We get asked this a lot: is SEO Score API an Ahrefs alternative? A Moz alternative? An SEMrush alternative?
No. Honest answer: those are dashboard suites and we're not trying to build one. SEO Score API is a focused REST API for on-page and technical SEO audits — the kind of work that should happen in your code, not in a tab someone has to remember to open. The two categories of tool do different jobs, and the most useful thing we can do is be clear about which is which.
What Ahrefs, Moz, and SEMrush are for
Three things, primarily:
Backlink intelligence. Who links to you, who links to your competitors, what those links are worth, when they appeared, when they disappeared. Ahrefs in particular has spent fifteen years crawling the web for this; the index size is the moat.
Keyword research. What people search for, what volume those queries have, how hard they are to rank for. SEMrush leans into this hardest.
SERP rank tracking. Where you actually rank for the keywords you care about, day over day, in the geographies that matter.
We don't do any of those three, and we're not planning to. Not because they're not valuable — they are — but because the cost to build them well is enormous and the existing players have done it already.
What SEO Score API is for
One thing, primarily: on-page and technical SEO audits as a programmatic endpoint. Send a URL, get back 82 checks scored as JSON, in two seconds. That's the whole product.
The workflows that grow naturally out of that endpoint:
- CI gates that fail the build when a page regresses
- Weekly monitoring across a portfolio of client URLs
- AI agents that read audit JSON and act on it
- White-label reports generated from JSON instead of screenshots
- Score badges embedded in READMEs and status pages
None of those workflows are things Ahrefs or Moz build for. They're not in the product roadmap because the customer those tools target — a human marketer working in a dashboard — doesn't need any of them.
The split, in one table
| Job | Use Ahrefs / Moz / SEMrush | Use SEO Score API |
|---|---|---|
| "Who's linking to us?" | ✅ | ❌ |
| "What's our keyword opportunity?" | ✅ | ❌ |
| "Where do we rank today?" | ✅ | ❌ |
| "Why does this page score 67 instead of 90?" | Sometimes | ✅ |
| "Fail the build when SEO regresses" | ❌ | ✅ |
| "Audit 5,000 product pages every week" | Painful in UI | ✅ |
| "Generate a client report from JSON" | ❌ | ✅ |
| "Give an AI agent structured findings" | ❌ | ✅ |
The cells where both can do the job are rare. Mostly, you reach for one or the other depending on what you're trying to answer.
The shape of a team that uses both
The setup we see most often at agencies and product companies:
- Ahrefs (or Moz, or SEMrush) — used by the marketing team for keyword research and backlink analysis. One license, used by 1–3 people, lives in a browser tab.
- SEO Score API — used by the engineering team for CI gates and monitoring. Lives in GitHub Actions, in a cron job, in a Slack alert, in an n8n workflow.
The two don't fight for budget because they don't fight for the same job. The Ahrefs seat is a marketing line item. SEO Score API is an engineering tooling line item, billed the same way as Sentry or Datadog.
When you don't need both
If you're a small marketing team with no engineering capacity, you don't need SEO Score API. Use Ahrefs or Moz. The dashboard tools are designed for you.
If you're a product engineering team that ships fast and just wants a quality gate, you probably don't need Ahrefs — and you probably aren't going to convince anyone to expense a $99/mo seat for it. SEO Score API at $5–$39/mo lives comfortably in the engineering tooling budget the way Ahrefs doesn't.
If you're an agency, you almost certainly need both. The dashboard is for the human-driven work; the API is for the leverage that scales beyond your headcount. Why SEO agencies are switching to API-first auditing goes deeper on this.
The positioning, plainly
We'd rather be the second SEO tool your company buys, used by the people the first one was never built for, than the one that tries to do everything badly. Ahrefs and Moz are good at what they do. We're good at what we do. The interesting workflows are the ones that exist because both are in the stack.
If you're already paying for Ahrefs and you're an engineer who wishes SEO findings lived in your CI alongside your test suite — that's exactly the gap SEO Score API fills. Try the free tier and see if the response shape fits the workflow you have in mind.