Keyword Difficulty
Keyword difficulty is a score SEO tool companies calculate to guess how hard it will be to reach Google's first page for a search. Google doesn't publish one. Ahrefs scores it from 0 to 100 using how many websites link to the pages already in the top 10, and says its score leaves out anything on the page itself.
Source: Ahrefs Help Center, What does KD stand for in Keywords Explorer?, checked October 29, 2026
What Keyword Difficulty means for your business
Each tool builds its score its own way, so the same number means different things in Ahrefs, Semrush and Moz. Semrush's KD% mixes the linking sites and authority scores of the sites already ranking with features of the results page itself. Moz weights the top 10 by how likely each spot is to be clicked and runs its scale from 1 to 100.
Ahrefs says not to base all your SEO decisions on its score, and calls it a first filter. We'd use it the same way. The scores look at the regular results only, so for a search like your trade plus your town they say nothing about the map listings.
We'd rather search the phrase ourselves and look at who's there. If the first page is full of small local sites like yours, a high score matters less than it sounds.
If a tool has told you a search is too hard to bother with, ask what winning it would bring in. We judge the work by whether more people call and book.
Last reviewed October 29, 2026. All terms
How AI answers it today
On October 29, 2026, Google's AI Overview cited SEO tool companies, YouTube and Reddit, and noted that each tool uses its own formula. ChatGPT cited nothing and gave one table of score bands that differs from the bands Semrush publishes.
Our run through ChatGPT and Google's AI Overview, October 29, 2026. A sample, not what every buyer sees.
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