TLDR: Brand Authority now delivers data across four English-speaking markets (US, UK, CA, AU,) providing a more comprehensive view of your brand presence. Try the enhanced Brand Authority today to better understand your brand presence. 

We launched Brand Authority in August 2023 with an eye toward the future of search. Since then, we’ve studied how brands change over time, discovered even more evidence of the impact of brands on Google results, and witnessed the wide release of AI-powered search. We’ve also kept working and learning, and today I’m proud to announce a number of enhancements to Moz’s Brand Authority, including multi-market awareness, deeper and broader data, and Brand Authority data in three additional Moz Pro products.

Large brands are not always constrained by borders, often achieving name recognition and influence across multiple global markets. Until recently, Brand Authority was limited to US search data. Like Domain Authority, we decided early on to use a single, non-localized score, but it has become clear that a single market doesn’t adequately represent global brands. As of late 2024, Brand Authority now reflects brand signals from four major English-speaking markets – the United States (US), the United Kingdom (UK), Canada (CA), and Australia (AU). This more accurately reflects multi-market brand awareness for most of our customers.

Multi-market Brand Authority has two practical advantages. First, if you primarily serve the UK, Canada, or Australia, you’re going to be much happier with the data. Here are some concrete examples of score increases from our initial testing:

• +60 — timhortons.ca
• +39 — bunnings.com.au
• +36 — bbc.co.uk
• +33 — tesco.com
• +26 — canadiantire.ca

This passes the critical “Tim Hortons Test” that I made up right after seeing this data for the first time (I can do that, because I’m a professional). If you operate in one of these markets or in a country that serves these markets, I hope you’ll give Brand Authority another look.

Second, internationally recognized brands that operate in all four markets (e.g., Netflix, Xbox, Wikipedia, etc.) will now more accurately reflect their multi-market presence. One extra bit of good news – everyone’s score either stayed the same or went up with this update.

Thanks to the hard (and often unseen) work of our Data Services and Big Data teams, Brand Authority now reflects signals from our entire SERP corpus, which means far more brand signals, improved scores, and better stability over time. While our score originally ran in real-time for most domains, multi-market Brand Authority is now pre-computed across roughly 2 million domains/brands. If you’re a Moz API customer, this means much more data availability and faster access to that data.

To help you put Brand Authority to work, we’ve added it to three product features. First, the SERP Analysis section of Keyword Explorer now shows Brand Authority scores for each organic result for that keyword (alongside Domain Authority and Page Authority):

Now, you can see at a glance how you stack up against the competition and whether there’s a brand advantage at play for any given keyword.

In our revamped Keyword Gap tool (under Competitive Research), we’ve also added Brand Authority to the Competitor Overview table, giving you a quick look at how you measure up against your competitors on key metrics.

With Brand Authority, Domain Authority, and Page Authority working together, we’re giving you a more complete view of how both Google and searchers see your site. The Competitor Overview with Brand Authority is also available in our Top Competing Content tool.

In the two years since we built Brand Authority, the power of brands in search has only become clearer. A search for “best laptops”, for example, returns three brand-focused features on page one, including “Explore brands”, which surfaces major brand sites.

There are also brand filters and “Brand picks for you,” which return targeted product results.

Finally, you can save your favorite brands, which modifies shopping results to reflect your personal preferences, customizing the search experience.

Beyond SERP features, it’s clear that brands and named entities also influence organic results. Research last fall from our own Tom Capper, inspired by the 2024 Google leaks, showed that sites with a high ratio of Domain Authority to Brand Authority fared the worst in Google’s Helpful Content Updates.

Another way to say this is that Google may be suspicious of sites whose link equity exceeds their brand equity (possibly measured by something similar to branded search volume). If you’re aggressively pursuing links without building a brand, you’re likely to struggle in 2025 and beyond.

Finally, the advent of AI/LLMs is shifting how we view search results and have made brand mentions a growing form of search visibility. Consider this excerpt from an AI Overview on a Google search for “AI search engines” …

Each of the underlined links opens a new Google search for that brand/product, with clear navigational intent. As these features evolve, searchers may interact with brands before even seeing traditional organic results.

Google SERP features, Gemini and other AI engines, and even the core algorithm itself are evolving constantly, and that’s not slowing down. Whatever hand Google deals us next, Brand Authority will give you an advantage by showing you the bigger picture of how searchers are looking for your brand vs. your competitors. With more markets, better data, and Brand Authority in more tools, Moz will keep working to prepare you for whatever the future brings.