SEO and marketing decision
Moz Pro
A small, limited SEO metrics and rank‑tracking service is realistic for a competent developer to build and run, but you cannot reproduce Moz’s proprietary global link index, established metrics, historical depth, or enterprise scale without significant data and engineering investment.
Visit website↗No open-source build does this yet
Nothing published replaces this one, so a replacement starts from an empty file. Here is what it would have to cover.
What a replacement has to do
- Provide programmatic domain/URL metrics, basic backlink lists, keyword metrics, and simple rank checks via scraped SERPs or public data, exposed as an internal API.
What it still won’t have
- Proprietary global link index (44+ trillion links) and historical depth
- Moz proprietary metrics like Domain Authority, Page Authority, Brand Authority, and Spam Score
- Scale and reliability for very high query volumes (millions of rows/month)
- Beta access to Moz MCP AI connectors and documented API methods
What remains hard
- Proprietary data
Moz’s proprietary metrics have helped shape the SEO industry since 2004.
- Proprietary data
Plug into the Moz API to build or enhance your custom data tools and dashboards.
- Proprietary data
Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 3 seats.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a lightweight SEO metrics API and dashboard using Node.js (Express) for the API, Postgres for storage, Redis + Bull for background jobs, Puppeteer for SERP scraping, and a React UI. Scope: implement endpoints to (1) check keyword rank for a given domain+keyword (desktop and mobile), (2) fetch basic backlink counts and top pages from a simple crawler, (3) store daily time series for domains/keywords, and (4) provide a small dashboard to view trends and export CSV. Out of scope: reproducing Moz's global link index, proprietary authority/spam scores, and billion‑row scale. Include authentication, rate limiting, error handling, background retry logic, and unit tests for API handlers and job workers.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- 3 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- Hard moats found in the evidence-3
- Evidence score55
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time — so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 3
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productMoz - SEO Software for Smarter Marketing
- official pricingMoz - Moz API Pricing
- official docsMoz public API Documentation - Welcome - API documentation
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
