How to compare domain authority for brands cited in AI answers with Moz

You compare domain authority for brands cited in AI answers in two stages: first find out which brands and sources the answers actually cite for the questions your buyers ask, then score each of those domains in Moz and set the scores beside your own. The first stage matters more than it looks. AI answers do two different things that both count as citing. They name brands in the text, such as the three competitors ChatGPT recommends, and they link to sources, such as a review site, a roundup article, or a Reddit thread. Both kinds of domain belong on your list, because a buyer can be steered by either one.

Moz handles the second stage well. Domain Authority is Moz's score from 1 to 100 that predicts how likely a whole site is to rank, based mainly on the links pointing at it. Page Authority is the same idea for a single URL, and Spam Score flags sites that resemble ones search engines have penalized. In Moz Pro, Link Explorer shows these scores for any domain, and its link profile comparison puts several sites side by side. Moz's free Domain Authority checker and the MozBar browser extension show the same numbers one site at a time.

What Moz doesn't do is choose the domains for you. Someone has to ask the answer engines your buyers' questions, write down every brand and cited page, clean the list up, and then decide what the scores mean. That last part is where most comparisons fall short. A table of numbers shows that a review site has a Domain Authority of 90 and you have 30, but it doesn't say what to do about it.

A good result answers that question. It shows, for each buyer question, which cited sources are out of reach on authority alone and which ones you could displace with a better page. It also shows which strong sites already cite your competitors and might cite you too. Kite does this whole job, from asking the questions to acting on what the comparison shows.

Start by asking Kite in Slack to run the comparison for your market:

"Find out which brands and sites AI answers cite when buyers ask about our category, and compare their Moz domain authority with ours."

Kite is an AI marketer in your Slack. It researches your business, builds a growth strategy, and ships the work that brings you new customers. From that research it already knows your category, your competitors, and the questions your buyers ask, so it proposes the set of questions to track and the competitors to watch. Confirm the list or add the questions you care about most, and Kite starts.

You'll need to connect your Moz account by adding an API key from it, because Kite reads Moz's scores through your own account. Moz meters its API in rows, so each domain or page Kite scores uses a little of your plan's allowance. The AI-answer tracking needs no setup, because it's built into Kite.

Asking the questions and scoring the domains is research, so Kite does it and reports back without waiting for approval. Anything that follows from the research, such as publishing a page or emailing a site to pitch it, waits for your go-ahead in Slack.

Kite starts by choosing the questions your buyers actually ask, because the brands an AI answer cites depend entirely on the question. It draws them from what it knows about your business: the problems your product solves, the category terms people search for, and the comparisons buyers make, such as "the best payroll software for small businesses" or "alternatives to" a well-known competitor.

It runs each question through ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude. For every answer, Kite records whether your brand appears, which competing brands appear, and which pages and domains the answer cites. It saves the full answer and its citations, and it measures your share of voice against the competing brands. Running all four engines matters, because each one leans on a different mix of sources, and a domain that dominates Perplexity's citations may barely show up in Claude's answers.

Kite turns the raw citations into a clean list before it scores anything, so every number it reads in Moz means something. It groups the citations by domain and counts how often each one appears across questions and engines, because a source cited in twenty answers deserves more attention than one cited once.

Kite also sorts the list into two groups. The first is the brands named in the answers, which are usually your competitors. The second is the sources the answers cite, such as review sites, industry publications, roundup articles, documentation, and community threads. For each source, Kite keeps the exact page that was cited as well as its domain. That distinction carries through the rest of the job, because an AI answer cites a page, and a page on a strong site can still be a thin one.

Finally, Kite decides what to score at which level. A competitor's main site is scored as a root domain, a separate blog or help center can be scored as a subdomain, and each cited article is scored as its own URL. Your own domain and the pages you'd want cited for each question go on the list too.

Kite reads Moz's site metrics for everything on the list through your connected account. For each domain it reads the Domain Authority, Spam Score, and link counts. For each cited page and each of your own candidate pages, it reads the Page Authority and the links pointing at that URL.

Before it scores a long list, Kite can check how many API rows your Moz plan has left. It can also read the current version of Moz's link index, which tells it when a score has moved because Moz recalculated its index rather than because a site gained or lost links.

Kite compares the scores question by question, because the gap that matters is the one between you and the sources cited for a specific question. A Domain Authority of 30 might be well below every source cited for one question and level with the sources cited for another.

For each question, Kite looks at three things. It compares your Domain Authority with the brands named in the answer. It compares the Page Authority of each cited page with the page you have, or could write, on the same topic. And it checks each cited source's Spam Score, so a high-scoring but low-quality site doesn't shape the plan.

Then it decides what the gap means. Authority is one reason a source gets cited, and Kite reads the cited pages themselves to judge the others. When the cited sources are review sites and publications far stronger than your domain, outranking them isn't realistic, and the better move is to get listed or mentioned on them. When a cited page has modest Page Authority but answers the question directly and specifically, it's winning on content, and a better page of your own can compete with it. When a competitor's whole domain is much stronger than yours, Kite looks at that competitor's top pages in Moz, meaning the pages with the most links from other sites, to see which kinds of content earn it links.

When the comparison is done, Kite posts a summary in the Slack thread where you asked. It names the questions where you're missing from the answers, the brands and sources cited in your place, and how your Domain Authority compares with theirs. It says plainly where your domain is weaker and whether that weakness explains the gap or whether the cited page is simply better.

The full comparison comes with it as a table you can scan in Slack. When it's too large for a message, Kite publishes it as a report with tables you can filter, at a link you can share with your team.

Kite follows the comparison with a short plan, ordered by how many answers each move could change. A plan might include a new page that answers a tracked question better than the weak page currently cited, a pitch to a high-authority roundup that lists your competitors but not you, or a content asset modeled on the kind of page that earns a competitor its links.

Once you approve, Kite carries out the work. It writes and publishes pages on a site it hosts or through your connected CMS, and it writes and sends pitches from your team's Kite email address. After a pitch, it can use Moz to check whether the site now links to your page. After the changes go live, Kite runs the same questions through the four answer engines again to measure whether the citations moved. You can also ask Kite to repeat the comparison on a schedule, such as once a month, so you see how the cited sources and their authority shift over time.

When Kite finishes, you have a clear picture of which domains the AI answers in your category trust, how your own site compares, and what to do about each gap.