Which links pay, which do not, and the ones we refuse to create

The rule this site runs on

A tool's place on this site is decided by which job it does and what its own pricing page publishes. Whether that vendor pays a commission is settled afterwards, and it has never changed an order, a recommendation or a sentence.

The test that keeps this honest: on the pages where the right answer is a free tool that pays nothing, the free tool goes first. On the tool map, three of the six jobs are answered by software from Google and Microsoft that will never pay this site anything, and they are named ahead of every paid alternative. On the free tools page, the entire page is about products with no commission attached.

How to spot a paid link

Partner links on this site are written as /go/ followed by the vendor's name, and every one of them carries rel="sponsored nofollow" in the page's markup. Your browser's status bar will show the /go/ address before you click. Ordinary links to a vendor, to documentation or to a source are plain links with no such markup and earn nothing.

Following a partner link costs you nothing extra and gets you no different price from clicking through from anywhere else — this site holds no discount codes and issues none.

The tools that do pay us

These run affiliate programmes that Searchbench takes part in. A subscription started through one of these links pays this site a share.

• SE Ranking — an SEO suite; its site-audit and rank-tracking modules are the ones named here
• Mangools — keyword research and rank tracking, and the cheapest paid entry point on the tool map after Ahrefs
• Surfer — on-page and content scoring, the sixth job on the map
• Rank Math — a WordPress SEO plugin
• AIOSEO — a WordPress SEO plugin
• SEOPress — a WordPress SEO plugin

One more sits in an odd position. Semrush has a partner programme, but it only accepts sites above a traffic threshold Searchbench has not yet reached, so that link currently points at Semrush's own homepage and pays this site nothing. Every sentence about Semrush on this site was written to be true at zero commission, and none of them will need changing if that ever changes.

The tools that pay us nothing, and why

Each of these is named, recommended or linked plainly somewhere on this site, and none of them can earn it a penny.

• Google Search Console and Google Keyword Planner — Google runs no affiliate scheme for them. They are the first recommendation on three of the six jobs anyway.
• Bing Webmaster Tools — the same, from Microsoft. Its keyword research and backlink reports are free features with nothing attached.
• Screaming Frog — no affiliate programme exists. Its free 500-URL crawler is the recommendation on the crawling job regardless.
• Ahrefs — the company shut its own affiliate scheme years ago and has not run one since. Ahrefs Starter is still named as the cheapest published entry price on the tool map, because it is.
• Yoast, Moz and Ubersuggest — these may well run programmes; nobody at Searchbench has read their current terms, so no partner link to them exists and none will be created until somebody has. They are named in prose where relevant, without links.

Things this site will not do

No discount codes, ever. Several of the programmes above forbid coupon placement outright, and the rest would simply be misleading: any saving shown on this site is the vendor's own published annual discount, quoted with the date it was read, never a code Searchbench is offering you.

No paid placement. Nothing on this wall can be bought. No vendor has ever been shown a page before it went up, and no vendor has been offered the chance.

No buying through our own links. Self-referral is banned by most of these programmes and would be grubby in any case.

No bidding on vendor names. Searchbench runs no paid search advertising on any brand name on this site, which several of the programmes above require and all of them prefer.

If a refusal here ever changes

The lists above are the site's working rules, not a form of words. A vendor moving from the second list to the first would mean rewriting this page first and the pages that mention it second — in that order, and visibly, with the date on this page moving. Nothing gets a link quietly.