We checked 148 AI directories. Seven are both alive and visible.

Every guide to launching an AI tool contains the same advice: submit everywhere. Get listed on a hundred directories. There are services that will do it for you for eighty dollars.

Nobody checks whether the hundred directories exist.

We did, on 7 August 2026. We took the list most of these guides are quietly working from, fetched every entry, and looked up every domain in Tranco, a research ranking of the top million sites. No estimates, no traffic guesses, no scraped analytics. Just: does it answer, and is the domain visible enough to appear in a list of a million.

What came back

Seven. Out of a hundred and forty-eight.

The eight that no longer resolve are not slow, not blocking us, not behind a login. Their DNS returns nothing: aitools.love, aixyz.co, allthingsai.com, evolmagazine.com, iasurmesure.com, salestoolsai.top, searchaidirectory.com, theresanai.com. A ninth, aiagentsbase.com, resolves and answers 404 on its own home page.

The 78 are the interesting number

A dead directory wastes ten minutes. You notice, you move on.

The 78 that answer are the expensive ones. They load. They have a submit form. Some have a review queue, some ask for a backlink, some charge. And they are absent from a ranking of the top million websites — which means whatever traffic they have is too small to register against sites you have never heard of.

You will not find that out by looking. A directory with a clean design and a "10,000 tools listed" counter looks exactly like one that works. The only way to tell them apart is to check something outside the page, which is why almost nobody does.

What we are not claiming

Tranco position is not traffic, and we do not pretend it is. A specialist directory can be genuinely useful to a narrow audience and still sit outside the top million; a site can rank well and send you nothing.

What absence from the list does tell you is scale. If a directory is not among the million most-referenced domains on the web, it is not going to be a meaningful source of discovery for your product. That is a floor, not a verdict — and it is a floor a lot of directory advice quietly assumes has been cleared.

We also do not publish a verdict from a single failed request. A site that times out once is a site that timed out once; ours only says a directory has a problem after repeated failures, and where the checks do not support a conclusion the page says exactly that. One of the entries in our own table currently reads "no answer" for a site that answers perfectly well today. We left the observation and the refusal to conclude both visible rather than quietly deleting the row.

The full table, with the date of every check and the method, is at /directories. It is also downloadable as JSON under a licence that lets you check our work.

So what should a founder actually do

Stop counting submissions. "Listed on 40 directories" is a number that feels like progress and predicts nothing. Four that are alive and visible will do more than forty that are not.

Check before you spend an afternoon. Open the directory. Search Google for its name. If it does not appear for its own brand, it is not going to make your product appear for yours.

Be suspicious of the ones that charge most confidently. Nothing in our data correlates price with visibility. Some of the most expensive listings in the AI space sit on domains that rank nowhere.

Treat a required backlink as a price. Several directories give you a free listing only if you put their link on your homepage. That is a real cost — it is a link off your site, on your domain, forever. Some of them sell the same listing without the condition, which tells you what they think it is worth.

Where we stand in this

We run one of these. It would be convenient for us if the answer were "submit everywhere, starting here", and that is not what the data says.

What we can tell you about us specifically: listing is free and asks for nothing in return — our badge is optional, and a listing without one sits on the same board in the same queue. Every listing is read by a person before it publishes. We are new, our domain is young, and we are not going to tell you we will send you a thousand visitors, because we do not know that and neither does anyone else who tells you.

What we will do is keep checking. The table above is regenerated on a schedule, every row carries the date it was last probed, and when a directory dies we say so with the evidence rather than quietly dropping it.

If you want to be in the version of this catalogue that is still answering in a year, the submission is free and takes about five minutes.