Submitting To AI SaaS Directories (May 2025)

One of the main things of off-page SEO is link building. Lowest hanging fruit is to be able to list in Directories website.

Unfortunately, this is full of snake-oil. It's easy to get scammed and spend a bunch of dollars with little to show.

SCAM #1 - Pay for a bad listing

Its easy to just end up paying for a bad listing website. It seems the amount these directories charge can be anywhere between 10USD to 150USD.

The assumption that more spend = better results is not at all true. Worse, there seems to be no corelation between spend and quality of listing.

SCAM #2 - Outsource to someone on Fiverr

There a bunch of gigs on Fiverr telling you that you will be submitted to 300 listings etc. They will provide you a "proof of submission". However, none of them give a guarantee of listing on the site.

Based on my experience, the rate of actual submissions to claimed submission is 3:100 ie. out of 300 submissions, roughly 9 will be actually listed. This is obviously not good.

SCAM #3 - Directories of Directories

There are a bunch of sites that list down other directories (ie. a listing site of other listing sites). Many of them have an "auto-submit to all directories" premium plan. This is obviously a scam to be avoided. The quality of the listing sites on these directories is questionable.

So how to discover directories?

The goal is SEO - so start with search engines. Find other sites in your domain and do a websearch for them, excluding their own sites. For eg.

"acme.bot" - site:acme.bot

This will list down all the sites that link to ACME.BOT, excluding ACME.BOT itself.

Now from this list, filter out the directories. Do this a bunch of times and you have a list of directories that consistently rank on google and might be worth spending the time / effort to submit.

(will continue to update as I go along if there is interest...)