A leaderboard ordered by how much you paid went viral in August 2026 and was cloned within hours. What the mechanic buys a founder, what it does not, and which of the numbers anyone can actually check.
Titles pass on 99% of them, logos on 99%, meta descriptions on 96%. The thing that actually stops a tool being listed automatically is bot protection — and the sites doing it are the ones that can afford to.
Five give a do-follow link, four give no-follow, three are mixed. One charges $497 and tags every outbound link no-follow. One does not link to you at all — it sends visitors through a redirect.
Twelve "alternatives" searches, 336 results, 248 different sites. Reddit appears in every one. Not a single general AI-tool directory appears anywhere. And the difficulty score every keyword tool reports for these searches is wrong.
Not an opinion piece. We fetched every directory on the list founders are working from, looked each domain up in Tranco, and wrote down what came back. Eight no longer resolve at all.
The mechanics take twenty minutes per directory. Deciding which twenty minutes are worth spending is the part nobody writes about.
What the paid tiers sell is placement, speed, or the removal of a condition. Only one of those is usually worth paying for.
What Google's documentation literally says about link attributes, why the dofollow obsession is mostly misplaced, and what to optimise instead.
We checked every one of these in August 2026. Two were dead, one had quietly gone paid, and none of them will tell you their traffic. Here is what is actually there.