60 days building an AI tools directory — 6,470 impressions, 2 real clicks,3 features I built because every other directory frustrated me
I've been lurking and commenting here for a month. Time to actually post.
I'm Adin — I work full time at an HRMS company in Mumbai and I've been building YourAIFinder on evenings and weekends. It's an AI tools directory. I know, another one. But I built it because I kept hitting the same three walls every time I tried to use the existing ones.
Here's the honest SEO picture first, then the product stuff.
Yes, 6,470 impressions and basically no real clicks. Average position is 35–45 across most queries — deep enough that CTR is near zero regardless of title. The site exists in Google's eyes. It's just not trusted yet.
That's the SEO reality of a brand new domain with zero backlinks. Nothing surprising — just slow.
Now the product part, which is what I actually want feedback on.
The three things that frustrated me about every other AI directory:
Problem 1: You can't search by price properly.
Every directory has a "free" filter. That's it. But "free" means nothing — some free tiers give you 10 requests a month, some give you unlimited. And if you have a $20/month budget, there's no way to see what fits without opening every tool individually.
What I built: a proper price explorer. 412 tools, filter by Free / Freemium / Paid, set a budget slider (e.g. $10–$30/mo), filter by category. You can actually answer the question "what's the best AI writing tool under $20/month" in one page.
Problem 2: There's no reason to come back.
Most directories are static. You visit once when you need a tool, then never again. There's no daily pull.
What I built: AI Tool of the Day. Every day, a handpicked set of tools across different categories — ranked, with a countdown to the next day's picks. Today there are 18 tools across 6 categories. It's a small thing but it creates a habit loop that a static directory can't.
Problem 3: You still have to open 4 tabs to compare tools.
Someone asks "should I use Buffer or Publer for social media?" Every directory will show you both tools individually. None of them let you put them side by side.
What I built: a comparison page. Pick 2 to 4 tools, see them compared across pricing, features, skill level, Integration Capabilities and category in one view. The feature most people actually need when making a buying decision.
The honest question I have for this community:
Of these three features — price explorer, tool of the day, side-by-side comparison — which one would actually make you use a directory you'd otherwise ignore?
And the harder question: is "better discovery" even the right problem to solve, or do people just Google "[Tool A] vs [Tool B]" and never visit a directory at all?
Site is youraifinder.com. Genuinely want to hear what's broken.
position 35-45 means you're basically invisible, ctr at that depth is a rounding error. so those 2 clicks aren't really about the product, google just doesn't trust a brand new domain with zero backlinks yet and that's a slow separate fight. on the product side, search-by-price is a genuinely good wedge because every other directory buries pricing or slaps 'freemium' on everything which tells you nothing. but directories live or die on whether the data stays current, the graveyard is full of ones that were great at launch and 40% dead links six months later. how are you keeping it fresh? that's the make-or-break imo.
Yeah, you're naming the actual risk. Right now it's manual: I go tool by tool and re-check pricing and status periodically. Works at 412 tools, won't survive at 1,500.
The freshness fix I'm building toward is an agentic layer, not a one-off scraper. The idea: a small set of agents that periodically revisit each tool's pricing/feature page, diff it against what's stored, and flag or auto-update when something's changed, rather than me manually re-checking on a schedule. Pair that with a "last verified" timestamp and a user-facing "report outdated" flag as the human backstop for anything the agents miss or misread.
That's the real bet here — directories don't die from bad launches, they die from drift. If the agentic crawl actually holds up at scale, that's the difference between this being useful in a year and being another graveyard entry with stale pricing everywhere.
Still early on this, but it's the piece I'm most focused on getting right before the catalog grows past what manual checking can cover.
What stood out to me wasn't the features.
It was that all three seem to assume the user already knows they need a directory.
I'm not sure that's the part I'd be most confident about yet.
The interesting question might be what situation causes someone to seek discovery in the first place, rather than going directly to a tool, a comparison article, Reddit, or ChatGPT.
Feels like the answer to that could change how important each of these features actually is.
This is probably the most useful push I've gotten on this.
You're right that all three features assume intent that already exists. Someone has to arrive thinking "I need to discover a tool" — and that's actually a pretty specific mindset that not everyone has.
The honest answer is I built for my own frustration, which was: I knew I needed a tool for a specific job, had a rough budget, and didn't want to open 15 tabs. That's a real moment — but it might be narrower than I assumed.
The situations I can actually imagine driving someone to a directory over Google/Reddit/ChatGPT:
Budget constraint is real and specific ("under $20/month")
They want to compare 2–3 tools they've already shortlisted but haven't committed to
They're evaluating tools for a team, not just themselves, so they need something presentable
Outside of those? I think you're right — most people don't seek discovery, they seek confirmation of a tool they half-already-know.
It's making me think the comparison feature might be the only one that captures a moment where a directory genuinely beats the alternatives. The price explorer is useful if someone's already there. Tool of the Day is a retention bet on a repeat visitor who barely exists yet.
What's interesting is that your reply made me less convinced this is a feature question and more convinced it's a user-behavior question.
That's where I'd spend the time if it were mine.
Hard to explain properly in a comment though.
If you're curious, drop your email and I'll send over the fuller thought.
Comparison page is the obvious winner — that's where the actual buying intent lives. We tried something similar for B2B tools and vendor pages outpaced our data within a week. How often do you re-pull pricing/features?
Comparison page being the buying-intent winner tracks with how I use directories myself — I only reach for one when I'm already 80% decided and need the last 10% validated.
The vendor data problem is real and I don't want to pretend I've solved it. Right now I'm doing manual updates — which obviously doesn't scale past a few hundred tools. The plan is to build a "flag outdated pricing" flow so users can surface stale data, and longer term, structured scraping for pricing pages where the format is consistent enough.
But your B2B experience is a good reminder that the data decay problem hits faster than you expect. A week is brutal — especially for anything with seat-based or usage-based pricing that changes constantly.
Curious what you ended up doing about it. Did you lean into "last verified" timestamps to set expectations, or did you try to keep up with the updates?
6,470 impressions feels more like a distribution signal than real product validation right now.
Also feels like these 3 features are doing 2 different jobs. The price explorer and comparison page help people make a buying decision. Tool of the Day feels more like browsing and retention.
Do you have any usage data on what people actually click or use? Or any users coming in with a specific intent like “best AI tool under $20” or “Tool A vs Tool B”?
Fair framing. Impressions at position 35–45 are existence confirmation, not validation.
The two-jobs point is accurate and I hadn't split it that cleanly. Decision tools vs retention bet. Different problems, different user moments.
Usage data is thin — 2 clicks doesn't tell you much. GSC queries are starting to show category + use case combinations and a few "vs" queries. No budget-specific queries yet, which probably means the price explorer is unfindable rather than unwanted.
Comparison page gets prioritized first. If buying intent exists anywhere on the site, that's where it is. Tool of the Day is a bet I won't be able to validate until returning visitors actually exist.