Start IQ Test is made and run by one person: Mathew O'Neill, working through DadLink Technologies Limited in Cheshire. This page exists so you know exactly who is behind the score you are given, how the questions are generated, and what the number does and does not mean.
I am a software developer, not a psychologist, and I would rather say that plainly at the top of the page than let you assume otherwise. What I bring to this test is not a clinical qualification. It is the thing I have actually done: I designed and wrote the item generator that produces every question you will see, and I can account for how each one is constructed.
I have been building and shipping software on my own since 2019, across roughly thirty products and more than a dozen apps on the App Store. I work solo, end to end — the reasoning engine, the scoring, the payment flow, the words on this page. That means there is nobody to hide behind when something is wrong, which is rather the point of a page like this one.
If you find a question with more than one defensible answer, a scoring result that looks off, or a claim on this site you think is overstated, write to hello@startiqtest.com and it reaches me directly.
Most free IQ tests online are not tests. They are a mixed bag of anagrams, arithmetic, trivia and lateral-thinking riddles, scored by an invented formula, wrapped around an upsell. They give inflated scores because a flattered visitor is a paying visitor, and they measure nothing coherent because every question taps a different skill.
I wanted to know whether a single-format, honestly-scored test could be built properly and still work as a small business. That is the whole thesis. One question type, thirty items, a difficulty curve that actually rises, a score that is not tuned to make you feel clever, and a price stated before you answer question one rather than revealed at the results screen.
You can take the test without paying, without registering, and without giving an email address. The £9.99 is for the full written report, and you decide after you have seen your result screen — never before.
Every item is generated by a rule-based engine rather than drawn from a fixed bank scraped off the internet. Each question is a three-by-three grid of tiles governed by hidden rules operating on a small set of attributes: shape, count, size, fill and rotation. You work out the rules and choose the missing tile.
Difficulty rises by layering more rules onto the same grid, never by making the tiles harder to see. A difficult item demands more of your working memory, not better eyesight.
No words, no arithmetic, no general knowledge. The test reads the same whether English is your first language or your fourth, and no amount of trivia helps you.
Results are expressed on the familiar scale where the population average is 100 and the standard deviation is 15, so your number means the same thing it does anywhere else.
A short online test is not a clinical assessment, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something. Here is the honest boundary.
This is not a diagnostic instrument. It cannot identify a learning difficulty, support a giftedness application, or serve as evidence for any clinical, educational or employment decision. Those require a full battery administered in person by a qualified psychologist.
It measures one thing well — fluid reasoning, the ability to solve novel problems with no learned knowledge to lean on — and makes no attempt at the verbal, memory and processing-speed components a full assessment would cover.
No online test qualifies you for Mensa. Every high-IQ society requires supervised testing under its own conditions.
The IQ Test is operated by DadLink Technologies Limited, a company registered in England with company number 16161444, based in Cheshire. It is the legal entity behind a portfolio of software products I have built since 2019 — business phone and AI receptionist systems, garage management software, invoicing tools, and a good number of iOS apps.
The products have almost nothing in common on the surface, and that is deliberate. What connects them is a preference for small, useful programs that do one job properly and can be understood by the person using them. Not platforms, not ecosystems, not tools that require a training course before they earn their keep. Software that solves a specific problem for a specific person, shipped quickly, fixed quickly when it breaks.
Each product keeps its own name and identity. DadLink is the company behind them, not a brand you need to care about.
The explanatory pages on this site cite published research where they make an empirical claim, and the figures come from the sources named rather than from other websites. If a page states something you can show to be wrong, I would genuinely rather hear it than not — send the page and the correction to hello@startiqtest.com and I will fix it and note the change in the page history.
Pages carry a published date and a last-updated date. Those reflect real edits, not automated refreshes.
Thirty questions, twenty-five minutes, no account and no email address.
Start the free IQ test