We all recognize the power of brands, but too often the value of brand building is reduced to hand-waving and wishful thinking. Today, Moz makes the power of brand measurable.
Starting today, you’ll find something new in our Domain Overview tool: a Brand AuthorityTM score for your domain (or any domain you choose to analyze):
You’ll also see a new visualization – a four-quadrant grid – that compares your Brand Authority and Domain Authority to your closest online competitors. Here’s an example for electric car maker Lucid Motors:
It’s easy to see how Lucid stacks up to their closest search competitors and where they might need to build more authority. Lastly (for now), we’re launching a new API endpoint for API customers to access Brand Authority directly.
What is Brand Authority?
Brand Authority is a (1-100) score developed by Moz that measures a domain’s total brand strength. Where Domain Authority measures your ability to rank on search engines, Brand Authority measures your broader influence across marketing channels.
Why Brand Authority?
We know that brands matter, online and in the broader world. We see the influence of brands on search results, even if the details of that influence can be hard to pin down. Consider this illustration from Google’s own Quality Rater Guidelines:
When someone in 2023 searches for “apple,” Google knows that they probably mean Apple the company (i.e., the “dominant interpretation” or “dominant intent”). Even if Apple.com didn’t get their SEO quite right or hadn’t built quite enough link equity, people expect it to come up first.
We also know that Google understands real-world entities and tries to represent them in search, which might include Knowledge Graph results and other rich search result features. Google’s job is to model the real world, and brands are a huge part of that world.
The problem is that while we all intuitively understand what a “brand” is and have our own idea of which brands are important, we often resort to hand-waving when it comes to measuring brand strength. At best, we’re limited by our own biases and influences.