In practice I’ve found that generally speaking, Ahrefs tends to flag more keywords as easy to rank for than Semrush - with an Ahrefs ‘easy’ score often equating to a ‘medium difficulty’ one in Semrush. Semrush claims that their approach makes their difficulty scores more accurate Ahrefs counters this by arguing that “backlinks are probably the only easily measurable confirmed ranking factor.” Semrush examines quite a lot of different parameters when calculating it - including the number of backlinks pointing to top ranking sites country the word count of a keyword whether or not a keyword is branded and search volume.Īhrefs, by contrast, focuses solely on the number of backlinks pointing to sites ranking highly for keywords. The way that Semrush and Ahrefs calculate keyword difficulty is quite different. How do Ahrefs and Semrush calculate keyword difficulty scores? This theoretically makes the Semrush authority score more accurate than the Ahrefs equivalent despite this however, the Ahrefs domain rating score is typically used as the industry standard benchmark for evaluating the ‘quality’ of domains.Īs part of their domain analysis overviews, both Ahrefs and Semrush give you reports detailing the monthly traffic to the domain you’re analysing - but it’s important to note that the figures provided here are estimates. These two scores are calculated in different ways however: with Ahrefs, the score is calculated entirely on the basis of the backlinks, but Semrush factors in backlinks, site traffic estimates and ‘spam markers’ when calculating it.

These give you an indication of how likely it will be that content published on a particular domain will rank highly, or how valuable a backlink from it might be. What’s the difference between Ahrefs’ Domain Rating score and Semrush’s Authority Score?īoth Ahrefs and Semrush assign scores to websites to indicate how much ‘authority’ they have - a ‘Domain Rating’ or ‘Authority Score’ respectively.

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