Who keeps this board, and how

Positionlog is written and maintained by one person who has spent too long watching rank graphs move for reasons nobody could explain. It exists because the rank-tracking category is unusually easy to write about dishonestly: everything is a subscription, the differences hide in allowances rather than features, and the one thing every buyer wants to know — which tool is right — cannot be measured by anyone.

How a figure gets onto this site

Someone opens the vendor's own pricing page, reads the number, writes it down with the date, and records the URL in the site's FACTS file. That is the whole method, and it has two consequences worth stating.

The first is about pages that draw their prices in the browser. This site's first pass treated any such page as unpublished, on the reasoning that a page serving no price to a plain request has not published one. That was too blunt and it produced a wrong sentence about BrightLocal, corrected on 24 September 2026: its cards do carry Track, Manage and Grow prices once JavaScript runs, and a price a browser shows is a published price. The rule now is narrower — a row reads not published only where a page shows no price even fully rendered, which on the day was true of Mangools. Mangools and Wincher are both in that position as of 24 September 2026, and both are named anyway, because leaving a tool out because its marketing is awkward would be its own kind of dishonesty.

The second is that every figure here has a shelf life. Pricing pages move. If a number on this site disagrees with the vendor's page, the vendor's page is right and this site is stale — tell the desk and it gets fixed.

The scoring scale

Scores on this site are out of ten, and they mean something specific:

• 8.0 and above — this desk would put its own keywords in it without much thought.
• 6.0 to 7.9 — it fits a particular job well. Buy it for that job, not as a default.
• Below 6.0 — there is something better at the same money, and the review says what.

The score is the published rubric applied to what the vendor documents and what the tool can be seen to do. It is not the output of a test, because this site has not run one, and a scoring system that pretends otherwise is inventing a measurement.

Things this site refuses to do

It does not print accuracy figures for rank trackers, because no vendor publishes an audited one and no independent audit exists. It does not print keyword volumes as evidence that a market is large. It does not run a mailing list, so nothing here asks for your address. And it does not carry discount codes or "exclusive deal" boxes — several of the programmes behind the links here ban that outright, and the ones that do not still make a page age badly.

Where a free tool or a tool with no partner programme is the right answer, it is named as the right answer and the page says plainly that it pays nothing. Google Search Console and Ahrefs are both in that category and both appear on the front page.

Independence

No vendor sees this site before it publishes, reviews copy, or has any say in an order. Some of the outbound links are partner links, which is how the hosting is paid for; what pays for this board sets out which ones, what they pay, and the three tools that were deliberately left out of that arrangement.