I scored three sites, including Indie Hackers itself. All three got 20/100 on directory presence.
I have been running domains through a free six-channel marketing scorer this morning. Three results, and one of them is this site.
indiehackers.com — 65 overall. Email 95, Social 80, Technical 85, SEO 70, Content 37, Directory 20.
habitleague.io (a habit app posted here today) — 65 overall. Technical 100, Email 75, Content 73, SEO 55, Social 50, Directory 20.
guiden.ai (a course platform) — 49 overall. Technical 85, SEO 60, Social 50, Email 45, Content 16, Directory 20.
Directory 20 on all three. Different stages, different categories, same number.
Before anyone takes that as gospel, the honest part about what these scores are and are not.
Indie Hackers scoring 37 on content is obviously not a statement about whether there is good content here. There plainly is, and most of it is yours. What the scorer can see is the marketing surface: whether a site publishes structured, crawlable, topic-organised pages under its own domain. A forum where the value lives inside user threads reads low on that axis no matter how good the threads are. So the number is measuring a thing, it is just not the thing the label implies. Read every automated score that way, including this one.
Directory 20 is different, and I think it is real. It measures whether your product appears in the third-party listings people and AI assistants actually consult. That is checkable by hand in about five minutes, and when I have checked it the number has usually been right. It is also the single most neglected channel I keep running into, because it is boring, it is manual, and it produces no dopamine on the day you do it.
Why it matters more in 2026 than it did in 2022: a growing share of "which tool should I use" questions now get answered inside an AI response that was assembled from third-party review and listing pages, not from your landing page. If you are not in those sources, you are not in the answer. Your own site being excellent does not fix that, because your own site is not what is being read.
The cheap test, no tools needed: search your product category the way a stranger would, open the first three roundups or directories that come back, and see whether you are in them. Then search your own product name and see what a third party says about you on page one. If the only page one result about you is yours, that is your directory 20.
The offer, because it costs me nothing and might save you a week:
Drop your URL below and I will run it and post the six numbers back in this thread. No email, no signup, nothing to install. I will do every one that gets posted.
The tool is contentmation.com/score if you would rather run it yourself and skip me entirely, which is completely fine and probably faster. It is free with no login, and it gives you a shareable page per domain.
One thing I would ask in return if you do drop a URL: when you see your six numbers, reply with which one surprised you. I am collecting that, because my hunch is the surprising number is almost never the one people were already working on, and I would like to know if that holds.
Three sites at different stages in different categories landing on exactly 20 is more likely a fact about the scorer than about the sites. Either the channel measures something almost nobody does, so everyone sits on the floor, or 20 is what it returns when it finds nothing and the real value is zero. Those are worth separating before the number means anything. The cheap test is to run a site that should obviously score well, something heavily listed with a long directory footprint, and see whether it moves. If it stays at 20 you have found a calibration bug. If it jumps, the 20 is real and the interesting question becomes why nobody bothers with that channel.
I ran your test. Two sites with obviously long directory footprints, same scorer, just now.
zapier.com came back Directory 40. So it is not a stuck constant, the number does move.
The second one is the part that proves you right. A very heavily listed design company came back Directory 20, the same floor as all three in the post, and on the same run it scored Social 0. That company has millions of followers, so the 0 is not a fact about them, it is the tool failing to reach them. And a site that blocks the fetch reads identically to a site with no listings.
So your test separated the branches properly and both are live: the 40 says the ceiling is reachable, while a 20 sitting next to an obviously false neighbouring number says "found nothing" and "found nothing because I was not allowed to look" are being collapsed into one value.
Which means the three 20s in my post carry less information than I claimed for them. The honest version is that the score is only readable when you know the fetch arrived, and I should have reported reach beside it rather than the number on its own.
zapier's card if you would rather check the arithmetic than trust me: contentmation.com/score/zapier-com