VidClean - Week 14 Update: 18 tools, AI citations working, stuck at 30-40 daily visitors

Quick context for anyone new: VidClean (vidclean.net) is a free online video and audio tool suite. No account, no watermark, no time limits. I'm building it in public, modeled on iLovePDF's approach. One free tool at a time, compound organic traffic over time, monetize later.
What shipped since my last post
The product has grown significantly. When I last posted I had around 8 tools. Now at 18.
New tools added: silence remover (flagship), remove background noise, enhance speech (free Adobe Podcast alternative using DeepFilterNet3), transcription to txt/srt/vtt using OpenAI Whisper, video compression, crop, trim, merge, stabilize, and more.
New languages: full Spanish translation (18 pages), full Brazilian Portuguese translation (17 pages). Brazil is 9% of traffic with zero Portuguese content previously.
Infrastructure: upgraded to Railway Pro, added a dedicated Whisper transcription worker with full queue isolation so transcription never blocks the silence remover.
Current metrics (honest)
Daily visitors: 30-40, stuck here for about 3 weeks. Weekends drop to 20-25.
Google Search Console (3 months): 131 clicks, 2,580 impressions, average position 59. Homepage filters to position 7.3 for brand queries. Non-brand organic is nearly zero.
Tool completions: 414 total across all tools since launch. Silence remover at 267, background noise at 55, transcription just launched.
AI citations: ChatGPT is my second largest traffic source. Copilot has cited VidClean 68 times over 3 months. Gemini has cited it once. This is the channel that actually works right now.
DR: 0.2. One confirmed referring domain in Ahrefs. This is the main bottleneck.
Revenue: $0.
Infrastructure cost: $25-30 per month.
What is working
The AI citation channel. The formula is: ship a tool with a specific searchable use case, drop helpful Reddit and Quora answers, get indexed, ChatGPT starts citing within 24-48 hours. This worked for the silence remover and is starting to work for background noise removal.
The "no account, no watermark, no time limit" positioning. This is what gets cited. Every competitor either watermarks, requires signup, or caps the free tier. VidClean does none of those things and AI systems highlight that when recommending tools.
What is not working
Backlinks. This is the core problem. Getting quality dofollow links without paying is genuinely hard. AlternativeTo rejected the site. Most directories either charge, require a link exchange badge, or are dead. Dev.to posts have the right DR but are getting 1-5 views each. The only meaningful backlink so far is whatlaunchedtoday.com.
Breaking the 30-40 visitor ceiling. The AI citation channel works but has plateaued. Without backlinks, Google organic stays near zero. Without Google organic, daily visitors stay stuck.
Key decisions made along the way
Stop building new tools until distribution works. Then broke that rule when the audit showed transcription was the only new tool with a real citation vacuum. Every competitor caps the free tier and none can match "no time limit."
No paid ads. No monetization to calculate ROI against yet.
No Pro tier until 150 daily visitors. Still holding that line.
What is next
Breaking the DR problem is the priority. Just submitted to WeekHack (DR 50+ dofollow, launching next week). Writing more technical posts on Dev.to and Hashnode. Submitting to AI tool directories now eligible because of the Whisper transcription tool. Exploring HARO for editorial links.
On the product side: /add-subtitles with burned-in captions is the next build. Then Product Hunt launch once the differentiation story is stronger.
Happy to answer questions about the stack, the AI citation strategy, or the building-in-public process. Follow along at vidclean.net or @thebuciyo on X.