<b>Three difficulty tools disagree by 22 points on the same query</b>

<b>Three difficulty tools disagree by 22 points on the same query</b>
We ran 600 mid-volume queries through three popular difficulty scorers and compared the same keyword side by side. KD = keyword difficulty, a 0-100 estimate of ranking effort.

— Tool A median: 41
— Tool B median: 33 ▇▇▇▇▇▇
— Tool C median: 55 ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇
— Average spread per query: 22 points
— Queries where all three agreed within 10 points: 18 percent

The scores are not interchangeable. Each models referring-domain counts differently, so a 40 in one is not a 40 in another. So what: pick one tool, learn its bias against pages you actually rank, and never compare KD across vendors.

<i>Benchmark of the week:</i> only 1 in 5 queries gets a consistent difficulty read across tools.