Wide, narrow & shallow moats
“Wide moat” and “narrow moat” are common shorthand among value investors for how durable a company’s competitive advantage looks: a wide moat should hold competitors off for decades, a narrow one for years, and a shallow one is an edge that exists but shouldn’t be leaned on. Used loosely, the labels are a judgment call — two analysts can look at the same company and disagree.
On this site the labels mean something narrower and more checkable, and that’s a deliberate difference from common usage: our tiers are exact bands of the Moat Score, not a committee’s opinion. Wide is 80–100, Narrow is 60–79, Shallow is 40–59, and below 40 is no moat. A company scoring 79.5 is Narrow and one scoring 80.0 is Wide — the boundary is sharp because the score is. Treat tiers as a reading aid over the number, not a separate verdict.
How the Moat Index measures this
The tier follows mechanically from the composite score described in the methodology — nothing else feeds it. As of the latest ingest, 143 of the 2,182 companies scored rate a Wide moat — the bar is meant to be hard to clear. You can read the top of the ranking on the Index, filter by tier in the screener, or start from the wide-moat preset screens.