Moz to Semrush: what transfers and what does not

The SEOmoz question, answered directly

A steady trickle of searches uses the phrase “Moz to SEOmoz migration”. There is no such thing, and it is worth saying plainly rather than building a page that pretends otherwise.

SEOmoz and Moz are the same company. It launched as SEOmoz, and rebranded to Moz in 2013 when the product line grew past search alone. No product moved anywhere. There is nothing to migrate between the two names.

What people searching that phrase almost always want is one of two things: how to move off Moz onto another platform, or reassurance that a tool they remember by its old name still exists. This page covers the first. The second is answered above.

What actually carries across

Two things transfer cleanly.

Keyword lists. Plain text out of Moz, plain text into Semrush Position Tracking. The keywords come across reliably. Tags and groupings usually do not, so budget time to rebuild the organizational structure by hand.

Search Console and analytics connections. These are Google’s data, not the vendor’s, so reconnecting the property gives you a continuous series regardless of which platform you view it through. This is the single most useful fact on this page for anyone designing reporting.

Everything else is a fresh start. Rank history, link data and every proprietary score belong to the platform that produced them.

Why the authority numbers cannot be compared

Domain Authority is a Moz model trained on Moz’s link index. Authority Score is a Semrush model built on Semrush’s index. They correlate loosely because both attempt to estimate the same underlying thing, and they disagree specifically because the inputs and the formulas differ.

Charting them as one series produces a line with a step in it that means nothing, and someone will eventually explain that step as a real event — a penalty, a link loss, a competitor move. That misreading is the actual cost of not documenting the switch.

The fix is a single annotation on the switch date and a restated baseline. Ten minutes of work that saves a genuinely confused quarterly review.

The parallel month

The most useful thing you can do costs one extra subscription month.

Run both platforms for a full reporting cycle. During that window both are measuring the same reality, so the difference between them is measurable rather than assumed. You end up able to say “Semrush reports our authority roughly X points below Moz for this domain” instead of guessing.

It is also the only way to distinguish a configuration error from a genuine index difference. If the parallel period shows a consistent gap, it is index difference. If it shows an erratic one, check the location and device settings — that is nearly always what it turns out to be.

This page makes no recommendation

Which platform is better is not a question this page answers, because the honest answer depends on what you use it for and no page selling a service should pretend otherwise.

What is worth saying: the switching cost is mostly reporting continuity, and that cost is almost entirely avoidable with an export, a parallel month and an annotation. Teams who plan those three steps barely notice the change. Teams who cancel first spend a quarter explaining a chart.

The general tool migration page covers the same method for any platform pairing, and if you arrived here looking for website migration work, that is a different service entirely.