Ahrefs and Moz are two paid SEO suites that do almost the same jobs: keyword research, backlink analysis, technical audits and rank tracking. What differs is where each one started. Ahrefs, based in Singapore, is built around a backlink index of 35 trillion records (Ahrefs data). Moz started in Seattle in 2004 as SEOmoz, invented Domain Authority and since 2021 has belonged to J2 Global, now Ziff Davis. Moz Pro starts at $49 a month, Ahrefs Lite at $129.
The short answer: Ahrefs if you work on backlinks and need deep data, Moz if your budget is tight or you're a team of two or three. The long answer depends on things the comparisons on page one don't look at: what each tool tells you about its UK data, and what they really cost in pounds, per person and per tracked keyword.
We checked Google UK for "ahrefs vs moz" on 10 October 2026. Above the results sits an AI Overview. The first organic result is a Reddit thread from three years ago, the second a comparison from November 2024, and further down the same page a guide from Content Powered still gives Ahrefs at $99 a month, a price list that's no longer current. Here you'll find up-to-date prices converted at the Bank of England rate, the UK data the vendors publish (and what they don't) and the UK search volumes we pulled ourselves.
Ahrefs vs Moz: the numbers side by side
These are the key facts, checked in October 2026. Where the vendor doesn't publish a number we say so, rather than filling the box with third-party estimates.
| Ahrefs | Moz Pro | |
|---|---|---|
| Base and ownership | Singapore, independent and bootstrapped, 149 people across 27 locations | Seattle, part of Ziff Davis since 2021 |
| Started as | a backlink index | SEOmoz, an SEO blog and community (2004) |
| Keywords in the database | 29 billion across 217 locations | can't be verified on the vendor's site |
| Keywords in the UK | 1.4 billion | not published |
| Authority metric | Domain Rating (DR) | Domain Authority (DA) |
| Backlink index updates | every 15-30 minutes | can't be verified |
| Entry price | $29 (Starter), $129 (Lite) | $49 (Starter), $39 billed annually |
| Users included in the base plan | 1 | 1 |
| G2 rating | 4.5 out of 5 (717 reviews) | 4.3 out of 5 (608 reviews) |
A note on the Moz column. The Moz prices below come from the G2 and Capterra listings, where the vendor fills in the price list, and from a The Next Web article of 12 March 2026 (sponsored by Moz). The three sources match to the dollar. For the size of Moz's databases we found no source we could verify, and we deal with those figures further down for what they are: numbers that get passed around.
What Ahrefs and Moz cost in pounds
Both price in US dollars, and Ahrefs' pricing page shows no sterling prices. The conversion uses the Bank of England daily spot rate for 8 October 2026, £1 = $1.3226. Prices exclude VAT.
| Plan | Monthly | In pounds | Billed annually | What it includes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Moz Starter | $49 | £37.05 | $39 a month (£29.49) | 1 user, MozBar Premium |
| Moz Standard | $99 | £74.85 | $79 a month (£59.73) | 3 campaigns, 300 tracked keywords, 150 keyword queries a month, 1 user |
| Moz Medium | $179 | £135.34 | $143 a month (£108.12) | 10 campaigns, 1,500 keywords, 5,000 keyword queries, 2 users |
| Moz Large | $299 | £226.07 | $239 a month (£180.70) | 25 campaigns, 3,000 keywords, 15,000 keyword queries, 3 users |
| Ahrefs Starter | $29 | £21.93 | monthly only | reduced features, for beginners |
| Ahrefs Lite | $129 | £97.54 | save up to 17% | 5 projects, 750 keywords, 6 months of history, 1 user |
| Ahrefs Standard | $249 | £188.27 | save up to 17% | 20 projects, 2,000 keywords, 2 years of history |
| Ahrefs Advanced | $449 | £339.48 | save up to 17% | 50 projects, 5,000 keywords, 5 years of history |
| Ahrefs Enterprise | $1,499 | £1,133.37 | annual only | 100 projects, from 10,000 keywords, unlimited history |
The entry gap looks clear: Moz Standard costs $99, Ahrefs Lite $129. With annual billing it gets wider. Moz Standard paid yearly comes to $948 (about £717), Ahrefs Lite to about $1,290 with the annual discount, which Ahrefs puts at two months free (about £975). That's around £259 a year of difference for a single professional.
Ahrefs has one catch the price list doesn't spell out: on Lite every report you open uses credits. We did the full sum, with extra users, credits, UK VAT and add-ons such as Brand Radar AI, in our guide to Ahrefs pricing.
The sum that changes the ranking: price per keyword and per person
The entry price tells you little if you use the tool to track rankings or if there are three of you in the office. Divide the monthly fee by the tracked keywords included, and the order flips halfway up the price list.
| Plan | Monthly price | Tracked keywords | Cost per keyword per month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Moz Standard | $99 | 300 | $0.33 |
| Ahrefs Lite | $129 | 750 | $0.17 |
| Moz Medium | $179 | 1,500 | $0.12 |
| Ahrefs Standard | $249 | 2,000 | $0.12 |
| Moz Large | $299 | 3,000 | $0.10 |
| Ahrefs Advanced | $449 | 5,000 | $0.09 |
On the first rung Moz is cheaper, but a tracked keyword costs twice as much: $0.33 against $0.17. If you need to follow 500 keywords on Moz, you already have to move up to Medium. From there up the two price lists even out, with Ahrefs slightly cheaper only on Advanced. How many keywords you really need depends on how you build the set you track, which we cover in our guide to rank tracking.
The picture reverses with users. Moz includes 2 users on Medium and 3 on Large. Ahrefs includes one per plan and charges for the rest: $40 a month on Lite, $60 on Standard.
| Team | Moz set-up | Moz cost | Ahrefs set-up | Ahrefs cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 person | Standard | $99 (£75) | Lite | $129 (£98) |
| 2 people | Medium | $179 (£135) | Lite + 1 user | $169 (£128) |
| 3 people | Large | $299 (£226) | Standard + 2 users | $369 (£279) |
For a three-person agency Moz costs $70 a month less, $840 a year (about £635). For two people Ahrefs wins narrowly, but Moz Medium includes 1,500 tracked keywords against Lite's 750. Most US comparisons miss this detail, because they reason on a single subscription.
UK data: what they publish and what they don't
If you work on Google UK, the real question is how many UK keywords sit inside the database. Ahrefs says so: on its Big Data page the United Kingdom has 1.4 billion keywords. It's third in the country list, behind the United States (2.7 billion) and Brazil (1.5 billion) and level with India, ahead of Germany (1.2 billion) and France (1.1 billion). That means about 4.8% of the 29 billion keywords in total cover the UK market. The help centre confirms that Keywords Explorer supports the United Kingdom - English (en-GB) combination.
For Moz we found no figure by country, either on the marketplace listings or in the comparisons that cite Moz as a source. And this is where a problem shows up for anyone reading a comparison of the two tools: the figures doing the rounds don't add up.
| Figure | What the source says | Source and date |
|---|---|---|
| Keywords in Moz's database | about 500 million | Oneupweb, November 2024 |
| Keywords in Moz's database | 1.25 billion | eesel AI, March 2026 |
| 44.8 trillion links | attributed to Moz's index | eesel AI, March 2026 |
| 44.8 trillion links | attributed to Ahrefs' index | Spike AI, June 2026 |
| Ahrefs backlink index | 35 trillion records | Ahrefs, October 2026 |
| Ahrefs and Moz prices in a comparison ranking on Google UK | Ahrefs $99 a month, Moz $99 a month | Content Powered, undated |
The same number, 44.8 trillion links, appears in two comparisons published three months apart, attributed to two different tools. Moz's keyword database more than doubles from one article to the next. We don't know which version is right, and that's the point: a figure that doesn't lead back to the vendor's own page should be treated as hearsay, not data. Before you decide, start the free trial and look up ten keywords from your sector with 20 or 30 searches a month. Long-tail volumes like these are where the databases pull apart.
Domain Authority and Domain Rating: why they don't match
Moz's Domain Authority and Ahrefs' Domain Rating are two scores from 0 to 100 that estimate a domain's strength from the links it receives. They look alike, but they don't measure the same thing, and one site can score very differently on the two tools. Moz presents DA as a prediction of how likely a site is to rank, according to the description given by eesel AI. Ahrefs presents DR as a measure of the strength of a link profile compared with the other sites in its database.
The DR method is documented in an article by Tim Soulo, updated in October 2024. Three rules explain many of the gaps you see between the two scores:
- only the first link from each domain counts: further links don't move DR;
- nofollow links don't raise DR;
- DR ignores spam and traffic, so lots of low-quality links can push it up rather than down.
The last rule is why a high DR, on its own, doesn't tell you whether a site is a good place to get a link from. Neither DA nor DR is a Google metric: they're proprietary estimates from two companies. An example from our own work makes the point. In the Italian project we wrote up in our piece on SEO for manufacturers, in July 2026 the Macropix site had a 25.55% share of voice on its keyword cluster, ahead of Amazon.it at 18.08%. No authority score would have predicted that. A better-written page on the topic decided it.
In the UK, though, DA is still the common language. In Google's Keyword Planner "domain authority" averages 590 searches a month and "domain rating" 170: more than three times as many. If you sell or buy links, the numbers you'll be asked for will almost always be Moz's, which also turn up inside Ubersuggest. How to read this score properly is in our guide to Domain Authority.
How often Ahrefs and Moz are searched in the UK
A piece of context we gathered ourselves from Google Ads data (via DataForSEO, 10 October 2026), UK market, monthly average from September 2025 to August 2026.
| Search | Monthly searches in the UK | Range |
|---|---|---|
| semrush | 27,100 | 22,200 to 40,500 |
| ahrefs | 18,100 | 12,100 to 22,200 |
| ubersuggest | 6,600 | 3,600 to 8,100 |
| moz | 2,900 | 2,400 to 4,400 |
| domain authority | 590 | 390 to 880 |
| moz domain authority | 390 | 260 to 480 |
| domain rating | 170 | 90 to 210 |
| mozbar | 170 | 90 to 260 |
| ahrefs vs moz | 20 | 10 to 40 |
Ahrefs is searched about six times as often as Moz, and the "moz" figure is generous because the word has other meanings. Semrush sits above both, and Ubersuggest, the budget option, is searched more than twice as often as Moz. We look at the cheaper routes in our piece on Ahrefs alternatives. The full overview is in our ranking of the best SEO tools.
Backlinks and link building: where Ahrefs makes the difference
On links, the gap is the easiest to document. Ahrefs declares 35 trillion records of external backlinks, 286 million domains, 5 million pages crawled a minute and an index updated every 15-30 minutes (Big Data). To build this index it even developed its own search engine, Yep. In the US comparisons we read for this article, from Spike AI to WebbyTemplate, the verdict on backlinks goes to Ahrefs almost unanimously, above all for how quickly new links show up, and lost ones too.
If your work is link building, finding prospects, checking competitors' links, reclaiming lost links, the freshness of the index matters more than its size. A link that appeared yesterday and that you see a month from now is a chance someone else has already taken. It's also the part we handle in our link building service.
Keyword research and rank tracking
On Moz the limit to watch is monthly keyword queries: 150 on Standard, 5,000 on Medium, 15,000 on Large (Capterra data). With 150 queries a month you can do a full piece of keyword research for a new site, but there isn't much left for the rest of the month. On Ahrefs the equivalent limit on Lite is credits, which go every time you open a report.
The two tools also calculate difficulty differently, so the same keyword can come out easy on one and medium on the other. Read the score inside the same tool, never compare it across tools: we explain why in our guide to keyword difficulty. And if what you mainly want is a low-cost keyword research tool, there are more focused options in our roundup of keyword research tools.
On AI the two price lists part ways. Ahrefs sells Brand Radar AI from $199 a month (about £150) to measure how a brand shows up in AI assistants' answers, on what it says is a database of more than 470 million prompts. If that's why you're choosing a tool, compare the dedicated options first in our guide to AI visibility tools.
Which to choose: three typical situations
Consultant or SME on a tight budget
Moz Standard at $79 a month billed annually (about £60) is the cheaper of the two full subscriptions. If the only site you look after is your own, though, before paying try Ahrefs Free, which works on verified sites, together with Google Search Console: for many UK SMEs those two free tools are enough for a year.
If you work on backlinks or competitors
Ahrefs. The index updated every 15-30 minutes and the 1.4 billion UK keywords it declares are the two arguments that count. Lite is enough for a single professional who doesn't open hundreds of reports a day.
Small agency of two or three people
Here Moz claws back ground: Large includes 3 users for $299, against $369 for Ahrefs Standard with two extra users. Before you sign, though, put the other Moz alternatives into the comparison too, starting with SE Ranking and Semrush, which in the UK is searched more than nine times as often as Moz.
A tool is still just a tool: results depend on how you use it. If you'd rather hand the analysis and strategy to us, you'll find how we work on the page for our SEO service.
Frequently asked questions
It depends on what you use it for. Ahrefs is stronger on backlinks, with an index updated every 15-30 minutes, and declares 1.4 billion UK keywords. Moz is cheaper to start with and includes more users on its mid-tier plans. For a single professional working on links Ahrefs makes more sense; for a team of three on a tight budget, Moz.
Moz Pro costs $49 a month for Starter (about £37), $99 for Standard (about £75), $179 for Medium (about £135) and $299 for Large (about £226), before VAT. Billed annually, Standard drops to $79 a month. Converted at the Bank of England rate for 8 October 2026 ($1.3226 to the pound).
No. They're both link-based scores from 0 to 100, but Moz's Domain Authority estimates how likely a site is to rank, while Ahrefs' Domain Rating measures the strength of a link profile compared with other sites. The same domain can score very differently on each, and neither is a Google metric.
Yes. According to Ahrefs' Big Data page, its database holds 1.4 billion keywords for the United Kingdom, out of 29 billion in total across 217 locations. Keywords Explorer supports the United Kingdom - English (en-GB) combination.
Yes, both with limits. Ahrefs Free gives you Site Explorer and Site Audit on sites you can verify as your own. Moz offers a free Community account with a limited number of queries a month and a 7-day free trial of its paid plans.
One last thing the industry rarely says. Whichever tool you pick, your ranking history stays inside its subscription: 6 months on Ahrefs Lite, 5 years on Advanced, and if you cancel you lose access to all of it. The history you really control is Google's. Search Console lets you export your performance data to BigQuery every day, and if you switch the export on today, in two years you'll have an archive of queries and clicks that no change of vendor can wipe out. Do it before you choose between Ahrefs and Moz, not after.
