Backlinks and directories

One page per competitor, targeting “[competitor] alternative”. Nothing else ranks this cheaply.

Answer engines cross-reference competitor claims and de-rank pages that lie. Concede real losses.

The single highest-trust block on the page, and it disqualifies bad-fit signups for free.

These are the pages you most want quoted in an AI answer. Make them extractable.

A different query from “[rival] alternative”, typed later by a warmer buyer who has already shortlisted you both. One audited site had 73 alternatives pages and no head-to-heads, while comparison pages were its best template. Put the date beside every competitor price you quote; an undated price goes wrong within a year and reads as a lie.

Its users now have a deadline and must choose something, so searches for “[rival] alternative” spike and then stop once the doors close. Lead with how to export their data and what maps to what in your product, not with your pitch. It earns traffic only while the deadline is still ahead.

Same product, their words, their screenshot, their objection handled.

Include your competitors honestly. This ranks for category queries and becomes an AI citation source.

Typeform’s template library drove 30k non-branded signups. It is also a permanent link magnet.

Outcome first. Every form has this field and most have a hard character limit.

What it does and for whom, in the words a directory’s own search results show. Forms with a 60-character limit take the tagline instead.

One text, three ways in: lead with the outcome on one directory, with the alternative it replaces on the next, with the mechanism on the third. Never paste the same first sentence everywhere — duplicates get down-weighted.

Use the tags buyers browse, not the ones that describe your architecture.

Curated directories reject listings without one. Reused verbatim on launch day.

Directory, date, listing URL, status (live, submitted, skipped and why), dofollow verified. A marketinque project has it built in: the directory sprint on the plan page, checked nightly. You will be back here quarterly.

Nofollow, but it ranks for “[competitor] alternatives” and feeds AI answers heavily.

Dofollow, and ranks well for alternatives queries with genuinely high buying intent.

Listing only for now — it stays invisible until the review drive in 2.6.

Bought by G2 from Gartner in early 2026 (agreement 29 Jan, close reported 5 Feb). Same review mechanics, separate listing, separate review count.

Often auto-populates from Capterra. Claim it rather than creating a duplicate.

Gartner property; syncs with Capterra in several categories.

Lower volume than G2, higher review quality, and reviewers write real detail.

Legacy, unglamorous, DR 92, and takes twenty minutes.

Same operator as SourceForge — do them back to back with the same copy.

DR 88, clean categorisation, fast approval.

Directory plus media surface — occasionally turns into editorial coverage.

A “what is the best…” platform. Answer the questions your buyers actually ask.

Doubles as the home for your build-in-public updates from Phase 3 onward.

Used by accelerators; the profile outranks a lot of things for your brand name.

Publish your own stack too — that is what gets the profile crawled.

Startup Stash, Crozdesk, SaaSWorthy, Startup Fame, Taalk, StartupBuffer, 10words, Launched.io and friends. One sitting.

Heavily weighted in AI training corpora and in “who is this company” lookups.

Required before you can run any LinkedIn distribution in Phase 3.

The structured spine most knowledge panels and assistants resolve entities against.

DR 98. Every software product should have this whether or not it is open source.

Dofollow, and cross-post with a canonical URL back to your own blog.

One _atproto TXT record and the account becomes @yourdomain.com. Free verification, unlike every neighbour.

DR 93, and it becomes the newsletter home in Phase 3 if you want it to.

DR 95 for repurposing content you already wrote into a deck.

Gravatar, About.me, Hashnode, Disqus, Scoop.it, Diigo, Pearltrees, Dun & Bradstreet.

The largest AI directory, task-based search. Its own pricing page lists $437 with a newsletter mention and $49 as the base listing (the layout is ambiguous about what the $49 covers); a third-party review reports a monthly X thread that picks one tool as the only free route.

Its listing and pricing pages returned 404 on 2026-11-10, so no price is confirmed; a third-party review puts a verified listing at $497. Check the price before you budget it.

$99 and listed inside 48 hours according to third-party reviews; its own submit page shows no price but advertises a dofollow backlink, and reviews say at least six links. Public traffic trends make it competitive intel as well as a listing.

The one that is still free — a plain form, reviewed by hand. Do this before paying anyone. Small, but disproportionately influential in the AI-tool press cycle.

Acid Tools (free, dofollow), aitools.inc, AIStage, TopAI.tools, Supertools, AI Tools Guide, NewTools.site and the rest.

Grades are public and comparative. An A is a differentiator; an F is worse than absent.

The official MCP registry, still in preview; the protocol moved to the Linux Foundation’s Agentic AI Foundation in Dec 2025. Not a PR: a server.json posted with mcp-publisher after proving the namespace (GitHub for io.github.*, a DNS or /.well-known key for your domain). Description ≤ 100 chars; each version publishes once.

Sign in, paste the server URL, skip session config unless the server needs a key; its inspector reads your tools and scores the listing. Description, homepage and repository lift the score. “Verified” wants a TXT record on the homepage host and a paid plan — optional.

AI Agents List, APITracker, AI Agent Store, AgentHunter, AI Agents Directory.

Both list only remote servers over HTTPS, and both are reviewed. Claude’s needs OAuth 2.0 for any tool that acts on a user’s account, a title and a readOnlyHint or destructiveHint on every tool, a privacy policy and a test account for its reviewers. Fix those before applying, or the review is the first place you hear about them.

Search “best [category] tools 2026” and “best [competitor] alternative”. Note the author.

Short, specific, offer a free account for their readers, and make it trivial to say no.

Once. A second follow-up costs you the relationship for a link you were not getting.

Search your brand name in quotes, minus your own domain. Log every mention without a link.

Thank them first, then ask. Conversion here is unusually high because they already like you.

Redirect each dead URL to the page that answers what the reader came for, or restore it. Sending them all to the homepage instead reads as a soft 404 and drops out of the index, which loses the equity you were rescuing.

A Google Alert on the brand and your own name. The backlog is finite; what the plan earns later is not.

Open submissions, quick approval, and the audience is browsing to buy.

Categorised by project type, so pick the category a buyer would search.

Long-running curated list; editorial standards are real, so write the entry properly.

NoCodeList, NoCodeDevs, We Are No Code, NoCodeFounders, MakerPad. One sitting.

Blog discovery plus RSS aggregation — a real referral source, not just a link.

Long-established aggregator; one submission, permanent listing.

PRLog, OpenPR, PR.com. Only for something genuinely newsworthy — launch, funding, a big number. Nobody reads these; the links are the point.

Past a handful, low-quality distribution starts to look like a link scheme rather than a launch. Real PR is 4.4, pitched to humans.

Inspect the link; absence of rel="nofollow" or rel="ugc" means it passes equity.

A single number per week, and count recovered links apart from newly earned ones — repairing a redirect moves the same number as winning a link and means something completely different. If it stalls for a month, something flipped to nofollow.

Do not edit listings weekly. Do check them four times a year.

Link Intersect in Ahrefs, Backlink Gap in Semrush. Two competitors is the threshold that separates a habit from a coincidence.

A tool, a study, a template, a quote — or an acquisition, a sponsorship or a friendship. Mark those last three as not winnable rather than pitching them; most of a competitor’s profile is not an opportunity.

A link that 404s, or still loads while describing a product that shut down. Name the exact line, offer the page that finishes the reader’s task, and do not call a resource obsolete just because its owner changed.

The one route where the writer is already looking for you. Answer the question in the first sentence, from experience you can substantiate — no original data required, which is what makes it work at DR 20.

Run your ten highest-intent searches and ten prompts and write down what comes back: threads, listicles, review categories, videos. The repeats are the map.

A thread cited across nine of your queries beats a DR 80 mention nobody buying reads. Work only the handful scoring high on both.

Find out who owns each one and how it earns before you spend the afternoon: many ranking listicles are affiliate properties, where the price is a commission and no pitch will move them.

One category sentence, repeated by your site, your listings, your reviewers and your press. Consensus is what turns a claim into something a model will repeat.