Home / About

Why this exists

Every founder who ships an AI tool arrives at the same problem. The product is live, a few people have seen it, and Google has never heard of it. The standard advice is to get listed in directories, so you go looking for a list.

What you find is a spreadsheet someone posted on X. Half the entries are dead. Some never accepted submissions in the first place. A few are marked dofollow because that was true two years ago. Nobody who published the list has submitted to the sites on it.

So we did the boring version. We worked through more than a thousand AI directories, submitted to them, tracked what happened, and kept the ones that actually publish listings.

The gap between those numbers is the whole point. More than half of what we tested did not survive: dead domains, queues that never move, sites spun up during the 2023 rush and abandoned while the submission form stayed online. And of the ones that made the list, we submit to the 300 that are worth your time rather than padding a package to make the number look bigger.

What we found along the way

A few things surprised us, and they are worth knowing whether you use our service or not.

Some directories never intended to publish your free listing. The free form exists to bring in traffic and to sell you a paid placement. Your submission sits in a queue nobody reads. You can fill it in perfectly and hear nothing, forever. That is why our list marks free versus paid, and why we only submit to directories that genuinely approve.

Most rejections come down to three things. A logo or screenshot that does not meet the directory's requirements, a description too short or too vague for a reviewer to understand in ten seconds, or no reason given at all. Two of those three are fixable before you submit anything, which is what our guides are for.

Doing it yourself takes longer than anyone budgets for. A single submission takes 8 to 15 minutes when it is done properly, including checking the listing went in correctly. Across a few hundred directories that is a working week, and the tracking is the part people abandon first.

What we do

Two things, one free and one paid.

The list is free. Every directory we track, with its domain rating, whether the link is dofollow, and whether listing is free or paid. Create a free account and it is yours. No payment, no upsell required, and you are welcome to work through it yourself. Plenty of people do.

The submissions are the business. If you would rather not spend the week, we submit your tool by hand to every directory in your plan and send you a full report with proof of each submission, plus the login details so the listings are yours to edit. One payment, no subscription.

Every submission is done by a person. That is not a marketing line, it is the reason this exists. Before building it we tried a few of the automated services, and the output was exactly what you would expect: fields dropped into the wrong columns, categories that made no sense, nobody checking whether the logo would pass. The listings technically existed and several of them were wrong.

What we will not do

Who is behind this

Free AI Directories is run by George, and operated by Bizl LLC, which has been running Local Citation Services, a manual business-listing service, for over ten years. AI directories are newer and change faster, but the work is the same shape: do it by hand, keep records, tell people the truth about what happened.

I build in public and share what is working and what is not as I go. You can follow along on X, and if you have a question about any of this, contact us and a person will answer.