features

Outreach workflows, toolkits for content, advertising, local, social, digital PR, and market intelligence

Proprietary metrics including Domain Authority, Page Authority, Brand Authority, and Spam Score. And MozBar browser extension

Both platforms also offer options for larger teams and more specialized requirements.

Semrush Enterprise adds custom limits, large-scale AI prompt tracking, multi-million-page crawling, and governance controls for teams managing multiple brands and regions. Pricing is custom, and teams can request a demo to see if it's a good fit.

Moz serves larger teams through separate products: STAT for high-volume rank tracking, Moz API for programmatic access, and Moz Data for large-scale search datasets.

Semrush vs. Moz pricing

Moz Pro Standard includes SEO and AI visibility for $99 per month. Semrush’s SEO plans start at $139.95 per month, while plans combining SEO and AI visibility start at $199 per month. Semrush also offers more tracked keywords and daily updates, compared with Moz’s weekly updates.

Prices below use monthly billing. See Semrush pricing and Moz pricing for current plans.

Pricing area

Semrush

Moz

Starting price

$139.95/month for SEO plan

$49/month for limited one-site plan

SEO + AI visibility

Starts at $199/month

Starts at $99/month

Free plan

Available with daily usage limits across SEO and AI visibility tools

Free Moz community account with monthly usage limits

Free trial

7-day free trial

Websites

Starter includes 5 websites

Standard includes 3 tracked sites

Keyword tracking

Starter includes 500 keywords tracked daily

Standard includes 300 keywords tracked weekly

AI prompt tracking

Starter includes 50 custom prompts tracked daily

Standard includes 150 prompts tracked weekly

Site crawling

Starter includes 100K pages per month

Standard includes 400K pages per month

Annual billing discount

Up to 17%

Up to 20%

API access

Available from Advanced plan

Sold separately through Moz API

Enterprise options

Custom pricing with custom limits, tracking, integrations, API, and governance controls

STAT, Moz API, and Moz Data priced separately

At the entry level, Moz Pro Standard costs $100 less per month than Semrush Starter with AI visibility. Moz allows you to track 150 AI prompts weekly, compared with 50 prompts tracked daily on Semrush.

For keyword tracking, Semrush offers 500 keywords updated daily, compared with 300 updated weekly on Moz. However, Moz offers more crawl capacity, at 400K pages per month versus 100K on Semrush.

Semrush’s advantage lies in its tracking frequency and research depth. Starter includes daily keyword and prompt tracking alongside dedicated AI visibility research and brand analysis. Higher Semrush tiers add historical data, content optimization, multi-location tracking, API access, and larger limits as you scale.

Semrush vs. Moz: Which should you choose?

Choose Semrush if you want to go deeper into SEO and AI-search research and connect that research to a broader set of marketing workflows.

Its larger keyword database, 317M+ AI prompt database, daily keyword and prompt tracking, and additional toolkits make it better suited to teams that need to identify opportunities, understand why visibility is changing, and act on those insights across search and other marketing channels.

If you want a focused SEO platform with AI visibility at a lower starting price, Moz may be a better fit.

It also offers generous crawl allowances and higher tracking limits on some plans, which can work well for teams whose needs are primarily centered on SEO monitoring and site auditing.

Ultimately, the choice comes down to scope. Moz is a solid fit for teams with focused SEO needs, while Semrush offers a full brand visibility platform that brings SEO and AI search together, with data across 142 markets and dedicated toolkits for content, advertising, and other marketing channels as your needs grow.