Moz debuts new metric, Brand Authority, to measure brand strength

A new metric, called Brand Authority, is now available in the Moz Pro SEO toolset and the Moz API, the company announced today.

What is Brand Authority. Moz’s new Brand Authority metric can be found in Domain Overview. Moz assigns an “online brand strength” score between 1-100. There is also a new brand comparison visualization.

• “At a high level, Brand Authority combines Moz’s knowledge of search intent and search volume to calculate a score that reflects the total strength of a website’s branded search terms,” according to Dr. Peter J. Meyers, Moz marketing scientist.
• “For instance, we know that searches like [iPhone 15] and [iPad Pro] strongly reflect awareness of the Apple brand. Brand Authority combines all this data and scales it against the strongest known brands.”
• “While we can’t tie a specific Brand Authority score to a specific offline factor, it inherently reflects the total (including offline) influence big brands have in the world.”

This metric is based only on U.S. data, but Moz said it plans to add data from more regions in 2024.

The data points used by Brand Authority will be updated at different intervals, but the metric will be refreshed bi-monthly, Meyers told Search Engine Land.

The price of a Moz Pro won’t be increasing with the addition of this metric. However, accessing Brand Authority data in the API will incur additional charges, Moz said.

Why we care. Moz customers may want to check out the metric and see whether it’s useful for SEO, PR or other marketing activities – and get a general sense of how Moz assesses your brand strength compared to your competition. However, I expect many SEOs, especially those who don’t use Moz, to be skeptical of another 1-100 “authority score.”

Why Moz cares. I asked them why how SEOs and marketers can use this score. Meyers said:

• “While the mechanisms of how brands impact search results are complex and not always transparent, we know that understanding and being able to measure brand influence is incredibly important for SEOs, hence the motivation to create a metric like Brand Authority.
• “Because Brand Authority encompasses success signals beyond search, it has many interesting use cases for PR and broader marketers, but it is firmly rooted in our SEO expertise.”

How Moz describes Brand Authority. According to Moz, users can use the metric to:

• “…assess their marketing gaps to maximize their return on investment (ROI), see the true value of sales prospects and potential acquisition targets, and assess the real influence of the media brands that pick up their stories.”

How it’s different from Domain Authority. Moz is the company that created the controversial Domain Authority metric, which predicts “how likely a website is to rank” in search, using a similar 1-100 scoring system.

Domain Authority isn’t going away. Both metrics will co-exist. Meyers said the metrics are “complementary” and there is little overlap between how the two metrics are computed:

• “Domain Authority remains an important indicator of online strength and ranking potential, while Brand Authority captures broader signals of an organization’s influence.
• “Our improved Domain Overview tool now displays a 4-quadrant visualization of Domain Authority vs. Brand Authority to help customers understand their relationship to their competition.”

Brand Authority vs. other brand score metrics. Search marketers have relied on metrics such as NPS (net promotor score), share of voice and sentiment analysis to measure brand strength. But Brand Authority attempts to “capture people’s awareness of a brand even before they begin their search and buyer’s journey,” Meyers said:

• “Brand Authority is a search-centric metric that helps us understand the influence of brands (including ‘offline’ influence, such as traditional advertising and word of mouth) on our online efforts, by analyzing searchers’ awareness of brand terms (including sub-brands, products and services),” Meyers said.

Top 500 U.S. brands. In addition to the new metric, Moz revealed a list of 500 sites with the most Brand Authority. Five brands achieved a perfect score of 100:

• google.com
• youtube.com
• facebook.com
• amazon.com
• walmart.com

Also making the top 10:

• target.com (98)
• yahoo.com (98)
• homedepot.com (96)
• walgreens (94)
• foxnews.com (94)