I'm building a software directory, and the hard part isn't the directory

Everyone says "don't build another directory." Fair. There are hundreds, and most blur together.

But I kept running into the same small frustration: when I'm evaluating a tool on one of these sites, I can't always tell what's actually verified versus what an AI just generated to fill the page. Integrations, pricing, "best for" claims, it all reads with the same confidence, whether it's a checked fact or a guess.

So I'm building directree around one rule: be honest about where every fact comes from.

Every field on a listing is labelled. "Observed" means we crawled and verified it, and it's shown as a fact. "AI-inferred" means a model generated it (the summary, the strengths, the likely competitors), and it's clearly marked as a model's take, never disguised as certainty. Founders can claim their listing, correct anything that's wrong, and keep a real do-follow backlink.

That's the product. Here's the part I actually lie awake thinking about.

The directory itself is the easy 20%. Anyone can build a listing page. The reason most directory projects quietly die is distribution: they can't get the pages ranked, so nobody ever sees them. That's the 80%.

And it's the one part I have an unfair advantage in. I already run an SEO/GEO pipeline across my other products (indexing automation, keyword research, the whole content engine). directree gets to plug straight into it. So instead of "build it and pray," I'm treating ranking and getting cited by AI answers as the actual core problem, and the honest listings as the thing worth ranking.

There's a newer wrinkle too. People increasingly ask ChatGPT "what should I use for X?" instead of Googling it. Which means the sources those models trust matter more every month. A directory that's structured, transparent, and clear about what's verified is exactly the kind of source I'd want an AI to pull from. That's the bet I'm making with the "GEO" side of it.

Where I am now: the directory is live, listings are getting enriched, and I'm heads-down on the boring, compounding distribution work rather than chasing a launch-day spike.

Open question for anyone who's done this: for a directory, what actually moved the needle on getting pages indexed and ranked, beyond just publishing volume? Backlinks, freshness, structured data, something else entirely? I'd genuinely like to hear what worked (or didn't) for you.