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, m