Moz was founded in 2004 in Seattle as SEOmoz by Rand Fishkin and Gillian Musnicki. The company pioneered the concept of Domain Authority — the logarithmic 0-100 score that predicts a domain’s ranking potential based on its backlink profile — which became the most widely used reference metric in the SEO industry. Moz rebranded from SEOmoz to Moz in 2012 and raised $18 million in venture funding. The company was acquired by iContact in 2021 and subsequently acquired again by Ziff Davis in 2022, where it operates alongside other media and technology brands.
Moz Pro is an all-in-one SEO platform covering four core disciplines: keyword research with competitive difficulty scoring, rank tracking with daily keyword position updates, site auditing that crawls and identifies technical SEO issues, and backlink analysis powered by Moz’s Link Explorer index. The Starter plan at $39 per month annually is the entry point for individual professionals and small businesses. It covers one tracked website with 50 keywords, 20,000 pages crawled per month, and the foundational Moz AI tools.
The Standard plan at $79 per month annually is the practical minimum for small businesses doing meaningful SEO work — 300 keywords across 3 sites with 400,000 pages crawled per month and full backlink analysis. The Medium plan at $143 per month is the recommended tier for growing teams, with 1,500 keywords across 10 sites and 2 million pages crawled per month, plus branded reports and AI Visibility Dashboards.
Moz’s distinguishing features in 2026 are its AI-enhanced tools. Keyword Suggestions by Topic generates semantically related keyword clusters from a seed topic, reducing the research time for content planning. AI Overviews by Keyword tracks whether target keywords trigger AI-generated summaries in Google Search, helping SEOs understand which queries are shifting toward zero-click AI results. Brand Authority Score measures brand recognition signals beyond traditional link-based authority — a metric relevant as search engines increasingly weight brand mentions alongside backlinks.
The primary criticism from experienced SEO practitioners comparing Moz Pro against Ahrefs and Semrush is database size. Moz’s keyword database and backlink index are smaller than both competitors, which means some keywords and backlinks appear in Ahrefs or Semrush that are absent from Moz’s reports. For comprehensive competitive research at scale, this gap is material. For small businesses and individual practitioners doing foundational SEO work, Moz Pro covers the necessary capabilities at lower cost than Ahrefs or Semrush.