My free tool out-impressed 29 of my 32 blog posts. Its ranking got five times worse.

Two numbers off my Search Console this morning, same 28 day window, same site.

The free landing page roast tool: 42 impressions, average position 38.0.

The blog post I wrote to support that tool: 11 impressions, average position 21.1.

Six weeks earlier it was the other way round. On July 4 the tool sat at position 7.5 on 18 impressions and the article was at 17.8 on 38. So the tool has more than doubled its reach since then, and its average position has gotten roughly five times worse over the same stretch.

Both of those things are true at once, and working out why changed how I plan the next tool.

The tool

favors.dev/roast takes a URL and gives back a conversion score out of 100.

It screenshots your full public page, then grades the copy and the design together across six categories: clarity, value proposition, trust, CTA, visual design and SEO. You get back the specific issues hurting signups with a fix for each, the things the page already does well, and a one line verdict.

No signup, no credit card, no email field. Paste a URL, press "Roast it", read the result.

It is deliberately small, and the scoping is most of why it shipped. The cut list was: accounts and password resets, saved history, dashboards, billing and usage limits, settings and themes, support for every edge case, and an admin panel for myself. Every one of those is how a weekend build turns into a month. If a free tool needs a billing system, you have started building a second product by accident.

What those numbers actually say

Here is the honest read, because "my free tool beat 29 of my 32 blog posts" is technically true and a bit misleading.

Reading	Tool impressions	Tool position	Article impressions	Article position
Jul 4	18	7.5	38	17.8
Jul 11	20	7.1	42	16.9
Jul 19	22	10.4	39	19.1
Aug 15	42	38.0	11	21.1

Impressions climbed because the tool started matching a much wider spread of queries. Average position fell for exactly the same reason. It is not ranking better. It is ranking on more things, most of them further down the page. A URL sitting at 7.5 on one tight query and a URL sitting at 38.0 across a lot of loose ones are different animals, and only one of them is growing.

The second honest thing: these are small numbers. 42 impressions is 42 impressions. Favors.dev is an early site and I am not going to dress this up as traction.

What makes it worth writing down is the ratio, not the size. That tool out-impressed 29 of the 32 blog posts on the site that ranked at all. It took a weekend. The posts take a morning each, and there are 32 of them.

The mechanism is intent matching, not some special treatment for tools. Somebody typing a query that ends in a verb wants to do the thing. A page where they can do the thing satisfies that better than a page describing how it is done.

The bridge, which is where free tools usually get ruined

The common failure is gating the result. You build something good, it starts working, and then you put the score behind an email field. That turns interest into a bounce at the exact moment the visitor is most engaged, and it kills the sharing that made the tool worth building in the first place.

Mine works in two moves. The roast is free, instant and complete: the score and the reasoning, no account. What an account adds is a step by step fix plan generated from that specific roast. That is a different artifact, not the same one held hostage. By the time somebody sees that offer they have already read a real critique of their own page, so they are deciding whether the next thing is worth an email, not whether I am worth trusting at all.

Three rules I would keep whatever you build. The next step should follow from the result the visitor just saw, so it reads as a continuation instead of a toll booth. It should be one option, not a menu. And it should be worth more than the free thing, or people will correctly ignore it.

What the tool is actually marketing

Favors.dev is a marketing co-op for founders who ship.

Founders complete small verified marketing tasks for each other and earn points to spend on their own launch. Actions run from +2 points for favoriting a launch up to +2,500 for a featured article, across 14 tracked action types. The work gets verified before points release, and 25% of every request is burned so points stay scarce. You cannot buy points. You can only earn them.

New members land with 250 points and can start clearing the queue straight away, without adding a project of their own first. Most tasks take between 2 and 10 minutes. When you are ready to launch you post a rally, which is a bundled request for testimonials, feedback and shares. Six rallies are live on it right now.

Trade favors, earn points, launch faster. The roast tool exists because the founder who wants an honest read on their landing page is the same founder who needs help launching it.

The rest of today

Everything below ran unattended while I was doing other things. Times are Bangkok.

• 08:31 PounceDomains published "Atom.com Appraisal Alternative: Score vs. Buying Loop".
• 08:55 Favors.dev published the full teardown this post is drawn from, at 743 lines of TSX in one commit.
• 11:12 The DomainNetwork monorepo published 10 posts across 10 live sites in a single commit: 30 files, 1,308 insertions. print-excel-on-one-page on supersheet.app, best-day-to-launch-on-product-hunt on trymy.app, h264-vs-h265 on vidclip.app, invoice-without-a-company on billable.dev, harvey-ai-alternatives on legalizeai.com, job-costing-for-small-contractors on smbdashboard.com, how-to-get-to-80-wpm on typetimer.com, questions-to-ask-grandparents on questioncard.com, time-blocking-your-day on smartclock.app, and 144-languages-claim-explained on aiearbuds.com.
• 12:05 Reinventing.AI published its weekday post.

Ten of those eleven posts are articles. Exactly one of them is a tool. Based on the table above, I have the ratio backwards, and that is the thing I am fixing next.

One ask

Go roast a page you own and tell me whether the score is wrong. Not whether you liked it, whether it is wrong. The rubric is only as good as the arguments people bring against it, and a bad score I can defend is more useful to me than a good one nobody checked.

If you are building in public and want somewhere to do it, I run Vibe Coding is Life: a Facebook group for the daily stuff, and a Skool community for people who want the builds broken down properly. Both are full of founders shipping small things on weekends, which is the entire premise of this post.