Every list of “500+ places to submit your startup” has the same problem: it is a list, not a filter. Nobody has opened those 500 sites. Plenty are dead, plenty will never publish you, and a good number will quietly charge you for a link that does nothing.
This is the filter we use on our own index of 151 directories, and what the data behind it actually says.
Where these numbers come from. They describe the 151 directories indexed on this site as of September 2026. Every one was opened and checked by hand. Where a figure could not be verified we record it as unknown rather than estimate it, which is why several counts below do not add up to 151. Domain rating and traffic figures are third-party estimates, not measurements from the directories themselves.
Start by cutting the list to your category
The single fastest cut is relevance. Our 151 break down like this:
| Category | Directories |
|---|---|
| AI tools | 66 |
| Launch platforms | 19 |
| Review sites | 15 |
| SaaS | 11 |
| Startups | 11 |
| Communities | 10 |
| Dev tools | 9 |
| Marketplaces | 9 |
If you have built a developer tool, the 66 AI-tool directories are mostly noise for you, and nine dev-tool listings plus a handful of launch platforms are the real shortlist. Ten well-chosen submissions beat sixty scattered ones, because the ones that fit are the ones whose audience clicks.
Filter 1: does anyone actually visit it?
We have a verified traffic estimate for 70 of the 151. Among those, the median is about 240,000 monthly visits, and 18 sites clear a million. The top of the list is dominated by places you already know: Product Hunt, There’s An AI For That, FutureTools, Futurepedia.
The long tail is where judgement is needed. A directory with no measurable traffic is not automatically worthless, because a brand-new site can still be well run, but it should be free. Paying a site that cannot demonstrate an audience is the most common way makers waste a launch budget.
How to check in 30 seconds: open the directory’s newest listings. If the most recent addition is four months old, the site is abandoned no matter what its traffic estimate says.
Filter 2: will the link do anything?
This is where the data gets uncomfortable. Of our 151 directories, we could only verify the link behaviour on 38. Among those 38: 18 give dofollow links, 17 give nofollow, and 3 are mixed. The remaining 113 do not disclose it anywhere, and you cannot tell until you are published.
Worse, a handful advertise dofollow and deliver something else. We found paid listings sold explicitly as dofollow whose links tested as nofollow once live, including two with domain ratings in the high seventies and eighties. Those are excluded from the featured picks on this site for that reason.
How to check for yourself: find any existing listing on that directory, view the page source, and look at the outbound link’s rel attribute. rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored" tells you what you are buying before you pay. Do this on a competitor’s listing, not your own, and do it before the invoice.
A nofollow link is not worthless. It still sends people. It just will not do what a link-building pitch implies it does.
Filter 3: free, paid, or paid-for-nothing
Of the 151, 95 accept free submissions, 30 are paid-only, and 26 do not say clearly enough for us to record an answer.
Paid is not automatically bad. Paying can buy a faster review, a better position, or editorial work you would otherwise do yourself. What it should never buy is the only thing many directories imply: a guaranteed SEO result. Before paying, ask what changes concretely. “Published within 48 hours” is a promise that can be kept. “Boost your rankings” is not.
Also watch for the reciprocal-badge model, which is very common in the AI-directory space: free listing in exchange for a backlink from your site to theirs. That is a real cost, not a free listing. You are trading a link from your homepage, which is usually worth more than the one you receive.
Filter 4: does a human read it?
122 of the 151 have some form of editorial review, and 60 require an account before you can submit. Both are good signs rather than obstacles.
A directory that publishes anything instantly fills with spam, and a page full of spam is a page Google stops trusting, which takes your listing down with it. Friction at submission is usually evidence that somebody is maintaining the place.
41 of the 151 have community voting. Those are a different kind of venue: you are not submitting to an editor, you are competing for attention on a particular day. Treat them as launches, not listings.
Filter 5: treat domain rating as a hint, not a score
We have a domain rating on file for 104 directories. The median is 69, the middle half sit between 53 and 79, and 51 of them are DR 70 or higher.
Those are healthy-looking numbers, and they are also the most over-weighted metric in this whole space. Domain rating is a third-party estimate of a domain’s overall link profile. It is not a Google metric, it says nothing about the specific page your listing will sit on, and a DR 80 directory that buries you on page 14 of an unvisited category is worth less than a DR 30 site whose newsletter goes to your exact audience.
Use it to sanity-check, not to rank. If two directories are otherwise equal, take the stronger domain. If they are not equal, everything above matters more.
The shortlist, in practice
- Filter by category first. Anything outside your niche goes, regardless of its numbers.
- Drop anything visibly abandoned. Check the newest listing’s date, not the traffic estimate.
- Split free and paid. Do all the relevant free ones first; they cost you an hour each at most.
- For each paid one, write down what you get. If you cannot state it in one sentence with a number in it, skip.
- Verify link behaviour before paying, using a competitor’s live listing.
- Stop at about ten. The eleventh is almost always worse than spending that hour on your product page.
What we would skip entirely
- Directories whose own pages are not indexed by Google. Search
site:theirdomain.com. If their listings are not in the index, yours will not be either. - Anything selling “guaranteed DR 80 backlinks” as the headline product.
- Sites where every listing was added by the same account on the same day.
- Paid placements with no visible editorial standard, because a page of paid links is exactly the pattern search engines discount.
Common questions
How many directories should I actually submit to?
Ten good ones, done properly, with a real description written for each. The marginal value drops off a cliff after that, and the time is better spent on the pages those links point at.
Is it worth paying for a listing?
Sometimes, when the thing you are buying is concrete: speed, placement, or writing work. Never when the pitch is an SEO outcome, because nobody selling a listing controls that.
Do nofollow links from directories help at all?
They send referral traffic, which is the point most people forget. They do not pass ranking signals. If a directory’s whole value proposition is the link, a nofollow link means the value proposition is gone; if its value is its audience, nofollow changes very little.
How often do these figures change?
Constantly. Pricing and submission rules on directories change month to month, which is why every listing on this site records when it was last checked. Treat any figure older than a few months, including ours, as a starting point to verify rather than a fact.
You can browse the full index of 151 directories, filter it by category, and see the recorded domain rating, traffic and submission cost for each.
