Enter a keyword and see how hard it is to rank for, computed from the live top ten and the referring domains behind each result. The pages that produced the score come back with it.
Free, one keyword per run
Ranking pages shown
Ten when signed in
The scale
What the number means.
Very easy0–14
Easy15–29
Moderate30–49
Hard50–69
Very hard70–84
Brutal85–100
How it is scored
Four things decide the score.
1
55% of the score
Link strength of the pages already there
The referring-domain count of every result in the live top ten, taken as a set rather than an average. The weakest page in that set is the entry bar, because that is the position you would have to take to break in.
2
20% of the score
How many big brands hold the page
A SERP can look beatable on link counts alone and still be immovable, because searchers click a name they recognise. Counting the brands in the top ten explains a difficulty score that the backlink numbers on their own would not.
3
15% of the score
What advertisers are paying
Paid competition is a market signal about commercial value. When advertisers bid hard on a term, the organic results for it are usually contested just as hard.
4
10% of the score
How crowded the results page is
AI Overviews, People Also Ask boxes and shopping units sit above the organic results and absorb clicks. A first position under a stack of features is worth measurably less than a first position without one.
Honest limit
What a score cannot tell you.
What a difficulty score cannot tell you
Difficulty describes the competition, not your chances. It knows nothing about your domain, your existing authority, or whether your page answers the query better than the ten already ranking — a site with real topical authority will beat a score its link profile says it should lose to, and a new site will lose one it should win. It also cannot tell you whether a keyword is worth the work: a brutal keyword with high volume and buying intent is often a better use of a quarter than an easy one nobody searches.
A number tells you the cost. Deciding what to spend it on is a strategy question, and that is a conversation rather than a tool.
FAQ
Questions about keyword difficulty.
What is keyword difficulty?
Keyword difficulty is a 0-100 estimate of how hard it would be to rank on the first page for a search term. It is derived from the pages already ranking — how many other sites link to them, how established those brands are, and how much of the results page is taken up by features rather than organic links. It describes the competition you would face, not your own chances of beating it.
How is this difficulty score calculated?
The score is computed from the live top ten results for the keyword and the referring-domain counts behind each one, weighted at 55% link strength, 20% brand density, 15% paid competition and 10% results-page crowding. Every run returns the ranking set it used, so the number can be checked against the pages that produced it. It is a calculation from live data rather than a figure looked up in a database.
What is a good keyword difficulty score to target?
For a site without much established authority, keywords scoring under 30 are realistic within a few months, while anything above 70 usually needs a sustained link-building programme rather than a single page. The more useful question is difficulty relative to value: a moderate keyword with clear buying intent is worth more effort than an easy one with no commercial signal. Difficulty tells you the price, not whether the thing is worth buying.
Why does this score differ from Ahrefs, Semrush or Moz?
Every tool computes difficulty from its own crawl of the web and its own weighting, so the same keyword routinely scores differently across vendors. None of them is the true value, because there is no true value to be right about — difficulty is a model, not a measurement. Compare keywords within one tool rather than comparing one keyword across tools.
Why do you show two difficulty numbers?
The headline score is computed from the live top ten and their referring domains. Alongside it we show DataForSEO’s own difficulty metric, which runs on a different scale and will often disagree — 61 against 38 is a perfectly normal spread. They are labelled separately and never averaged, because averaging two different scales produces a third number that measures nothing.
How accurate is the traffic estimate?
It is an estimate and is labelled as one everywhere it appears. It multiplies the keyword’s real search volume by published average click-through rates by position, reduced where AI Overviews or shopping units sit above the organic results and absorb clicks. Those CTR averages come from aggregate industry studies rather than from your site, so treat the figure as a rough order of magnitude rather than a forecast.
What does it mean when a keyword comes back as not found?
It means the term is not in the keyword database, which almost always indicates negligible search volume. That is a finding rather than an error: a keyword nobody searches for has no difficulty worth scoring. Try a broader phrasing, or the question a buyer would actually type.
Is the keyword difficulty checker free?
Yes. One keyword per run is free with no account, and signing in raises that to ten keywords at a time along with the comparison and opportunity views. Every run returns the full ranking evidence either way, because the evidence is the point of the tool rather than the upsell.
What happens next
01Answer a few quick questions about your business. About two minutes.
02Pick a time that suits you for a free 30-minute call with a founder.
03We study your site before the call, so you leave with a plan, not a pitch.
