How a Site Earns a Spot on Our Recommended List

A site makes it onto the Recommended list only after Mr. Puzzle has personally used it — solved a puzzle on it, run its solver against a real clue or grid, or worked through its training material. Specifically, we look for:

• It actually works as described — no dead tools, broken solvers, or bait-and-switch content.
• It offers something genuinely useful, whether that's depth, a different approach, or a community our own tools and puzzles don't cover.
• If it overlaps with a tool or puzzle collection we've built ourselves (marked OURS), it earns its spot by doing something ours doesn't — not just by existing.
• It isn't buried in intrusive ads, pop-ups, or dark patterns that make it unpleasant to use.

We're glad to hear from site owners — a good submission is often how we find things we'd never have stumbled onto ourselves. But a self-submission is a starting point for review, not an automatic listing. The same testing standard applies regardless of who suggested the link. Submitting a site doesn't earn any priority placement or guaranteed inclusion, and we don't accept payment or trade for a listing.

When a self-submitted site is listed, we mark it NEW for visibility, and the outbound link is set to nofollow sponsored per Google's linking guidelines, since it originated from the site owner rather than our own independent research.

A listing isn't permanent. Sites are pulled from the directory if they go stale, get overrun with ads or pop-ups, change hands and stop being what earned the listing in the first place, or simply stop working. We periodically recheck listed sites rather than assuming a link that was good once is still good now.

If a listed site is broken, misleading, or has changed for the worse since it was added, we want to know. Let us know and we'll take another look.