Updates & corrections
Every substantive change to this site gets logged here with a date — new guides, pricing re-checks, factual corrections, and tools that come off the directory. If you read a page and something looks out of date, this is where you find out whether it already has been looked at. Corrections reported by readers are credited by first name unless they'd rather not be.
To report an error: [email protected] or the contact page. The process is described on how we check a tool.
October 2026
The correction still claimed experience we do not have
The entry below, logged earlier this month, retracted invented benchmarks and numeric ratings — but it still described profiles as written with a phrase that this entry is retracting: "hands-on time on the tiers that are free or cheap to try". That was not true either, and no such material exists. Every page on this site now states the actual evidence base: the vendor's own documentation and pricing page, read on a dated stamp, with no claim of use anywhere.
What changed to make that sentence true: the site footer, the about page, the method checklist, the guide index and nineteen passages across the tool profiles that implied the writer had used, trialled or tested a tool. Those claims were replaced with what the desk can actually point at — the vendor's page and the date it was read — not deleted and papered over.
News desk: four new entries for the week to 12 October
/news/ grew by four hand-written entries covering 2–8 October: Claude Haiku 5.5 launching with a 1M-token context window on the cheap tier, Gemini 3.7 Flash requests being silently re-routed to 3.8 Flash, the hard 16 October retirement date for the Gemini 2.5 line, and OpenAI's GPT-6 "Intelligent UI" announcement — where the entry says plainly which parts we could not verify, because the announcement page refuses automated fetching and we do not fill that gap from third-party summaries.
Vendor claims are labelled as claims, and each entry still links to exactly one primary source: the vendor's own changelog, release note or announcement page.
Old .html addresses now redirect in one hop, on the right host
Search Console was still crawling the addresses from before the clean-URL move — /blog/ai-image-generator-guide.html and friends — and reporting them as "page redirects". The redirects themselves were correct, but they were the host's automatic ones: two hops to get from an insecure www address to a page, and the second hop kept you on www, which is not the address the page declares as canonical. Every page, guide and section index now has an explicit permanent redirect to its canonical address, generated from the pages that actually exist rather than maintained by hand, so a new profile gets its legacy address covered automatically.
This also closes three holes that were plain errors: /tools.html, /blog.html and /news.html returned 404, because no such file exists for the host to redirect — they now point at /tools/, /blog/ and /news/.
The directory grew from 24 tools to 36, and six new categories
Twelve profiles added, written from each vendor's own documentation and pricing page: Grok, DeepSeek and NotebookLM (now branded Gemini Notebook) under Chat assistants and Research & study; Elicit, Julius AI and Microsoft Copilot for Excel; Ollama and LM Studio for running open models locally; Fireflies.ai and Granola for meetings; and Replit and v0 for building apps from a prompt. The four flagship assistant profiles — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity — were deepened at the same time.
Nothing here is a rating and no comparison was run in a lab: where a vendor publishes a benchmark it is reported as the vendor's claim, and where the vendor's own pricing page refused to load from this machine — x.ai/pricing and grok.com/plans both did — the profile quotes no figure and says so. One planned profile was dropped before publication: spreadsheet tool Rows is being wound down by its acquirer, so pointing readers at it would have sent them to a subscription with an end date. The index now groups 36 tools into 15 categories.
A news desk, at /news
Recent AI releases and changes, summarised by hand with the date, what happened, why it matters and a link to the primary source — the vendor's own announcement, changelog or help page. Ten entries to start, covering September and October 2026, with a new batch most weeks.
The rules are on the page itself: no feed scraping, no republished article text, no press-release copy-paste, and a vendor's benchmark shown as the claim it is. Corrections go to the contact address and get logged above, the same as anywhere else on this site.
The author profile page was retired
The standalone page at /authors/magicer is gone. Nothing about the byline changes: the guides and tool profiles are still written and signed by one person under the name Magicer, the About page says who runs the site and how it's funded, and the methodology page still states what I don't test. The separate profile page mostly repeated that, and it added a page whose only claim to exist was the author's name — which is not a good use of a small site. Old links to it redirect to /about.
Every page moved to a clean URL
Search Console started reporting pages as "page redirects" and "alternate page with proper canonical tag". The cause was ours: the host serves /contact and redirects /contact.html to it, while every page on this site declared the .html address as canonical. So the address we told Google was authoritative was an address that redirects. Canonicals, og:url, JSON-LD URLs, internal links and the sitemap now all use the extensionless form, and a real 404.html replaces the old behaviour where any mistyped address quietly returned the homepage — which made unknown URLs look like duplicates of it.
Directory rebuilt: every tool now has a full profile page
The homepage used to show 24 tools as one-sentence cards with an outbound link. That wasn't a directory, it was a list. Each tool now has its own profile at /tools/<tool>.html covering what it's for, where it wins, where it falls short, indicative pricing with the month it was checked, a 30-minute test plan, alternatives and common questions. The new directory index groups them by category.
Also added: this updates page, a methodology page, an author page, per-article tables of contents, and diagrams drawn for the site rather than lifted from vendors.
Editorial claims tightened
The About page previously implied that every listed tool had been used before being listed, and some comparison copy described tests that were never run. Both have been rewritten to say what is actually true: profiles are written from vendor documentation and published pricing plus hands-on time on the tiers that are free or cheap to try, there are no controlled benchmarks, and no numeric ratings are published because there's no measuring instrument behind them. See what we do not do.
September 2026
Structured data and social previews
Added JSON-LD (Article, BreadcrumbList, WebSite, Organization) and Open Graph metadata across all pages so search results and shared links render properly.
Four new guides
Added AI video generators compared, how to evaluate an AI tool, the AI image generator guide and building a personal AI stack.
Site launched
AI Tool Nest went live on ai-tool-nest.com with the tool directory and five guides: ChatGPT vs Claude vs Gemini, the best free AI tools, AI agents explained, prompt writing habits and AI for small business. About, contact, privacy, terms and disclaimer pages published at the same time.
What's coming
Not a promise, more a queue, so you can see where this is going: the news desk filling out on a roughly weekly cadence, profiles for the tools still missing from the thin categories, a written-up decision guide for each category rather than one page mixing all of them, and a monthly pricing sweep where every "last checked" stamp gets moved forward or the figure gets removed. When any of those land, they'll appear above with a date.