The Board's Free Tools Are Live

Nobody searches for a leaderboard of brands.

They search for what a CPM is. What UTM stands for. Whether their pin will crop right on Slack.

Or where to submit a product this week, free, before spending anything on a badge nobody clicks.

That's the search we decided to answer first, before we ever asked anyone to pay a dollar for a rank.

Our free tools page is a growing list of our free tools built for exactly that arithmetic: what a click costs, what a link looks like before anyone clicks it, and where else a new brand can get seen.

Every one is free. None of them need an account. None of them keep what you type.

Here's what's in the toolshed, why we built it before the throne, and what it changes if you already hold a listing.

The six calculators

Three numbers, tied by one formula, in each. Type any two and the third solves as you type. Type into the answer instead, and it becomes the input.

Pull your last invoice from whichever platform you spent on this month.

Type the spend and either the impressions or the clicks into the matching calculator above. If the CPM or CPC it hands back sits above the benchmark line built into the page, you've found a budget conversation worth having this afternoon, not next quarter.

The average cost per click for search advertising across every industry sits at $5.42 this year. The range by industry runs from under $2 to nearly $10, depending on who else is bidding that hour, LocaliQ's 2026 benchmark report shows.

Nobody prints that range on the sign-up page of the platform selling it to you. We wanted a place that did, and let you check your own number against it before spending anything else.

That's the same arithmetic behind what a website visitor actually costs once every channel is priced side by side, and behind buying traffic outright from the networks that sell it by the click instead of the impression.

None of the six calculators gate the answer behind an email address. Type the numbers, read the result, close the tab if that's all you needed. A lot of "free" calculator pages online only look free until the final number sits behind a form; ours doesn't, on any of the ten pages.

The builder, the checker, and the lists

Four more tools, for the part of the job that isn't arithmetic.

One tags the link on the listing. One shows the card it makes when it's shared. Two more list every free place a new brand can put itself.

UTM builder makes a tagged link and tells you what GA4 will file it under before you post it anywhere. UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module, a naming convention Google inherited when it bought Urchin Software in 2005, and it's still what most analytics platforms read today to know where a click came from, according to Shopify's 2026 UTM guide.

Build one now for whatever you're about to post today.

Fill in the source and the medium, leave the campaign field as "launch" if you have nothing more specific, and reuse that exact link every time the post gets shared, so the clicks land in one bucket in your analytics instead of ten.

Link preview checker shows how a link unfurls on X, Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack, and Google, and names exactly what's missing when it doesn't.

Paste your homepage into it before your next launch post, not after. A missing preview image is the easiest reason a good link gets scrolled past, and it takes thirty seconds to catch.

Startup directories rates seventy places to list a new product using Ahrefs' own authority data, with a tracker that remembers what you've already submitted. It's the working version of the directories we rated in full on the blog: something you check off one row at a time instead of read once and forget.

Free backlink sites does the same for two hundred and twenty-five places a new site can get a link for nothing.

A backlink is still one of the clearest votes a page can earn from another site. Ahrefs' own research has found that pages with none of them almost never show up in organic search results at all.

Pick five rows from the tracker today, submit to all five before the tab closes, and check back in thirty days for which ones actually linked back.

Why we built the toolshed before the throne

A leaderboard sorted by money is not, on its own, something a search engine has any reason to show anybody.

Nobody types "leaderboard of brands" into Google at eleven at night.

They type the ten questions above instead. So we built the ten questions.

Each tool is written to actually be the best free answer to its own narrow query, not a landing page wearing a calculator's clothes. That's the SEO half of it: rank for "CPM calculator" or "UTM builder" on its own terms, the way any standalone tool site competes for that same search, and mean it enough that it holds up when someone checks the math.

The other half is newer, and most sites haven't caught up to it yet.

Answer engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity don't send a click. Neither does Google's AI Overviews. They hand back an answer instead, and they pick that answer from whichever page states it cleanest and sources it best.

Contently's 2026 guide to answer engine optimization puts it plainly: the goal shifts from earning a ranking position to earning the citation inside the machine-generated response itself. A calculator that shows its formula, backs it with a benchmark, then dates its source is exactly the shape these engines prefer to lift from.

CXL's AEO guide makes the same point from the other side of it. Structured and sourced beats long and vague, every time an engine has to pick one answer to quote instead of ten links to list.

We didn't build these tools for the search engine and the answer engine separately.

One well-made tool earns both at once, and neither half was ever the actual point.

The point is what both of them are pointed at.

Every tool page has a throne too

Here's the part that makes this different from any other free-tools page on the internet: the top of every single tool carries a paid ad spot, sold and ranked the exact same way a pay-to-rank leaderboard works everywhere else on this site.

Highest payer gets top placement. It's disclosed as a paid position every time it's shown, on every page, with no exception.

That's who holds it on all ten tool pages right now, because rank on The Board is one ledger, not ten separate ones:

A calculator that ranks for its own query and gets cited inside an AI answer doesn't just bring a reader through the door. It brings a reader who is, at that exact moment, mid-decision about where to put a marketing dollar, arriving on a page whose top slot happens to be for sale.

Check your own analytics next time somebody lands on a calculator page straight from a search result. That's a materially different visitor than one scrolling past a banner on a news site they opened for something else entirely.

The traffic each tool earns on its own is what makes the ad spot at the top of it worth paying for in the first place.

The better a tool ranks, and the more often an answer engine quotes it, the more that spot is worth, and the more reason anyone else has to outbid whoever is sitting in it today.

What it means if you already hold a listing

This is the part worth sitting with.

None of it was possible until the tools existed. A leaderboard can only sell the attention it can pull through the door.

Ten free tools, each built to earn its own search traffic and its own answer-engine citations, are ten new doors that stayed closed until we opened them.

Some of that traffic stops at a tool's own ad spot and goes no further. Whoever holds that spot keeps every impression and every click it sends, counted in public the same way every position on the board is counted.

Some of it clicks through instead, curious what else lives on a site that just solved a real problem for nothing, and lands on the board itself.

Both outcomes pay somebody. Neither one cost us a cent of ad spend to earn the visit.

If you hold a listing today, this changes what your rank is actually worth. Check the impressions and clicks printed on your own listing this week against last week's.

A jump that lines up with one of these tools climbing its own search rankings isn't a coincidence. It's the toolshed doing exactly what it was built to do, and it's a channel that didn't exist for anyone until nine days ago.

That's the strategy in one line: build the free thing worth ranking for, then let the paid thing sit at the top of it.

It's a different bet than a directory site selling banner space beside content nobody asked to read. Every visitor to a tool page came looking for that exact page.

The ad spot at the top of it is the first paid thing they see after we already helped them for nothing, which is a far better place to stand than the first paid thing anyone sees before being helped at all.

Ten minutes, start to finish

Most people close the tab after one calculator. Here's the version that actually moves something this week.

1. Open the calculator that matches your last invoice, CPM, CPC, CTR, ROAS, or CAC, and type in your real numbers. Write down whether you're above or below the benchmark on the page.
2. Build one UTM link with the UTM builder for whatever you're posting today, and reuse it everywhere that post goes out.
3. Paste your homepage into the link preview checker and fix whatever it says is missing before you post anything else.
4. Open the startup directories tracker, pick five rows you haven't submitted to, and submit to all five before you close the tab.
5. Come back in thirty days, check which directories actually linked back in the free backlink sites tracker, and check your own listing's impressions against the week before.

None of those five steps costs anything. All five together are the same on-ramp that built the traffic behind the ad spot at the top of each tool.

We're not done building these. A tool that works and ranks is worth more than a paragraph explaining why it should, so the rest of what we ship will keep landing on this blog as it happens, same as this did.

Go open one of the ten tools right now. Run your own numbers through it. See what it tells you that your ad platform's dashboard never did, and decide from there whether the top of that page, or the top of the board itself, is the spot worth having.