Moz Brand Authority: How the Score Works and What It Means

Moz Brand Authority is a score from 1 to 100 that measures how strong a brand is inside search. Moz builds it from the volume and the intent behind a site's branded queries, then scales that against the strongest known brands. It ships inside Moz Pro and the Moz API at current pricing, refreshes roughly every two months, and launched on United States data.

What Moz Brand Authority measures

Brand Authority answers one question: when people already know who you are, how many of them go looking for you by name? Every other Moz score reads your links. This one reads demand.

The raw material is branded search. Someone typing [iPhone 17 battery life] is not shopping for a phone in the abstract, they are shopping for Apple. Someone typing [best plumber near me] is shopping for a category. The first query is a brand-strength signal, the second is not, and telling the two apart is the job Moz built the metric around. That distinction rests on the same intent modeling behind the four types of search intent.

Because branded demand is created offline as well as online, the score picks up things no backlink graph can see. A television campaign, a stadium naming deal, a viral news cycle, a good reputation passed by word of mouth: all of them end as people typing your name into Google. Dr. Peter J. Meyers of Moz put it plainly at launch, telling Search Engine Land that while no single score maps to a specific offline factor, the metric "inherently reflects the total (including offline) influence big brands have."

How the Brand Authority score is calculated

Moz has not published the formula, and anyone who tells you they know the weights is guessing. What Moz has said publicly is the shape of it.

The model starts from Moz's own search volume and search intent data, identifies the queries that carry a brand's name, aggregates the demand behind them, and then scales the result against the strongest brands it can measure. Meyers described it to Search Engine Land as combining "all this data" and scaling it "against the strongest known brands." That last step is why the score is comparative rather than absolute: a 70 does not mean seventy of anything, it means you sit at a certain distance from Google and Amazon.

Three practical consequences follow from that design:

• Buying links will not move it. Links feed Domain Authority. Brand Authority is fed by people searching your name.
• It is slow. Branded demand is a byproduct of years of work, so the score moves on the timescale of reputation, not the timescale of a content sprint.
• Small numbers are normal. A regional contractor with a healthy business can sit far down the range simply because a few hundred people a month search the company name.

What a score like 68 actually means

Moz has not published named tiers, so the only honest calibration is the company's own top 500 U.S. brands list. Read against that list, the range compresses hard at the top.

So a 68 is not a mediocre score. It is a fraction under the cutoff for the 500 strongest consumer brands in the country. If you run a local service business and you are hunting for your own number, expect it to be far lower than that, and expect the comparison that matters to be your direct competitors rather than Walmart.

Brand Authority vs Domain Authority

These two get confused constantly because both run 1 to 100 and both carry the word authority. They measure unrelated things.

Meyers described the two as complementary, with little overlap in how they are computed, which is why Moz shows them together on a four-quadrant view in Domain Overview. The interesting cells are the mismatches. High Domain Authority with low Brand Authority is a site that has collected links faster than it has collected customers. Low Domain Authority with high Brand Authority is a well-loved business that has never invested in earning high-quality backlinks, and it is usually the easier problem of the two to fix.

Two cautions about Domain Authority itself are worth carrying into any conversation about Moz numbers. It is a Moz model, not a Google signal: Google does not use it and never has. And it is a moving target by design, rebuilt as a neural network in the 2019 Domain Authority 2.0 update and recalibrated against Google's own changes, so a score can fall without your site doing anything wrong.

Where Brand Authority sits among Moz's metrics

People searching for "Moz metrics" are usually trying to work out which number to quote in a report. Here is the working set.

One name that keeps surfacing in searches does not belong on that list any more. Social Authority was a 1 to 100 Twitter influence score, and it belonged to Followerwonk, not to the core Moz toolset. Moz divested Followerwonk in 2016 as part of a refocus on search that also cut 28% of company staff, and the tool passed to an independent owner.

If you are looking for a Moz-branded social score today, there is not one. Brand Authority is the closest replacement, and it reads search rather than social.

How to check a Brand Authority score

Access is simpler than the old coverage suggested, and one detail is worth correcting.

• Moz Pro. The score appears in Domain Overview beside Domain Authority. Search Engine Land reported at launch that it was included at current Moz Pro pricing rather than sold as an upsell.
• Moz API. Brand Authority is exposed as a site metric alongside Domain Authority, Page Authority and Spam Score, again at existing API pricing. API plans are metered by rows, so the cost question is volume, not the metric.
• Refresh cadence. The underlying data points update on different schedules, but the score itself refreshes bi-monthly. A rewrite you published last week will not show up in it.
• Region. The metric launched on U.S. data with additional regions promised. Check Moz's current documentation before comparing a brand outside the States, because a low score may only mean the market is not covered.

If you want a second read on the same underlying idea, watch branded query volume directly in Google Search Console and branded impressions in keyword research. Those are your data, refreshed daily, and they will move months before a bi-monthly third-party score notices.

The top 500 U.S. brands by Brand Authority

Moz published the full ranked list when the metric launched. Five brands scored a perfect 100: Google, YouTube, Facebook, Amazon and Walmart. Scrolling it is the fastest way to build a feel for the scale, and it is worth noticing how weakly ranking-keyword counts track the brand score.

Two rows make the point. Reddit carries 18.4 million ranking keywords and scores 88. McDonald's carries 87,918 and scores 89. One of them has built an enormous surface area in search. The other has built a name that a generation says without thinking. Brand Authority is measuring the second thing.

What a small business should do with the score

For a Denham Springs plumber or a Baton Rouge law firm, the absolute number is close to useless and the trend line is not. Here is the practical use.

• Benchmark against your actual competitors. Pull Brand Authority for the four or five firms you lose deals to. That gap is a marketing brief, not a vanity chart.
• Use it to argue for brand spend. When leadership wants every dollar in performance channels, a branded-demand score is the cleanest evidence that sponsorships, PR and reputation work show up in search.
• Diagnose the mismatch. Strong branded demand and weak rankings usually points at a technical or content problem you can fix this quarter. The reverse points at a business that nobody is asking for by name yet.
• Do not report it monthly. It refreshes every two months and moves on a scale of years. Quarterly is honest, monthly is theatre.

The work that actually raises it is unglamorous and slow: consistent service that earns repeat searches, a claimed and active Google Business Profile collecting real reviews, a name and mark people can recall, and enough visibility locally that your company name enters the vocabulary. Our notes on increasing small business brand awareness and on what Joe Burrow's rise says about brand awareness cover the demand side of it, and logo and branding work covers the recognition side.

If you want to know where your business currently sits and what would move it, the next step is a look at your branded search data alongside your rankings. That is a short conversation, and it is the same starting point for our search work and our wider digital marketing engagements.