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.
We already knew roughly two thirds of the tools we list publish a price. This time we recorded where it was. 432 put it at /pricing, 83 keep it on the home page only, and 108 of the 519 were invisible to a plain fetch until a browser ran their scripts.
Our submission check asked whether your title tag exists. Across 701 listings that passed 60 titles saying nothing but the brand name, and 14 share images pointing at a 404. It now asks the question the audits found was worth asking.
We measured the HTML document of all 701 listings — not the images, not the scripts they pull in, just the markup. 114 are over half a megabyte, 35 are over a megabyte, and the heaviest is 2.7 MB. Compression hides it from you and not from the browser.
A title tag saying "Ollama" ranks for people who already know Ollama. We read the title and meta description of all 701 listings — 60 are bare brand names, 125 are too long to show in full, and 41 have no description at all.
A machine found a price on 512 of them. Reading 92 of those by hand found that one in ten figures was not a price at all — a funding round, a benchmark table, an example query. Corrected, roughly 65% publish a price and 35% do not.
97 sites have no og:image at all. Eight point at a URL that 404s. Six serve an SVG that most scrapers will not render. And 18 are using a square logo, which is the one that gets you a thumbnail instead of a card.
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.
Cloudflare has integrated Agent Readiness and a new Answer Engine Optimization tool into its dashboard. The diagnostic feature scans websites to check how AI agents read them, grouping tasks from quick wins to commerce standards, while the AEO tool tracks brand visibility across major assistants.
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.