EcomIQX

I'm building EcomIQX, an AI tool that scores ecommerce product catalogs and rewrites the weak listings. Pre-revenue, still early days.

So I got the usual pitch. Pay around $500, we submit you to 100 hand-picked directories, your DR goes up, buyers find you. ListingBott is the one everyone knows but there are a dozen of them now.

I didn't want to spend it, so I spent a weekend doing it myself instead. Ended up with 152 directories and a lot of reading about whether this whole thing does anything at all. Sharing it because most of what's written about directory submissions is written by people selling directory submissions.

The pricing doesn't hold up

Roughly the same service, roughly the same lists:

AutoSaaSLaunch is $29 lifetime for 18 directories. SubmitSaaS is $45-105 for 60-140. Launch Directories is $99-199 for 30-100. GetMoreBacklinks is $127 for 500+. SubmitPro.ai is $189-259 for 100-200. ListingBott is $299-999 for 100.

So somewhere between 3x and 15x for filling in forms.

The guarantee bugged me more than the price though. It's "DR 0 to 15 in two months or refund". Domain Rating is a number Ahrefs made up. Google doesn't use it. And it goes up more or less automatically with link volume, which is the exact thing the service produces. You're being guaranteed the one metric they can move by definition.

Do the links do anything?

Less than you'd hope.

Google's spam policy names this stuff directly. Their link spam list includes "low-quality directory or bookmark site links", "using automated programs or services to create links to your site", and "keyword-rich, hidden, or low-quality links embedded in widgets that are distributed across various sites". That last one describes the badge deal that about 16 directories on my list offer, where you get a dofollow link only if you put their widget on your homepage.

The risk isn't really a penalty. Google mostly just ignores these links now rather than punishing you for them. The risk is spending $500 and nothing happening.

Also most of it never gets indexed. A study of 16 million pages found 37% indexed, median 27.4 days to get there, and 21.3% dropping back out later. A listing Google never indexed does nothing at all.

And the directories are in rougher shape than the listicles suggest. One founder who did 100+ manually reported about 40% dead or broken, 25% now charging $50-200, and roughly 15% actually free and working. One sent him 500 visits. Most sent under ten.

Worth saying: I couldn't find a single independent study showing directory links move rankings. I also couldn't find one showing they don't. It's a thin evidence base and everyone writing about it has something to sell.

So why bother

Because SEO is the wrong reason. AI search is a better one.

Ahrefs ran correlations across 75,000 brands against how visible those brands are in AI answers:

• YouTube mentions: 0.71-0.74

• Branded web mentions: 0.66-0.71

• Branded anchors: 0.51-0.63

• Domain Rating: 0.27-0.33

• Backlink count: about 0.20

A directory listing is a branded web mention. Second strongest thing on that list, and about ten times more correlated than the backlink count everyone's actually selling.

The other study changed my plan more. Ahrefs looked at 26,283 URLs ChatGPT cited and found that "best X" listicles were 43.8% of every page type cited. Brands ranked higher inside a list got recommended more often. And 35% of those cited lists came from low-authority domains, meaning small blogs with barely any traffic.

So getting into fifteen "best Shopify SEO app 2026" posts probably beats forty directory profiles, and the small blogs are actually reachable. That's the main thing I'm doing now. Directories are the cheap layer underneath it.

Four things the 2026 lists get wrong

I checked these by opening the pages, which as far as I can tell nobody writing these roundups does.

G2 bought Capterra, GetApp and Software Advice from Gartner, closed February. One submission at app.g2digitalmarkets.com/get-listed/start covers all three now. The old Capterra vendor signup 404s.

BetaPage is dead. betapage.co redirects to PitchWall. Every list still recommending it is over a year stale.

Uneed closed its free queue. AllTopStartups suspended free listings. SaaSGenius stopped taking them. Startups.fyi now starts at $29. All four still show up as "free" everywhere.

Only one paid listing looked worth it to me, There's An AI For That at $49, DR77, full refund if they don't publish. Futurepedia wants $497 and Toolify $99. I skipped both.

What I'm doing

First wave is thirteen listings that carry most of the value. G2 (with customer reviews lined up first, an empty profile is pointless), the G2 Digital Markets three-in-one, Crunchbase, AlternativeTo, SourceForge, SaaSHub, Trustpilot, F6S, Wappalyzer, Dealroom, LinkedIn, Wikidata.

Then about 44 genuinely free ones, then the badge tier, then one afternoon on the long tail and no more.

Branded anchor text only. "EcomIQX", never a keyword phrase. Checking indexation at day 30 and 90, and anything still unindexed with no referrals gets marked never again.

Caveat

I have no results yet. Pre-revenue, mid-campaign, and all of the above is research plus a handful of actual submissions. There's a real chance I come back in three months and say it did nothing, which would at least be a useful data point since nobody seems to publish those.

What I'm fairly sure of: don't pay $500. The twenty listings that matter all need you personally. G2 needs your customers, Shopify needs a real app, the editorial ones need an actual email from a human. Nobody can do those for you, and everything else is worth maybe $50.

Happy to drop the full 152 in the comments with costs, DR, submit URLs and which ones are dead, if that's useful to anyone.

Will report back with numbers either way.