Semrush and Moz Pro are two paid SEO suites that do the same jobs: keyword research, backlink analysis, technical audits and rank tracking. Semrush started in 2008, is based in Boston and since 28 April 2026 has belonged to Adobe (Adobe announcement). Moz started in Seattle in 2004 as SEOmoz, invented Domain Authority and in 2021 was bought by iContact, part of the J2 Global group (Search Engine Land). Moz Pro's entry plan costs $49 a month, Semrush's $139.
The short answer: Semrush if you need a lot of competitor data and tools beyond SEO, Moz if you're paying for more than one person or want to track AI assistants' answers for less. The second part is the sum missing from the comparisons we read: for the same tracked keywords and AI prompts, Moz Medium costs $179 a month and the equivalent Semrush plan $299. That's 40% less, before you even count users.
We checked the first page of Google UK for "semrush vs moz" on 10 October 2026. A Reddit thread comes first, followed by Style Factory, two Semrush comparison pages and articles from Oneupweb, 01net, WPBeginner and DemandSage. None gives prices in pounds, and the figures don't agree: DemandSage gives Moz's free trial as 7 days in its table and 30 days in its text, while WPBeginner, updated in August 2026, says 30 days. Old price lists also survive in pages that are still being updated: SEO Design Chicago, modified in August 2026, has Semrush Pro at $119.95 and Moz Pro up to $599 a month, the same figures as the OMR comparison page. Below you'll find the official price lists converted at the Bank of England rate, the like-for-like comparison and two sets of figures we gathered ourselves on how the two brands perform in the UK.
Semrush vs Moz: the numbers side by side
These are the key facts, checked on 10 October 2026. Where the vendor doesn't publish a number we say so, instead of filling the cell with third-party estimates.
| Semrush | Moz Pro | |
|---|---|---|
| Base and ownership | Boston, part of Adobe since 2026 | Seattle, bought by iContact (J2 Global) in 2021 |
| Founded | 2008 | 2004, as SEOmoz |
| Keywords in the database | 28.8 billion across 142 geographic databases | can't be verified on the vendor's site |
| Keywords in the UK | no current figure published | not published |
| Backlinks in the index | 43 trillion | can't be verified, the figures in circulation differ |
| Entry price | $139 (SEO plan) | $49 (Starter), $39 billed annually |
| Users included | 1 on every plan | 1, 2 on Medium, 3 on Large |
| First plan with AI prompts | Starter, $199, 50 prompts a day | Medium, $179, 100 prompts |
| Capterra rating | 4.6 out of 5 (2,329 reviews) | 4.5 out of 5 (350 reviews) |
A note on the Moz column. Moz's pricing page on moz.com couldn't be read by our checking tools, so Moz Pro's limits come from the G2 listing, filled in by the vendor and updated on 30 April 2026. It's the same price list we used in our comparison of Ahrefs and Moz and in the guide to Moz alternatives.
What Semrush and Moz cost in pounds
Both price in US dollars. The conversion uses the Bank of England daily spot rate for 8 October 2026: £1 = $1.3226. Prices exclude VAT.
| Plan | Monthly | In pounds | Annual (per month) | Tracked keywords | AI prompts | Users included |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Moz Starter | $49 | £37.05 | $39 | 50 | - | 1 |
| Moz Standard | $99 | £74.85 | $79 | 300 | - | 1 |
| Moz Medium | $179 | £135.34 | $143 | 1,500 | 100 | 2 |
| Moz Large | $299 | £226.07 | $239 | 3,000 | 200 | 3 |
| Semrush SEO | $139 | £105.10 | $117.33 | 500 | - | 1 |
| Semrush Starter | $199 | £150.46 | $165.17 | 500 | 50 a day | 1 |
| Semrush Pro+ | $299 | £226.07 | $248.17 | 1,500 | 100 a day | 1 |
| Semrush Advanced | $549 | £415.09 | $455.67 | 5,000 | 200 a day | 1 |
Billed annually, Moz takes off about 20%, Semrush 17% on the Semrush One plans and 15.6% on the SEO plan. A year of Moz Standard costs $948 (about £717), a year of Semrush's SEO plan $1,407.96 (about £1,065). The full Semrush bill, with VAT, refunds and the toolkits sold separately, is in our guide to Semrush pricing.
Semrush also keeps a second price list alive with the old names: Pro at $139.95, Guru at $249.95 and Business at $499.95 (Semrush knowledge base). Guru has the same 15 sites and 1,500 keywords as Pro+, without AI tracking. We need it for the next calculation.
The like-for-like comparison
The entry price compares two different things: Moz Starter tracks 50 keywords, Semrush's SEO plan 500. To see which costs less, you first have to fix the work to be done, then find the cheapest configuration of each tool that covers it. We did that for four situations we often see in businesses and among consultants.
| Work to cover | Moz configuration | Moz cost | Semrush configuration | Semrush cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 person, 300 keywords, no AI | Standard | $99 (£75) | SEO | $139 (£105) |
| 1 person, 1,500 keywords, no AI | Medium | $179 (£135) | Guru | $249.95 (£189) |
| 2 people, 1,500 keywords, 100 AI prompts | Medium | $179 (£135) | Pro+ and 1 extra user | $379 (£287) |
| 3 people, 200 AI prompts | Large (3,000 keywords) | $299 (£226) | Advanced and 2 extra users (5,000 keywords) | $749 (£566) |
Moz costs less on all four rows, and the gap grows with the number of people. For a two-person team that also follows AI answers the difference is $200 a month, $2,400 a year, about £1,815. For three people it rises to $450 a month. And on Semrush the bill can go higher still: the same knowledge base says that giving an extra user access to the AI toolkit needs a separate purchase of $99 per user.
The table compares limits, not data quality. Semrush declares a database of 28.8 billion keywords and sells toolkits for content, local search and traffic analysis alongside SEO; Moz remains an SEO-only suite. If you need that data, the comparison changes. If you mainly use the suite to track one site's rankings, you're paying Semrush for reports you never open. How many keywords you really need is covered in our guide to keyword rankings.
Tracking AI answers costs less on Moz
Both measure how a brand shows up in AI assistants' answers. On Semrush you need a Semrush One plan: Starter at $199 includes 50 prompts tracked every day. On Moz you need at least Medium at $179, with 100 prompts and 2 AI visibility dashboards; Large has 200 and 4 dashboards. Moz Standard doesn't include the module (G2 listing).
Sources don't agree on what Moz measures. Style Factory, in a comparison updated on 29 September 2026, says Moz covers ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini and Perplexity with weekly updates. BoostUrSEO, updated the day before, mentions only ChatGPT and Gemini. Exploding Topics, in its October 2025 version, said Moz didn't track ChatGPT at all. The G2 listing doesn't say. Before buying, ask the vendor which assistants it covers and how often it updates: a prompt checked every day and one checked every week aren't worth the same.
There's a question that comes first: do you need the tracking? A B2B company we work with in Italy put off switching on Semrush's AI module for six months, because in its sector there were still too few questions to AI assistants to see a return. You can measure how often your brand already shows up without a subscription, using the method in our guide to AI visibility. The dedicated tools, with their prices, are in our roundup of AI visibility tools. If you'd rather hand the work over, it's what we do in our SEO for AI service.
Keyword research and UK market data
If you work on Google UK, what matters is how many UK searches are in the database. Semrush declares 28.8 billion keywords across 142 geographic databases, 43 trillion backlinks and 808 million domains (Semrush), but on 10 October 2026 neither that page nor its statistics page gave a figure for the UK database. For Moz we found no per-country figure we could verify either. So neither vendor lets you check, on its own site, how deep its UK data goes.
On Moz the limit that bites hardest is a different one: keyword queries per month. Starter allows 75, Standard 150, Medium 5,000, Large 15,000. With 150 queries you can do the keyword research for a new site; a consultant with five clients uses them up in a few days. Semrush's SEO plan shows up to 10,000 results per report and allows 250 keyword metric updates a month (Semrush knowledge base).
Neither price list tells you how reliable the estimates are for small keywords, the ones with 20 or 30 searches a month that are typical in B2B. The test we suggest during the trial: look up ten keywords from your sector in both and compare the estimates with the real impressions in Google Search Console. Bear in mind that the two tools work out difficulty differently, so the score has to be read within the same tool, as we explain in our guide to keyword difficulty. Other options, some of them cheaper, are in our roundup of keyword research tools.
How Semrush and Moz perform on Google UK
A set of figures we gathered ourselves shows how far apart the two brands are in the UK. On 10 October 2026 we used DataForSEO Labs to measure how many English-language searches the two domains rank for on Google UK.
| Domain | Keywords ranking on Google UK | In the top 10 | Estimated organic traffic per month |
|---|---|---|---|
| semrush.com | 12,103 | 5,045 | 279,800 |
| moz.com | 2,674 | 808 | 25,500 |
Semrush ranks for about four and a half times as many keywords and gets about eleven times the estimated traffic. Moz's gap is smaller than the numbers suggest, though, because its best UK pages are free tools: on the same date the Link Explorer was first on Google UK for "inbound link check" (8,100 searches a month) and the Domain Analysis page first for "da checker" and "domain authority checker" (5,400 each). It's a figure about the two brands' presence, not about the quality of the tools. But it tells you that in the UK, Moz is known above all for its free checkers and its authority score.
The same imbalance shows up in searches. These are the monthly UK volumes for the two brands and their metrics, taken from Google Ads.
| Search | Monthly searches in the UK |
|---|---|
| semrush | 27,100 |
| ahrefs | 18,100 |
| se ranking | 4,400 |
| moz | 2,900 |
| semrush pricing | 880 |
| domain authority | 590 |
| moz domain authority | 390 |
| semrush free | 320 |
| mozbar | 170 |
| moz pro | 170 |
| moz keyword explorer | 110 |
| semrush vs moz | 50 |
| authority score | 40 |
| semrush authority score | 40 |
| moz free | 20 |
Semrush is searched about nine times as often as Moz. With the authority metrics it's the other way round: "domain authority" and "moz domain authority" add up to 980 searches a month, "authority score" and "semrush authority score" to 80, about twelve times fewer. When you sell or buy a link, the number you'll be asked for is Moz's Domain Authority, the same one Ubersuggest shows (we explain this in Ubersuggest vs Semrush). How to read it without being misled is covered in our guide to Domain Authority.
The figures on Moz that get passed around don't add up
In the comparisons on the first page of Google, the numbers on Moz change from one article to the next, almost always without a link to the source.
| Figure on Moz | What the source says | Source and date |
|---|---|---|
| Keywords in the database | about 500 million | Oneupweb, November 2024 |
| Keywords in the database | 1.25 billion | Traffic Think Tank, February 2025; DemandSage, February 2026; Style Factory, September 2026 |
| Links in the index | 40.7 trillion | SEO Design Chicago, August 2026 |
| Links in the index | 45.5 trillion | Traffic Think Tank, February 2025 |
| Links in the index | 45.8 trillion | DemandSage, February 2026; Style Factory, September 2026 |
| Length of the free trial | 30 days | Traffic Think Tank, SEO Design Chicago, WPBeginner (August 2026) |
| Length of the free trial | 7 days | Style Factory, September 2026; DemandSage gives both 7 and 30 days in the same article |
| Top Moz Pro price | $599 a month | OMR, SEO Design Chicago |
The G2 price list updated in April 2026 has four plans, from $49 to $299: the $599 plan no longer exists. On the trial, G2 now says new subscribers can take a 7-day free trial with Medium's limits, and adds that availability and length may vary. We apply the same rule we used in the comparison with Ahrefs: a figure that doesn't lead back to a vendor page is hearsay, not data.
Technical audit and backlinks
On technical audits Moz is more generous than its price suggests. Standard crawls up to 100,000 pages a week, about 430,000 a month; Semrush's SEO plan 100,000 a month (G2, Semrush knowledge base). For a business site with a few hundred pages either is enough, and a free crawler often is too, as we explain in our guide to the SEO audit.
For backlinks, Moz Standard allows 5,000 queries a month, Medium 20,000 and Large 70,000. Semrush declares an index of 43 trillion links; for Moz, as we saw above, the published figures don't match. Style Factory gives Semrush the edge on the practical side, with a built-in outreach workflow, while on Moz you manage contacts by hand in spreadsheets and email. In link building, though, the list of the right sites matters more than the tool you manage it in.
Which to choose
The quickest method is to start from what you do every week, not from the feature list.
| If your situation is | Choice | Why |
|---|---|---|
| You analyse competitors on Google UK and work alone | Semrush SEO | 10,000 results per report, no cap of 150 keyword queries a month as on Moz Standard |
| There are two or three of you and you track rankings | Moz Medium or Large | users included in the price |
| You want to follow AI answers on a tight budget | Moz Medium | 100 prompts for $179 a month |
| You need content, local and traffic data from the same vendor | Semrush | dedicated toolkits, sold separately |
| You only need the Domain Authority of other sites | neither | Moz's free Domain Analysis page shows it |
| You only track rankings and the budget is low | a dedicated rank tracker or a lighter suite | SE Ranking's Core plan tracks 2,000 keywords for $129 a month |
For the last two rows the options are in our guides to Moz alternatives and Semrush alternatives; the full overview is in our roundup of the best SEO tools. And if you'd rather not buy tools at all, in our SEO service access to the suites and the reading of the data are included. In the Macropix case, an LED screen manufacturer in Italy, the share of voice we measure, 25.55% on the LED wall cluster ahead of Amazon at 18.08%, depends on the keyword set chosen before it depends on the tool.
In the UK people buy Semrush and talk Moz
The figure that struck us most is the gap between brand and metric. Semrush wins searches for the name by about 9 to 1, Moz wins searches for the authority metric by about 12 to 1. In practice Domain Authority lives apart from the product that invented it: people who have never opened Moz Pro use it, and Moz's own free DA checker ranks first on Google UK. For anyone choosing, that matters in two ways. If you buy Semrush, publishers and link sellers will keep asking you for DA, and you'd do well to know it isn't your tool's number. If you're thinking of taking Moz to get DA, you'd be paying for a whole suite to see a score you can read elsewhere. The right choice comes from looking at the reports you've opened over the last two months, not at the metric you hear mentioned most often.
Frequently asked questions
It depends on the work. Semrush declares a database of 28.8 billion keywords, ranks for far more searches on Google UK and sells toolkits beyond SEO. Moz costs less for the same tracked keywords and AI prompts, and includes up to 3 users in the price. For a consultant analysing competitors, Semrush makes more sense; for a small team that tracks rankings, Moz does.
Yes, almost always. Moz Pro starts at $49 a month, Semrush at $139. For the same work, for example 2 people, 1,500 keywords and 100 AI prompts, Moz Medium costs $179 and Semrush Pro+ with one extra user $379, about £135 against £287 at the Bank of England rate for 8 October 2026, before VAT.
Both cover Google UK, but neither publishes a current, verifiable figure for the size of its UK keyword database. Semrush gives only a global total of 28.8 billion keywords across 142 databases. Before choosing, compare the two tools' estimates on ten keywords from your sector against your Search Console impressions.
Both, but only on some plans. On Semrush you need a Semrush One plan, from $199 a month with 50 prompts tracked every day. On Moz you need at least Medium at $179 with 100 prompts. Sources disagree on which assistants Moz covers and how often it updates, so ask the vendor.
No. Domain Authority is Moz's metric, Authority Score is Semrush's: both are scores from 0 to 100 calculated on different indexes, and neither is a Google metric. In the UK, Domain Authority is searched about twelve times as often as Authority Score.
Yes, for both. Semrush offers a 7-day trial on its paid plans and a free plan with one demo project. Moz lists a 7-day trial with Medium's limits on G2, although comparison articles still give anything from 7 to 30 days.
