Authoritas’ Market Analysis Tool: Will It Replace Ahrefs?

I saw Authoritas counting down today on AS and thought I’d do a quick test to see if this is a #goodbuy or #goodbye.

After logging in, I notice they have A LOT of features (should have tested this earlier).This mini-review only explores the Market Analysis feature of Authoritas. Which basically tells you what keywords you/ your competitors are ranking for. (I’ll check out other features if possible!!)

…So you can optimize the ones you rank for on the 2nd or 3rd page of Google and “steal” potential keywords away from your competitors.

Most SEO tools do not have this feature because it takes a lot of resources to crawl billions of pages every day. Plus maintaining and updating the database regularly.

I want to know if Authoritas is good enough to cancel my Ahrefs subscription. Let’s put it to the test…

Authoritas VS Ahref vs MOZ

Since my domain is weak and fairly new, this is a good opportunity to test the power of Authoritas. I mean, they must be good if they can detect a small fly like me and index some of the keywords, right?

Number of keywords for my website…

Authoritas: 20 Keywords
Ahref: 437 Keywords
MOZ: 65 Keywords

Authoritas was only able to find 5% of the keywords found by Ahref.

Hmmm not very good.

Maybe because my site is not big enough to be under the radar of Authoritas? And so they did not crawl my site properly and index the keywords?

Let’s do another search for Backlinko.com, one of the most popular sites on SEO…

Number of keywords found for Backlinko…

Authoritas: 18,106 keywords
Ahref: 161,000 keywords
MOZ: 48,300 keywords

As expected, the percentage has increased from 5% to 11% because Backlinko is a much more popular site with nearly 400k monthly search traffic.

However, the number of keywords found was still very low compared to Ahref.

Now the important question…

Would I trust Authoritas to help me find ranking keywords?

No.

Why should I create my SEO strategies based on 5-10% of Ahref data? The potential loss from missed opportunities or poor decisions will cost me much more.

What are the chances of Authoritas’ visibility explorer getting to Ahref’s level?

At least 3-5 years. And not likely be able to catch up.

It takes A LOT of resources to crawl billions of web pages a day, maintain a huge database, and constantly update it to keep it fresh.

MOZ, one of the OG SEO tools with more than 15 years in the business, has only managed to find 15-30% of what Ahref finds.

Mind you, this is a company with over 700k monthly search volume and millions in annual revenue.

So that should tell us how big of a task this is.

Authoritas Market Analysis Tool Rating:

2 out of 5 moos

What about WriterZen, Labrika, or other SEO LTDs? Can they help me figure out what keywords me & my competitors are ranking for?

Unfortunately, no. Finding keywords not only for your site, but also for ALL websites require a lot of crawling and a huge database. Ahref reportedly crawls over 6 billion web pages per day and updates it every 15-30 minutes to ensure the data is fresh.

This is resource intensive and very difficult to achieve, especially for a startup with limited funds.

Can the Google Search Console (GSC) reveal the same data?

The free GSC is capable of uncovering all the major search queries that visitors use to find your website.

However, these are search queries, not keywords.

A keyword can have multiple search queries that people use to search on Google. You want to know BOTH the keywords and the search terms.

Besides, the GSC can only show search queries for your own website. You will not be able to check what keywords your competitors are ranking for and do a competitor analysis. For that, you still need a tool like Ahref/Semrush.

Their market analysis feature and it was a total dud! Let’s check out their rank tracker and keyword research tool to see if they measure up.

Rank Tracking Tool

I added a couple of keywords to test and the data was updated within 1-2 hours. The position tracking was also accurate. Pass

Apart from the usual rank tracking features, such as showing rank position changes and a graph showing your position over time, there are 2 other notable features that caught my eye. (As I later discovered, these two were also useful in the keyword research tool).

Serp Features

These are special features that show up on the SERP result. For example – the people also ask box, video recommendations, Google ads…

So even if you rank #3, these additional SERP features can push your position down because they take up quite a bit of space at the top of the screen. With this information, you can either shoot for a less “competitive” keyword first or push even harder to get to the top. Not super important information in this section, but good to know.

User Intent

This gives you at a glance an understanding of the user intent of the keywords you are ranking for. Not really important in this section. But very useful when we get to the keyword research tool. But I suspect they just want to include it here to beef up the rank tracker a bit

One star is taken away for the below average UI/UX…

Rank Tracking Feature (Rating):

4 out of 5 moos!

Keyword Research Tool (Data Accuracy)

Let’s compare it to WriterZen, since we know they use the standard Google KPI (like Ubersuggest, Keywordtool.io, & many other KW tools) to get their keyword data, and also Ahrefs, which is one of, if not the best on the market.

The first step (and easiest way) to measure data quality is to compare keyword search volume.

And so I ran a few searches for the various keywords below…

“KEYWORD RESEARCH”
Authoritas — NA
WriterZen (Google API) — 5,400
Ahref — 16,000

“TECHNICAL SEO”
Authoritas — 1,600
WriterZen (Google API) — 1,600
Ahref — 3,500

“SEO FOR BEGINNERS”
Authoritas — 720
WriterZen (Google API) — 880
Ahref — 600

“APPSUMO”
Authoritas — NA
WriterZen (Google API) — 14,800
Ahref — 22,000

“LIFETIME DEALS”
Authoritas — NA
WriterZen (Google API) — 880
Ahref — 500

“YOGA FOR BEGINNERS”
Authoritas — 40,500
WriterZen (Google API) — 49,500
Ahref — 34,000

“SUMO WRESTLING”
Authoritas — 60,500
WriterZen (Google API) — 60,500
Ahref — 5,600

My Observations for Authoritas’ Keyword Research Tool

I noticed that Authoritas’ search volume is very similar to WriterZen’s, in some cases exactly the same.

That tells me they are probably using the same Google API.

But there were also many cases where they were slightly different. So my guess is that Authoritas is also trying to create their own click estimation model to make the data more accurate.

But for this reason, it seems like is a bug whereseveral of their searches returned 0 results or NA where there was actually significant search volume. (See above for the keyword “appsumo”, and “keyword research”).

3 out of 10 searches I ran had this problem. Hopefully it’s a simple error they can fix. (Removal of one star)

Keyword Data Accuracy (Rating):

Ahref:  (5/5)

WriterZen: (4/5)

Authoritas: (3/5)

If Authoritas manages to perfect keyword research data with its own model, this investment will pay off (roadmap). Another big plus is the generous limits. We get unlimited keyword research even with Tier 1.

Keyword Research Tool (Features)

As mentioned in the rank tracking section, Authoritas has a unique feature called “User Intent”.

Basically, the AI looks at the top results and makes a guess about the user’s intent. There are 4 categories – information, navigation, transaction and research.

Here are some examples…

Appsumo Briefcase Login — Navigation
What is Appsumo Briefcase — Informational & Research
Appsumo Briefcase vs Plus — Research
Buy Appsumo Briefcase — Transactional

This will help you determine if a keyword is worth ranking for and what TYPE of content you should write.

For example…

Would you want to rank for “Appsumo login” even though it might have a LOT search volume? Nope.

Semrush has that feature, but Ahref does not. I usually have to do it manually. With Authoritas, I can let the AI tell me what the user intent is. Nice!

THE END… of the unique features for Authoritas.

Sad but true: the rest of their features pale in comparison to even WriterZen.

Take a look at the comparison chart in the Nimbus note + a quick demo of their features, and you’ll see…

Keyword Research Tool Features Rating:

2 out of 5 moos!

(It would be 1 star without the User intent feature)

Conclusion!

Authoritas has A LOT of other SEO features and I only had time to go through the market analysis tool, the rank tracking tool and the keyword research tool.

What is your favourite feature on Authoritas that I’m missing out?

Let me know by joining the discussion on our Facebook group!