What we check before a tool gets listed
The whole process, written down. What gets opened, what gets printed on the card, what gets turned down, and what happens to a listing after it goes live.
Every directory says it curates. Almost none of them say what that means, which is convenient, because for most of them it means a script found the tool and copied its own marketing copy.
So here is ours, in full. If you are a maker deciding whether to submit, this is what will happen to your listing. If you are a reader deciding whether to trust a card, this is what is behind it.
Somebody opens it and uses it
Not a screenshot. Not the landing page. A person signs up and does a real task with the tool for an afternoon.
This is the entire foundation, and it is also the reason we will never have as many listings as a scraped directory. An afternoon per tool does not scale to tens of thousands of entries, and we would rather have a shelf you can trust than a search index you have to double-check.
What that session is looking for is simple: does the thing do what the page says it does, and does it survive contact with a real input rather than the demo one.
The pricing goes on the card
Half the work of choosing a tool is finding out what it actually costs. So the price is printed on the card, not left three clicks away behind a pricing page that opens a modal.
Where pricing is genuinely complicated, usage-based tiers and the like, the card says what tier the tool sits in rather than inventing a number. What it will not do is say “contact us” and leave it there. If the only way to find out the price is to book a call, that is a fact about the product and the card says so.
The description is the maker’s, not ours
If you submitted the tool, the line on your card is your line. We do not rewrite it in a house voice, and we do not substitute a reviewer’s opinion for your description.
This matters more than it sounds. On a previous project, one card surface quietly reached for the reviewer’s verdict when a tagline was missing, and the reviewer’s voice started appearing on listings that were supposed to speak in the maker’s words. Every card, search result, meta description and shared link on this site now goes through one function that enforces the rule, so it cannot drift again.
Editorial imports, tools we added ourselves rather than tools makers submitted, are allowed to carry our own line. Those are the ones where there is no maker to speak for.
What gets turned down
Four things, consistently:
Anything you cannot sign up for without a sales call. If a reader cannot get to the product, a listing is an advert rather than a recommendation.
Prompt wrappers with no product behind them. Not wrappers in general, which we do list. Specifically the ones where there is no product, no state, nothing that survives the tab closing.
Tools already listed under another name. Rebrands and white labels of something already on the shelf.
Anything outside AI tooling. This is a shelf, not a warehouse.
Nothing can be paid into a higher position
There are no paid placements, no sponsored slots dressed as listings, and no pay-to-rank tier. Ordering is by recency and category.
If that ever changes, sponsored placements will be labelled and will carry a sponsored link, because the whole value of the ordering is that you can trust it. A directory that sells position is a billboard, and a billboard should say so.
What happens after it goes live
This is the part most directories skip entirely, which is why so many of them are full of dead links.
Listings are re-checked daily. Dead links get pulled. If a listing’s verification badge disappears from the maker’s site, that maker gets an email and seven days to put it back before the listing comes down.
The badge is worth explaining, because it is the only thing we ask of makers. Submitting is free and stays free. Once a submission clears screening you get an embed badge; put it on your site, hit verify, and the listing goes live with a real dofollow link. That is the whole transaction. A review costs us an afternoon either way, and the badge is how a maker shows the listing is actually wanted rather than something we added to pad a count.
Why write this down
Because a curation claim you cannot check is marketing. This one is checkable: open any listing, compare the card to the tool, and see whether the price is right and the description is honest.
If you find one that is wrong, tell us and we will fix it. That is a better guarantee than the word “curated” on a landing page.
