Expedition log
Every camp you pitched.
Every flag still standing.
Launching is not one day. It is twenty directories, a Show HN, a Reddit post, a podcast, spread over months. Nobody keeps that record, and nobody checks whether any of it is still real. The expedition log does both.
Start your ascent Scan your site first Free to keep the record · pro to see what it produced
01 / The logbook
The record of the whole climb
Every listing comes with an expedition log: one dated entry for each place you distributed your product, with the link and a note. By week twelve most founders cannot tell you what they did in week three. The log can.
02 / The anchor check
It tests every placement, again and again
The crawler revisits every entry, weekly free and daily on pro, and tells you when a page quietly dies. From your side a dead listing looks fine until you go clicking. Here it shows as missing, with the date we last saw it alive.
03 / The rope back
Who is actually tied in with you
Every directory listing is meant to be an exchange: you link to them, they link to you. The audit reads their side, and tells you whether that link is dofollow or nofollow. Some of them are taking your link and returning nothing. Now you know which.
Which ones were worth it
Not just where you posted. What it produced. Pro
This one is paid. Everything else on this page is free, and stays free.
Name a placement and it carries a tagged link straight away, before you have posted anything. Post that instead of your plain URL, and when somebody arrives through it and signs up, your code sends us one request. The entry then shows how many signups that placement produced. It works the same for an advertisement or a newsletter swap, where there is no public page to point at.
Being straight about the trade: a signup happens in your database, and nothing outside it can see one. So this needs a few lines of code on your side. What we bring is the other half, a verified list of everywhere you posted, so the number lands against the right placement. No tracker on your site, no personal data, and we never see who signed up.
The rope back
Your analytics cannot see this. The tools that can cost more than your hosting.
For each directory on your log, the audit shows whether the page still links back to your site, and whether that link passes any equity at all.
Two platforms refuse crawlers outright: Reddit and LinkedIn. Their robots.txt turns away everyone they have not allowlisted, and we honour that, so we do not offer to verify them and never pretend a check is coming. Most other places answer us: Hacker News, Bluesky, YouTube and nearly every launch directory. Product Hunt is the notable exception, not through robots.txt but through a bot check that refuses us at the door.
What we can see from up here, and what we cannot
Every platform decides what it lets anyone read. We take what is published and never guess at the rest, so here is the whole list rather than a promise about "engagement".
| Where | Still live? | Numbers we read |
|---|---|---|
| Hacker News | Yes | Points and comment count |
| Bluesky | Yes | Likes, reposts, replies |
| YouTube | Yes | None yet: this one needs an API key we have not set |
| Launch directories | Usually | No count we can read. We audit the link back instead |
| Product Hunt | No | None. A bot check turns our crawler away |
| Podcasts, newsletters, blogs | Usually | Nothing but the page itself |
| No | None. Their robots.txt refuses our crawler | |
| No | None. Their robots.txt refuses our crawler | |
| X | No | None. Reading posts costs money we are not spending yet |
"No count we can read" is not the same as "no upvotes". Most launch directories have them, and show them proudly. They are simply not readable by a crawler: nearly all of them draw the number with JavaScript after the page loads, and we read raw HTML on purpose, the same way we insist your badge be a real link rather than one a script paints in later. A few sit behind a bot check that turns us away entirely, Product Hunt among them. So we do not report directory upvotes, and we will not guess at them.
No account connections, no logins handed over, and no scraping of anything a platform has told crawlers to leave alone. An upvote count we cannot read is not something we will estimate for you; a Reddit post goes on your log as a dated record, and the log says plainly that we cannot confirm it.
It scouts ahead
You do not start from a blank page
When you list a product we scan its site for directory badges and launch links already out there, and we search Hacker News for anything pointing at your domain. Site links land on the log by themselves. Search hits wait for a nod first, because a submission of your product is worth knowing about whether or not you posted it, but it is not certainly yours. One button runs both again whenever you want.
That is the whole of what scouting finds, and it is worth being plain about it: the badges on your own site, and Hacker News. A directory you never linked back to, a podcast, a newsletter, a post on a platform we cannot search, none of those announce themselves. You paste those in, which is one field and a button, and from that moment the crawler treats them like everything else.
Free, and the one part that is not
The record and the checking are free for every listing.
- The log itself, with no cap on entries
- The link-back audit on every directory entry
- The public numbers where a platform publishes them: Hacker News points and comments, Bluesky likes, reposts and replies
- Liveness checks, on-demand scans, and instant verification when you paste a link
- Every channel, including the ones we cannot check: Reddit and LinkedIn sit on the log as plain records
Signup attribution comes with a pro listing. Knowing which of your listings are still real is not the sort of thing we want to ration, so that stays free. Knowing which of them brought you customers is a different question, it costs us something to answer, and it is the one thing here you pay for.
No trial and no card for the free part. See pricing for the rest.