Semrush vs. Ahrefs vs. Moz: When it comes to SEO tools, you’ve probably heard of these three tools. But which one is truly the best?
These are giants that offer similar features: keyword research tools, competitor research, SEO tracking, backlink monitoring, and more. So, how do you choose?
Having used all three extensively, we’ve got some strong opinions, but it really comes down to what you need. If you are new to SEO, it can be hard to tell them apart at first. But once you dig deeper, the differences are clear. 😉
Curious to know which tool performs best in each area?
We will break down the features of Semrush, Ahrefs, and Moz, highlighting what each does well and where they fall short. Keep reading to know which one suits your needs and why!
What Is Semrush?
Launched in 2008 by a dedicated group of SEO and tech specialists, Semrush has evolved into a global leader, boasting a massive database of over 20 billion keywords. From startups to global enterprises, it’s widely used. 🏢
Semrush spans a broad spectrum, from SEO and content marketing to competitive analysis, social media, and advertising—centralizing and streamlining your entire digital marketing strategy.
Its power lies in its data-driven approach, helping users discover opportunities, set benchmarks, and track progress while keeping an eye on competitors.
Though beginners might need some time to get accustomed, the platform’s intuitive interface and vast resources make it accessible to all experience levels.
With Semrush, you’re equipped with the tools to make informed decisions and boost your digital presence.
Semrush Features
Semrush offers an extensive suite of tools to support every facet of SEO, advertising, and social media. Here’s why it’s unique:
- Keyword Difficulty & Variations: Identifies competitive keywords and suggests alternatives to enhance your content and reach.
- Backlink Tools: Provides in-depth analysis of backlink profiles, assessing link quality, types, and growth opportunities.
- Competitor Backlink Insights: Reveals competitor backlink strategies to help you pinpoint valuable link-building prospects.
- On-Page SEO Audit: Identifies on-site issues and offers actionable fixes to improve your site’s SEO health and performance.
- Traffic Estimates: Accurately estimates traffic, highlighting top-performing pages and key traffic sources.
- Domain Comparison: Analyzes your site versus competitors, revealing strengths and areas for improvement.
- PPC Insights: Dissects pay-per-click campaigns, providing competitor ad strategy and keyword targeting analysis.
Semrush Pricing
Semrush’s powerful features come with a premium price tag. It offers tiered plans, each providing varying levels of access tailored to your specific needs and budget:
- Pro Plan: $139.95 per month, 5 projects, tracking up to 500 keywords, and checking up to 10,000 results per report.
- Guru Plan: $249.95 per month, 15 projects, tracking up to 1,500 keywords, and checking up to 30,000 results per report.
- Business Plan: $499.95 per month, 40 projects, tracking up to 5,000 keywords, and checking up to 50,000 results per report.
Semrush also offers add-ons like Local SEO tools and trends analysis, providing flexibility, though they come with additional costs.
What Is Moz?
Moz is an all-in-one SEO tool designed to help users improve their website’s search engine rankings. It’s widely used for keyword research, site audits, backlink analysis, and tracking rankings.
Moz’s intuitive interface and robust features make it a favorite among SEO professionals, particularly for its ability to uncover SEO opportunities and monitor website performance. Users appreciate its keyword explorer, link-building tools, and detailed reports.
Many online reviews highlight its user-friendly design and strong customer support. People often mention its comprehensive suite of tools, but some wish for even more advanced features for larger-scale projects.
Moz Features
Moz stands out with its strong focus on authority tools, like Link Explorer and Page Optimization, helping users build and track SEO authority:
- Keyword Explorer: Provides deep insights into keyword opportunities and search volumes, ideal for content strategies.
- Link Explorer: Allows users to analyze backlink profiles, uncover link-building opportunities, and monitor link health.
- Site Crawl: Helps identify technical SEO issues, offering detailed reports to improve website performance.
- Rank Tracking Tools: Tracks keyword rankings over time, providing insights into your website’s SEO performance.
- Page Optimization: Offers actionable recommendations to optimize individual pages for better search rankings.
- Custom Reports: Lets users create tailored reports, offering flexibility in data presentation for client projects.
- On-Page Grader: Evaluates how well individual pages are optimized for target keywords and SEO best practices.
- Moz Local: Optimizes local SEO by tracking business listings and ensuring consistency across directories.
Moz Pricing
Although it’s considered pretty costly, Moz offers flexible pricing plans, ranging from basic to advanced, with features tailored for individuals, small businesses, and larger enterprises:
- Starter Plan: $39 per moth, 1 user, 1 tracked site, 50 tracked keywords, 20K pages crawled.
- Standard Plan: $79 per month, 1 user, 3 tracked sites, 300 tracked keywords, 400K pages crawled.
- Medium Plan: $143 per month, 2 users, 10 tracked sites, 1,500 tracked keywords, 2M pages crawled.
- Large Plan: $239 per month, 3 users, 25 tracked sites, 3,000 tracked keywords, 5M pages crawled.
What Is Ahrefs?
Founded in 2011, Ahrefs has emerged as a leading name in the SEO industry, recognized for its extensive database and advanced crawling capabilities. With one of the most active SEO bots in the market, Ahrefs crawls billions of pages daily, indexing millions of pages each minute.
It provides detailed insights into backlinks, keywords, and competitors’ keyword strategies, offering powerful tools for site exploration, content analysis, rank tracking, and keyword research.
While Ahrefs may be complex for beginners, its comprehensive educational resources make it accessible. Additionally, its ownership of the Yep search engine further solidifies its role in the SEO space. Ahrefs is ideal for users with some SEO experience, offering in-depth features to conduct thorough audits, monitor link profiles, and discover growth opportunities.
Ahrefs Features
Ahrefs is an extensive SEO platform with a wide array of features. Here are some of the key tools:
- Keyword Explorer: Helps uncover relevant keywords, search volume, and competition analysis.
- Content Explorer: Finds trending content and identifies high-performing topics across industries.
- Site Explorer: Provides insights into competitors’ backlinks, top-performing content, and keywords.
- Rank Tracker: Tracks keyword performance over time, offering insights into ranking trends.
- Backlink Checker: Analyzes the quality and quantity of backlinks pointing to a site.
- Link Intersect: Compares backlink profiles to uncover new link-building opportunities.
- Competitor Analysis: Offers insights into competitors’ strategies and organic search traffic.
- Content Gap: Helps identify untapped topics by comparing competitor keyword rankings.
Ahrefs Pricing
Ahrefs offers four pricing tiers designed to accommodate various business needs:
- Lite Plan: $129/month, 5 projects, 6 months of history, 750 tracked keywords, and 100,000 crawl credits.
- Standard Plan: $249/month, 20 projects, 2 years of history, 2,000 tracked keywords, and 500,000 crawl credits.
- Advanced Plan: $449/month, 50 projects, 5 years of history, 5,000 tracked keywords, and 1.5M crawl credits.
- Enterprise Plan: $14,990/year, 100 projects, unlimited history, 10,000 tracked keywords, and 5M crawl credits.
Certain features like the report builder and content marketing toolkit are available as add-ons.
Features Face-Off: Semrush, Moz, or Ahrefs?
Semrush, Moz, and Ahrefs all offer powerful SEO tools with many similarities, but small key differences can drastically impact your daily SEO routine and results. We’ll dive into how their features, ease of use, pricing, and overall usefulness stack up.
1. Keyword Research
Semrush’s Keyword Magic Tool provides a considerable database for uncovering related keywords, long-tail opportunities, and niche markets.
It evaluates keyword difficulty, PPC data, ad traffic, and top-ranking domains, helping users refine SEO strategies by identifying valuable keywords for both organic and pay per click campaigns.
Moz’s Keyword Explorer allows users to find valuable keywords using metrics like search volume, keyword difficulty, and opportunity scores.
The tool highlights the potential for ranking, suggesting related terms, and offering keyword analysis to help users improve their content strategy and SEO performance.
Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer delivers keyword insights across nine search engines, including Google, Bing, and YouTube. It provides in-depth metrics like search volume, keyword difficulty, CPC, and traffic potential.
The tool also features keyword idea categories, position history, and competitor analysis to uncover gaps and refine keyword strategies.
Winner: Semrush
Semrush excels in keyword research with its Keyword Magic Tool, which offers a vast keyword database, detailed analysis of keyword difficulty, and robust metrics for both SEO and PPC campaigns. This level of precision and depth gives it a clear advantage in optimizing strategies.
2. Content Editor and Optimizer
Semrush provides two content optimization tools: the AI SEO writer Writing Assistant and the SEO Content Template.
The Writing Assistant helps ensure readability, tone, and SEO optimization, while the SEO Content Template, powered by the SERP Analyzer, suggests relevant keywords for content creation.
Moz offers a dedicated AI content writer and optimizer tool. Additionally, it provides valuable keyword and on-page analysis through its other features, helping users optimize content for search rankings by identifying keyword opportunities and ensuring the strategic use of target keywords.
Ahrefs AI Content Helper uses AI to analyze and score your content based on key topics for your target keyword. It helps users optimize the content by identifying areas to expand and improve relevance, ensuring it competes effectively on SERPs without keyword stuffing.
Winner: Semrush
Semrush stands out with its integrated content optimization tools, offering users a more straightforward approach to refining content for SEO.
3. SEO Auditor
Semrush’s SEO audit tool delivers a thorough analysis of a website, identifying issues related to crawlability, broken links, internal linking, site speed, and more. The site auditor also detects technical SEO problems like hreflang tag issues and multilingual site configuration.
Detailed reports offer actionable recommendations, helping users address issues and optimize site performance effectively.
Moz’s Site Crawl tool scans websites for SEO issues, including broken links, duplicate content, missing meta tags, and page speed concerns.
It provides insights into technical aspects of a site, offering recommendations to fix problems and improve overall site health, although it lacks some of the more advanced features found in other platforms.
Ahrefs’ Site Audit tool is a comprehensive solution that analyzes a website’s overall health. It checks for common SEO issues such as broken links, missing meta tags, slow-loading pages, and crawlability problems.
The tool provides clear, actionable insights for improving technical SEO and user experience across your site.
Winner: Moz
Moz excels with its straightforward Site Crawl tool, offering a user-friendly interface that provides detailed reports on SEO issues.
4. SERP Analysis
Semrush’s SERP Analysis tool provides an overview of the top-ranking pages for specific keywords, offering valuable insights such as keyword difficulty, search volume, and competitive metrics.
It also includes a snapshot of the top-ranking domains, helping users better understand their competitive landscape and refine their strategy.
Moz’s SERP analysis offers an overview of search engine results for targeted keywords. It provides useful data like keyword rankings, competitors, and the estimated difficulty of ranking for specific terms.
Moz also gives insights into search volume, organic CTR, and other metrics to help refine SEO strategies, although it lacks the depth of some other tools.
Ahrefs provides a comprehensive SERP analysis integrated into its Keyword Explorer tool. Users can view detailed information about top-ranking pages for any keyword, including metrics like page ratings, domain authority, backlinks, referring domains, estimated traffic, and more.
Winner: Ahrefs
Ahrefs stands out in SERP analysis with its rich, detailed metrics and robust features. It not only provides essential SEO data but also allows comparisons based on location and time.
5. Rank Tracking
Semrush’s Rank Tracking tool provides daily tracking updates and a unique feature that highlights keywords with the most potential for generating additional traffic with content improvements.
It tracks keyword rankings across multiple devices and search engines, offering detailed insights into keyword performance.
Moz’s Rank Tracking allows users to track rankings for various search engines, including Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
With the on-demand tracker, users can get real-time information up to 200 times per day, though the default reports are issued weekly. This feature provides a broad view of keyword performance across multiple search engines.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs offers a robust Rank Tracker tool that tracks rankings across more than 190 locations on both desktop and mobile devices. It supports CSV imports and integrates with Google Search Console for historical data.
The tool includes interactive graphs and displays metrics such as Share of Voice, total traffic, and SERP feature rankings, allowing users to track SEO progress visually.
Winner: Ahrefs
Ahrefs excels with its global reach and interactive, visually engaging graphs. The ability to track rankings in over 190 locations and seamlessly integrate with Google Search Console (GSC) makes it a powerful tool for monitoring SEO progress.
6. Backlink and Competitor Analysis
Semrush offers a powerful competitive research tool, allowing users to assess competitor backlinks, organic search rankings, and paid search strategies.
This helps you refine your SEO strategy by understanding the tactics used by your competition, giving insights into their keyword strategies and backlink profiles.
Moz provides a suite of tools for backlink analysis and competitor research, helping users explore backlink profiles and monitor competitors’ link-building activities.
Moz’s Link Explorer tool provides detailed insights into your competitors’ link structures, highlighting their top backlinks and linking domains.
Ahrefs excels in backlink and competitor analysis with its Site Explorer tool. Users gain detailed insights into backlink profiles, domain ratings, and referring domains.
The platform’s ability to filter backlinks, including new, lost, or one link per domain, helps uncover valuable link-building opportunities. Ahrefs also provides a Link Intersect tool to compare competitor backlink profiles and identify missed opportunities.
Winner: Moz
Moz’s approach to backlink and competitor analysis stands out with its broad view of backlink quality and user-friendly interface.
7. Domain or Site Analysis
Semrush offers a robust domain analysis tool that provides an overview of a website’s organic and paid search performance. Users can examine keyword rankings, backlink profiles, traffic data, and even analyze competitors. It’s a comprehensive tool for understanding a domain’s SEO and PPC strategies.
Moz’s Domain Analysis tool, known as Link Explorer, provides deep insights into a website’s backlink profile. Users can view metrics such as domain authority, top linking pages, and organic search rankings, helping to assess the overall strength and performance of a domain.
Ahrefs’ Site Explorer provides an in-depth look at a website’s organic search traffic, backlink profile, and paid traffic performance.
It allows users to analyze keyword rankings, backlinks, and competitors’ strategies, offering valuable insights to refine SEO and content marketing efforts. Ahrefs also includes historical data for better trend analysis.
Winner: Moz
Moz distinguishes itself with its user-friendly Domain Analysis tools, providing a clear and intuitive interface for tracking a website’s SEO and backlink health.
Its data-driven insights into domain authority and top backlinks make it an invaluable resource for assessing a site’s overall authority and growth potential.
8. Ease of Use
Semrush has a steeper learning curve due to its extensive range of features. While powerful, its complexity can overwhelm new users. However, the platform provides comprehensive guides and tutorials to help users navigate its tools effectively over time.
Moz offers a more user-friendly experience, with an intuitive interface and clear navigation. The simplicity of its tools makes it easy for beginners to get started with SEO tasks like backlink analysis and keyword tracking. The platform is accessible, even for users without deep SEO experience.
Ahrefs features a clean, easy-to-navigate interface, making it relatively simple for users to jump straight into analyzing backlinks, keywords, and competitors. Although the tool has a lot of advanced features, it’s designed in a way that makes it manageable for both beginners and experienced users.
Winner: Moz
Moz excels in ease of use, offering a straightforward interface that makes it accessible to newcomers while still providing powerful insights. Its simplicity in navigating between tools and interpreting data makes it an ideal choice for users who prioritize usability over complexity.
9. Unique AI Capabilities
Semrush offers a variety of AI-driven tools, including the ContentShake AI, which combines SEO data with generative content capabilities to produce optimized articles and social media posts.
These tools are designed to improve content creation by suggesting keywords and helping users generate high-quality text.
Moz has begun to explore AI with its Search Intent feature in Keyword Explorer. It utilizes an augmented intelligence model that blends machine learning with expert knowledge to help users understand the intent behind search queries.
This tool aims to better predict user intent and guide SEO strategies, especially in the context of evolving search behavior.
Ahrefs employs AI to enhance its search intent analysis through its SERP AI tool. By breaking down search queries into different types of intent, Ahrefs helps users understand how to tailor content to rank for specific queries.
It also provides valuable insights by showing the distribution of traffic across various intents, which helps in crafting more targeted content strategies.
Winner: Tied
The AI features offered are mostly limited to content rewriting and search intent analysis, rather than acting as a personal AI agent that can automate SEO tasks and decision-making processes.
To truly revolutionize SEO, these platforms would need to fully integrate AI to automate tasks.
10. Pricing
Semrush offers a tiered pricing structure with three main plans, making it one of the more expensive SEO tools on the market. Its pricing reflects the broad range of features and functionalities, but it’s still expensive even for large businesses or agencies.
Moz offers multiple pricing plans that cater to different levels of SEO needs. Its pricing is generally seen as more affordable than some of the more premium tools, but it can still be expensive for small businesses or individuals who need access to more extensive features.
Ahrefs is also on the pricier side, with monthly fees that include access to core features. However, once users exceed the 500 credit limit, additional charges apply, which can escalate costs.
Add-ons like the Content Kit and advanced reporting tools come at an extra fee, starting at $99 per month. These additional costs make Ahrefs an expensive option, especially for small businesses looking for more budget-friendly SEO tools.
Winner: No clear winner
While Semrush, Moz, and Ahrefs pricing can be a significant barrier for any businesses. These platforms often come with additional costs for essential add-ons or extra credits, which can quickly make them an expensive investment.
There are alternative tools that provide competitive features at a cost-effective SEO price point, offering better value for those on a budget.
A New Era of SEO Tool Evolution: Search Atlas vs. Semrush, Moz, and Ahrefs
While Semrush, Moz, and Ahrefs dominate the SEO landscape with their robust features, they lack the innovative AI SEO spark needed.
Enter Search Atlas. It doesn’t just match its competitors in core capabilities; it redefines the standard with groundbreaking features that transform how SEO gets done.
Search Atlas is a cutting-edge all-in-one SEO platform that outperforms competitors by delivering a complete suite of tools for content creation, link building, UX optimization, technical SEO fixes, press releases, PPC, PR outreach, and so much more.
Its continuous updates ensure your strategies stay future-proof.
Keyword Research Tools
Search Atlas brings a powerful arsenal for keyword research and intent analysis:
- Keyword Research: Gain deep insights into search volume, competition, intent classification, and emerging trends.
- Keyword Magic Tool: Generate expansive keyword suggestions, organized by intent type for precision targeting.
- Keyword Rank Tracker: Monitor the performance of your focus keywords over time with ease.
- Keyword Gap: Pinpoint untapped keyword opportunities by comparing your rankings against competitors.
Content Genius
Content Genius is your AI-powered writing assistant, crafting SEO-optimized, human-like content that stands out. 👱
It examines top-ranking pages to deliver actionable insights on keywords, subheadings, NLP terms, and internal links, empowering you to create content that resonates with both readers and search engines.
Competitor Analysis
Search Atlas sets a new standard for competitor analysis:
- Backlink Gap Analysis: Identify missed opportunities by comparing your link profile with your competitors.
- Backlink Analyzer: Gain a complete view of links pointing to your site to benchmark against competitors and improve your strategy.
- Traffic Insights: Discover which keywords and pages drive the most traffic to your competitors, refining your approach for a competitive edge.
Search Atlas also offers a tool to compare competitors’ keywords and identify more ranking opportunities. It includes keywords gap, keywords in common, keyword opportunities, unique keywords, and all common keywords.
Additionally, there’s site explorer, which provides valuable insights into competitors’ backlinks, keywords, and overall site performance.
Content Planner and Topical Maps
Search Atlas makes content planning smarter and more efficient. From keyword research and rank tracking to gap analysis and topical maps, its tools help you identify high-value keyword clusters.
Outreach Tools
Take your outreach campaigns to new heights with Search Atlas’s advanced automation tools. What used to take weeks can now be completed in a fraction of the time.
- Use customizable pitch templates to craft compelling emails, personalize campaigns, and save top-performing pitches for future wins.
- Find contact details for publishers, bloggers, and influencers instantly, all from one streamlined dashboard.
- Scaling your link-building efforts has never been this effortless!
OTTO: AI SEO Agent
Meet OTTO, your personal AI-powered SEO assistant. OTTO handles time-consuming tasks like technical fixes, local SEO, and authority building, executing optimizations directly to save you countless hours.
By drawing insights from GSC, GBP, and top SERPs, OTTO automates almost all of your SEO efforts, drives better results, and saves thousands of hours.
PPC Tools
Search Atlas simplifies PPC management with PPC research tools designed for precision and performance:
- PPC Keyword Research: Discover the keywords your competitors are bidding on along with their full search ad copy.
- PPC Comparison: Analyze your PPC spend and bidding strategies against competitors.
- AI Ad Copy Creation: Generate high-performing ad copy that boosts Quality Scores and drives engagement effortlessly.
And coming soon: OTTO Google Ads, an AI-driven toolset that will automate nearly every aspect of PPC campaigns, delivering smarter, more impactful results.
Automated and Custom Reporting
Search Atlas takes reporting to the next level by integrating GSC, GA4, OTTO performance metrics, and its own custom tools.
Track page performance, rankings, engagement, and bounce rates effortlessly with automated insights, enabling real-time adjustments to keep your strategies on point.
Usability
Search Atlas ranks as the most user-friendly SEO platform, outshining tools like Serpstat, Semrush, and others according to Gartner. Its intuitive design, paired with tutorial videos and personalized 1-on-1 onboarding sessions, ensures you and your team can hit the ground running with minimal effort.
Search Atlas Pricing
Search Atlas offers unbeatable value with competitive pricing and free OTTO activations, providing the most comprehensive and cost-effective SEO platform.
| Starter plan | Growth plan | Pro plan | Enterprise | |
| Price: | $99 monthly | $199 monthly | $399 monthly | Custom |
| Free OTTO Activation | 1 | 1 | 3 | Custom |
| User Seats | 2 | 3 | 5 | Custom |
| GSC Sites | 5 | 15 | Unlimited | Custom |
| GBP Accounts | 3 | 10 | 25 | Custom |
| Regular AI Quota | 100 | 250 | Unlimited | Custom |
Search Atlas vs. The World: Winning the SEO Race with Groundbreaking Features
While Semrush, Moz, and Ahrefs are making efforts to enhance their AI capabilities, their progress is slow and incremental.
In contrast, Search Atlas has already leaped ahead, delivering innovative features that redefine SEO standards. 🦾
Search Atlas doesn’t just match its competitors—it surpasses them by integrating cutting-edge AI-powered tools, like OTTO, into a robust, enterprise-level platform.
From content creation to technical SEO, authority building, and competitor analysis, it provides everything you need, all at an accessible price point.
Prepare to be astounded: The future of SEO is within reach, and it’s yours to explore. Start your free trial today!
