Who keeps the board, and the rules it is kept by

What this site is

Searchbench is a map of the SEO software category, written by one person. It exists because the category is unusually badly served by the pages that rank for it: a "best SEO tools" list that puts a desktop crawler, a keyword database and a WordPress plugin in the same numbered ranking is comparing things that were never alternatives.

The organising idea here is a pegboard. Tools hang on a wall, sorted by the job they do, and you take down the one that fits the work in front of you. Nobody argues about whether a tape measure beats a drill.

How a price gets onto this site

Vendor pricing pages are read in a headless browser rather than fetched as text, because a large share of them render their prices in JavaScript and return an empty page to anything simpler. Every billing panel is read separately.

That last part matters more than it sounds. A pricing page can open on its yearly panel and headline a rate that is only available with a twelve-month commitment, while the monthly figure sits behind a control you have to click. One tool on this site publishes no monthly rate at all. Another shows a first-year price against a higher list price and states in small type that renewals are at the full one. Reading only what the page happens to show you first produces an article that is wrong in a way no reader can detect.

So: each panel is opened, each figure is copied as printed, the currency is recorded as displayed, and the date is attached. Every fragile figure on this site is kept in an internal source register alongside the page it was read from and the date, so a re-check starts from the original page rather than from what an article here says about it. Ask for the provenance of any specific figure through the contact page and you will get the page address and the read date.

What gets left out

If a vendor does not publish a number, this site does not supply one. There is no estimating, no averaging of third-party articles, and no silent currency conversion. A renewal price that is not stated is written as not published, and it stays that way until the vendor states it.

The same rule covers claims. Nothing on Searchbench has been benchmarked. No crawl speed has been timed, no index has been counted, no keyword tool's figures have been checked against anything. So you will not find a "most accurate" tool named here, or a data-quality score, or a sentence beginning "in our testing".

Where a vendor makes a claim about itself, it is quoted as that vendor's claim, with quotation marks and a name attached.

Why there are no scores on most pages

A score out of ten is a useful shorthand when the thing being scored was actually examined. Most of what a reader wants to know about an SEO tool — whether its data is any good — cannot be examined from outside, because the reference answer is inside Google.

So the pages here score fit, not quality: how well a tool matches the job you named, judged on what it publishes about itself. Where even that would be guesswork, there is no score at all, and the page says why.

What this site earns, and from whom

Some outbound links are partner links. They are written as /go/ addresses, carry rel="sponsored nofollow", and pay Searchbench a share if you subscribe. The list is short, it is published in full on the disclosure page, and it includes the ones that pay nothing — several tools recommended prominently here have no partner scheme at all, and two vendors are covered without any link because nobody has read their terms.

No vendor sees a page before it is published, and no vendor has ever been asked to.

Corrections

If a figure here is wrong, it is wrong because a page changed after it was read or because the reader made a mistake — both happen. Pricing pages on this list have moved more than once in the past two years. Say so through the contact page and the figure gets re-read at source, not adjusted from memory.