Neil Patel’s AI tools directory closed months ago. I still had it ranked #1 on my 43-row best AI directories page at DR 91. So did several other lists on the SERPs I checked. In this 43-directory sample, Ahrefs Domain Rating and estimated Google organic traffic showed only a weak relationship: Pearson 0.18. So a list ranked by DR alone is a list where backlink strength often overstates estimated search visibility, and that is what all of those pages, mine included, were quietly serving founders.
I ran Ahrefs across every row of my own list on August 31, 2026. Fifteen of the 43 domains that cleared a DR-based bar come in at 30 or fewer estimated monthly organic clicks. Neil Patel 301-redirects to his SaaS product. Turbo0 at DR 80 has an estimated 1 monthly organic click. ShowMeBest at DR 76 has 0. The backlinks are real. The estimated search visibility is not.
The main table below is 27 directories, ranked by estimated traffic rather than DR. One additional pick, this site (ZPlatform), sits just below my warning threshold and is retained separately with full disclosure. The DR-vs-traffic correlation, the discovery-page evidence for the top ten, and the 30-second screening test I use are all further down.
If You Only Have Time to Submit to Five
Sorted by Ahrefs estimated monthly organic traffic on August 31, 2026:
The five highest-visibility AI directories in this audit
- 1. There’s An AI For That - ~785k est. traffic/mo. Best for task-based discovery. Paid listing from $49.
- 2. Openfuture.ai - ~198k est. traffic/mo. Best free option in the audit. No paid listing wall.
- 3. Aixploria - ~124k est. traffic/mo. Best editorial reach; EN and FR audience. Paid from $79.
- 4. Futurepedia - ~61k est. traffic/mo. Best general task catalogue.
- 5. Future Tools - ~48k est. traffic/mo. Best free directory with a creator-brand audience.
Best for AI agents: AI Agent Store (~45k est. traffic/mo, specialised in agents). Best for GPT/LLM demos: GPT-3 Demo (~10k). Best for browser extensions: eBool (~1.4k). Every figure above is Ahrefs’ estimate of monthly Google organic traffic, not measured visits, and it should be used as a screening metric, not proof of referral ROI. Full table, methodology, discovery-page evidence and the DR-vs-traffic study follow.
Methodology and Limitations
The starting set was 43 directories I had already filtered for AI-focus. Launch platforms, SaaS marketplaces and general company databases were excluded at that stage. I ran the Ahrefs `batch-analysis` call on each domain in `subdomains` mode on 2026-08-31, pulling `domain_rating` and `org_traffic`. For the ten highest-traffic directories I also pulled `site-explorer-top-pages` to check which URLs the estimated traffic actually landed on.
I use roughly 30 estimated monthly organic clicks as a warning threshold rather than an absolute cutoff. 27 directories cleared it comfortably and are ranked in the main table. One additional pick sits just below (ZPlatform, this site, at 29 estimated clicks/mo) and is retained in a separate “borderline” section for transparency, since applying my own methodology to my own property matters more than the label. 15 fell well below the threshold and are documented in “What I Cut.”
Data source: Ahrefs Site Explorer (`batch-analysis` for domain metrics, `site-explorer-top-pages` for URL-level traffic). Mode: `subdomains`. Traffic metric: `org_traffic`, Ahrefs’ estimate of monthly visits from Google organic search. DR: Ahrefs Domain Rating. Measurement date: 2026-08-31. Warning threshold: roughly 30 estimated monthly organic clicks. Prices and listing statuses: checked on each directory’s own submission page during August 2026, and change frequently. Re-verify before paying.
This audit intentionally measures estimated Google organic visibility because it gives one consistent third-party metric across all 43 domains. It should not be interpreted as total audience or referral traffic. Ahrefs itself notes the number is an estimate derived from ranked keywords, estimated search volume and estimated click-through curves, and recommends using it for comparative analysis. Direct visits, newsletter subscribers, YouTube viewers, social followers, community members and paid referrals are all outside this audit’s scope.
What I Cut, and Why
Fifteen rows fell well below the warning threshold. All of them had DR that would clear the bar on any typical DR-based SEO shortlist. All of them had close to zero estimated organic traffic.
| Directory | DR | Est. clicks/mo | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| AI Tools Neil Patel | 91 | 4 | Closed. 301s to app.neilpatel.com/en/apps-integrations. |
| Turbo0 | 80 | 1 | High DR, indexed almost nowhere. |
| ShowMeBest.ai | 76 | 0 | Zero indexed keywords per Ahrefs. |
| Good AI Tools | 74 | 0 | Zero indexed keywords per Ahrefs. |
| AI Toolz Dir | 68 | 0 | Zero indexed keywords per Ahrefs. |
| Toolfio | 62 | 10 | Well below threshold. |
| AI Tool Trek | 59 | 10 | Well below threshold. |
| Woy AI | 58 | 22 | Well below threshold. |
| AIX Collection | 56 | 0 | Zero indexed keywords per Ahrefs. |
| AI Hunt List | 54 | 0 | Zero indexed keywords per Ahrefs. |
| GPTs Hunter | 53 | 26 | Below threshold at refresh. Was above at original 2026-08-25 audit. |
| AI Tool Mall | 51 | 2 | Well below threshold. |
| Free AI Tools (.net) | 45 | 6 | Well below threshold. |
| Aidirs | 1 | 0 | DR appears to have collapsed since last check. |
| Orynth | 0 | 0 | Pay-to-list. Tagline is “list your product and earn.” |
Notice the DR spread. From 45 all the way up to 91. This is not a “low DR is dead” story. Several of these outrank general SaaS review sites on DR alone, and Ahrefs still estimates almost no Google organic traffic to any of them.
Why DR Is a Weak Primary Filter for AI Directories
Domain Rating is a backlink metric. Google does not use it to rank pages, and Ahrefs never claimed it should be read as a traffic proxy. In a mature vertical it usually correlates with editorial quality anyway, because editorial coverage tends to earn links. In the AI directory space, in this sample, that correlation is weak.
I computed both correlations against the 43-row sample:
- Pearson (DR vs estimated traffic): 0.18
- Spearman (DR rank vs traffic rank): 0.23
- Pearson (DR vs log10 traffic): 0.30
A Pearson of 0.18 is a weak positive relationship. A Spearman of 0.23 says knowing DR gives you a small edge over random when ranking by traffic, and not much more. Filtering the full sample to only rows with DR >= 60 does not fix it: median estimated traffic in that group is 10,160, and median estimated traffic among rows with DR >= 70 is actually lower (3,439), because a handful of high-DR directories in this category (Turbo0, Neil Patel, ShowMeBest, Good AI Tools) are near-zero on estimated traffic.
The scatter tells the same story faster. Points below the dashed line are the 15 that failed the ~30-click warning threshold. Notice how many of them sit at DR 50-90.
Three mechanics plausibly explain the gap in this vertical. The audit does not by itself establish which is doing the most work in any single case, and I am not attributing any specific dropped directory to any of them. They exist as documented patterns in the wider link-building ecosystem, not as causal claims about the rows above.
Cross-linking rings. Small AI directories sometimes link to each other as “recommended.” Each ring member picks up dofollow links from freshly-crawling domains, and the ring’s DR climbs together without any accompanying editorial pull.
Sponsored placements without a `rel` qualifier. Google’s own spam policy lists buying links for ranking as a link-scheme signal and asks publishers to mark paid placements with `rel=”sponsored”` or `rel=”nofollow”`. A directory that accumulates backlinks through paid guest posts left unqualified will look strong in DR without corresponding search visibility.
Launch-platform spillover. A directory that cross-posts entries to Product Hunt and similar earns real high-DR backlinks to its homepage without those backlinks meaningfully driving Google organic traffic to its listings.
What the correlation and the scatter do show is that in this 43-directory sample, DR alone is a weak filter.
Discovery Evidence for the Top 10 Directories
A total domain traffic estimate is a screening metric, not proof that a tool listing will actually be discovered. If most of a directory’s estimated traffic lands on blog posts or news articles instead of tool/category/directory pages, an individual submission might see very little of it. So for the ten highest-traffic directories in the retained set I also pulled `site-explorer-top-pages` and classified each URL as either a discovery page (homepage, category, search results, or individual tool profile) or editorial (news, blog, tutorial).
| Directory | Est. domain traffic/mo | Est. discovery-page traffic (top 30) | Discovery share | Notes on the discovery mix |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| There’s An AI For That | ~785,000 | ~412,000 | ~100% | Homepage + task search + tool profiles. Skew: a large share of the top-page traffic is NSFW/adult queries. |
| Openfuture.ai | ~198,000 | ~189,000 | ~96% | Homepage, language hubs, tool pages. Very little editorial. |
| Aixploria | ~124,000 | ~97,000 | ~99% | Editorial + directory hybrid, but almost all traffic lands on tool profiles, category pages and best-of listicles that carry tools. |
| Futurepedia | ~61,000 | ~56,000 | ~99% | Category hubs + individual tool profiles. Tutorials share tiny. |
| Future Tools | ~48,000 | ~38,000 | ~100% | Almost entirely /tools/[slug] pages. |
| AI Agent Store | ~45,000 | ~40,000 | ~97% | Individual agent profiles dominate. One agent (blackbox-ai) alone drives ~26k of the total. |
| Toolify.ai | ~44,000 | ~19,000 | ~80% | Mixed: ~20% of top-page traffic comes from /ai-news/ editorial. Discovery share is lower than the domain traffic implies. |
| Dang AI | ~30,600 | ~30,000 | ~100% | /tool/[slug] + category hubs. |
| Easy with AI | ~22,400 | ~19,000 | ~100% | Individual tool profiles under category slugs. |
| AI Tools Directory | ~18,500 | ~18,200 | ~100% | Homepage brand + /tool/[slug] pages. |
“Discovery” here means the homepage, a category/search page, or an individual tool profile - the places a founder’s listing could plausibly be reached. “Editorial” means news, tutorial or blog pages. Shares computed from each domain’s top-30 pages by Ahrefs `sum_traffic` on 2026-08-31. Coverage of the top-30 varies from about 53% of domain traffic (TAAFT) to about 99% (AI Tools Directory), so treat the shares as directional.
Two things stand out:
- Nine of the ten highest-traffic directories are effectively pure discovery pages. Blog and news traffic is negligible for Openfuture, Aixploria, Futurepedia, Future Tools, AI Agent Store, Dang AI, Easy with AI, and AI Tools Directory. Their domain traffic estimate is a reasonable proxy for the estimated audience your listing could sit inside.
- Toolify.ai is the exception. About a fifth of its top-page traffic comes from `/ai-news/` articles rather than tool profiles or category pages. Its domain traffic estimate (~44k) overstates the estimated audience that flows through tool/category pages (~35k after removing news). Adjust accordingly before paying for a listing.
A different kind of skew matters at TAAFT and, to a lesser extent, Toolify: a substantial share of top-page traffic is estimated to come from NSFW / adult-content queries. That is still discovery traffic, but if your product is not in that category, the reachable audience for you is smaller than the raw domain number implies.
The 30-Second Test
My working heuristic, not an industry benchmark. These bands are how I personally decide whether a submission is worth the time. The exact cut points are arbitrary; the point is to force a comparison before submitting.
Open Ahrefs, SEMrush, or SimilarWeb. Paste the directory’s domain into site-explorer. Look at estimated monthly organic traffic (an estimate, not a measurement, in all three tools). Then, for anything above the bottom band, also open the tool’s Top Pages report and check whether tool/category/directory pages are what actually generate the traffic.
| Est. Google organic traffic | My interpretation |
|---|---|
| Under 500/mo | Low organic-search visibility. Submit only if the listing is free and takes under five minutes. |
| 500-5,000/mo | Modest organic-search visibility. Worth submitting when your product fits their category. Not usually worth $50+ for a paid slot without other evidence. |
| 5,000+/mo | Meaningful organic-search visibility worth investigating further. Check discovery-page share and audience fit before paying. |
None of this rules a directory in or out on its own. A directory with 50 estimated Google visits could still have a large newsletter, community, social following, or direct audience - none of which Ahrefs measures. Use the estimate to shortlist, then verify.
The 27 That Cleared the Threshold, Ranked by Estimated Traffic
| Directory | Est. traffic/mo | DR | Listing | Priority | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1There’s An AI For That | ~785,000 | 77 | Paid $49+ | Priority 1 | Task-based discovery. Largest estimated audience in this set. Substantial share of traffic is NSFW queries. |
| #2Openfuture.ai | ~198,000 | 68 | Free | Priority 1 | Highest-traffic free directory in this set. Broad AI-tool coverage; multilingual tool pages. |
| #3Aixploria | ~124,000 | 58 | Paid $79+ | Priority 1 | Editorial + directory hybrid, but ~99% of top-page traffic lands on discovery URLs. |
| #4Futurepedia | ~61,000 | 72 | Paid | Priority 1 | General task-catalogued AI-tool index. |
| #5Future Tools | ~48,000 | 69 | Free | Priority 1 | Matt Wolfe’s curated directory; free submission, creator-brand audience. |
| #6AI Agent Store Specialized | ~45,000 | 52 | Paid $49.99+ | Priority 1 | Only agent-specific directory in this set with meaningful estimated audience. Note: one profile (Blackbox AI) drives more than half the total. |
| #7Toolify.ai | ~44,000 | 73 | Paid $99+ | Priority 1 | General AI-tool index. ~20% of top-page traffic is /ai-news/ editorial; discount the domain estimate accordingly. |
| #8Dang AI | ~30,600 | 82 | Freemium $29+ | Priority 1 | Free entry queue; priority slot is paid. Almost entirely tool + category pages. |
| #9Easy with AI | ~22,400 | 59 | Paid $125+ | Priority 2 | Editorial reviews under category slugs; ~100% discovery pages by top-page share. |
| #10AI Tools Directory | ~18,500 | 53 | Free | Priority 2 | Free general index; second-best free option after Openfuture.ai. |
| #11AI Top Tools | ~18,200 | 55 | Paid $7+ | Priority 2 | Cheapest paid entry ($7); useful budget listing. |
| #12AI Tools Inc | ~16,400 | 67 | Free | Priority 2 | Free general listing with mid-range estimated audience. |
| #13TopAI.tools | ~14,400 | 65 | Paid $47 | Priority 2 | General directory; ~2k ranked keywords. |
| #14Siteefy | ~12,000 | 77 | Freemium $19+ | Priority 2 | Editorial + directory hybrid; low-cost freemium slot. |
| #15GPT-3 Demo Specialized | ~10,200 | 65 | Unknown | Priority 2 | GPT/LLM demo listings; specialised audience. |
| #16Open Tools | ~8,600 | 69 | Paid $199+ | Priority 2 | Broad general index; paid tier expensive for this traffic level. |
| #17AI Pure | ~7,500 | 57 | Paid $69.89+ | Priority 2 | General; borderline value at this price for a small audience. |
| #18Tool Pilot | ~3,400 | 78 | Free | Priority 3 | Free listing; useful long-tail exposure but small pool. |
| #19AI With Me | ~2,800 | 58 | Paid $19.89+ | Priority 3 | Low paid price point; audience matches the price. |
| #20Saas AI Tools | ~2,700 | 53 | Free | Priority 3 | Free SaaS-and-AI overlap directory; niche audience. |
| #21AIChief | ~2,500 | 56 | Paid $99+ | Priority 3 | General; check current traffic before paying $99. |
| #22eBool Specialized | ~1,450 | 51 | Paid | Priority 3 | Best in this set for AI browser extensions (specialised). |
| #23AI Tool NET | ~1,300 | 56 | Paid $9.9+ | Priority 3 | Very cheap paid entry; use only for quick coverage. |
| #24Twelve Tools | ~1,150 | 82 | Freemium $36+ | Priority 3 | Textbook DR-vs-traffic gap: DR 82, small estimated audience. |
| #25Dokey AI | ~1,100 | 56 | Free | Priority 3 | Free listing; small audience but no downside to submit. |
| #26Next Gen Tools | ~720 | 69 | Free | Priority 3 | Free; DR high but audience is thin. |
| #27Aijet | ~590 | 52 | Free | Priority 3 | Free; near the bottom of the useful range. |
27 AI-focused directories that cleared the ~30 estimated clicks warning threshold, sorted by Ahrefs estimated monthly organic traffic (highest first). Traffic and DR are Ahrefs estimates as of 2026-08-31. Prices and listing statuses checked in August 2026 and change frequently. 319 venues in our full SaaS directories database did not clear the AI-focus test and are not on this page.
Borderline and Disclosed Exceptions
One property in my audit sits just below the ~30-click warning threshold and is retained here rather than in the main table, for transparency. This is the site publishing the audit, so applying the same methodology to it publicly is the whole point.
- zplatform.ai - ~29 est. traffic/mo at refresh, DR 57, freemium listing. Passed the original 2026-08-25 audit above the threshold; slipped to 29 at the 2026-08-31 refresh. I run this platform, so its inclusion is disclosed here rather than hidden inside the main table. It gets no ranking preference and is not treated as a Priority tier. If it slips further at a future refresh, it will move to “What I Cut” and I will say so.
GPTs Hunter (the only GPTs-focused directory in the set) also fell below the threshold at refresh and has been moved to the dropped table above.
Free vs Paid: Screening, Not ROI Proof
Domain organic-traffic estimates say something about which directories have search visibility. They do not, on their own, prove that a paid listing will convert. To justify paying, you also need discovery-page share (does the traffic land on tool/category pages?), listing placement (where does the paid slot actually appear?), listing indexability (is it crawled and rankable?), and audience fit (are the queries relevant to your product?). Use the traffic estimate to shortlist, then verify the other four before paying.
That said, within this 27-row retained set:
- Free / freemium (12 rows): median ~12,000 est. traffic/mo
- Paid (14 rows): median ~18,200 est. traffic/mo
Paid directories in this sample do carry higher estimated visibility on average, but only by a factor of about 1.5x, and the top of the free category (Openfuture.ai at ~198k, Future Tools at ~48k) beats every paid directory except There’s An AI For That, Aixploria and Futurepedia.
Five paid directories sit at or above 40k estimated traffic/mo in the retained set: There’s An AI For That, Aixploria, Futurepedia, AI Agent Store, and Toolify.ai. Those are the ones where I would investigate a paid slot most closely - and even there I would run through the discovery-page and audience-fit checks first. The middle band (paid listings under 10k estimated traffic) is where paid budget is easiest to waste.
Specialised Picks by Product Type
Some products are a poor fit for a general “list of AI tools.” If yours is one of these, the specialised directories in this audit are a better use of a submission slot than the top of the general table.
- AI agents / autonomous agents: AI Agent Store (~45k est. traffic/mo, paid from $49.99). The only agent-specific directory in the audit with meaningful estimated audience. Discovery share ~97%. Note that one profile (Blackbox AI) drives most of it, so audience concentration is uneven.
- Chat / LLM demos: GPT-3 Demo (~10k est. traffic/mo). Still active despite the dated name.
- Browser extensions: eBool (~1.4k est. traffic/mo, paid).
If you want a broader, non-AI-only extension list, see also our review of the best AI Chrome extensions and best AI Firefox extensions, both of which are curated directly from Chrome Web Store and AMO data.
What I Stopped Doing
Ranking directories by DR alone. This page is now ranked by estimated organic traffic, which is closer to what a submitter actually cares about: whether people will see the listing.
Treating a Product Hunt AI category as an AI directory. It is a launch platform. Different audience, different value.
Assuming a $50+ paid slot beats a free one. The audit shows one obvious free outperformer (Openfuture.ai, ~198k est. traffic/mo) and several free directories in the 15k-50k band. Paid can be worth it, but it needs to earn the fee against a specific traffic number and a plausible discovery path, not against the directory’s DR.
Submitting anywhere with fewer than roughly 30 estimated clicks a month unless the listing is free and takes under five minutes. A backlink from a directory Google is not surfacing much is, at best, a weak entity-consistency signal. Buying one is not a good use of the budget.
If you would rather not spend a weekend on it, submit once to ZPlatform and we will route your listing to the directories that pass this exact test. The submission page also links back to the wider best-of category if you want to see what else on this site has been through the same audit.
The Wider Database
The full ZPlatform SaaS directories database tracks 348 startup, SaaS and AI directories with live DR from Ahrefs. Most of them are not AI directories in the strict sense; they are launch platforms, company databases, or review marketplaces. The honest AI-focused ones that sit below DR 50 stay on that page but not this one. If you want to run the same audit against your own list, that database is the source of truth. Every row updates on the same cadence as the numbers you see here.
About This Audit
Written by Alston Antony, Founder of ZPlatform and a SaaS SEO & AI Search researcher. I have been running audits like this one against SaaS directories, AI directories and startup lists for the last three years. Full editorial standards and testing methodology are on the about page.
Last audit run: 2026-08-31. Next scheduled refresh: 2026-10 (quarterly). Corrections or additions: email `[email protected]` with a directory you think belongs on the list. I re-run the audit rather than adding on trust.
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