DEV Community: Costin Gheorghe

Which Startup Directories Actually Give Dofollow Links (We Checked 104)

Costin Gheorghe — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 17:20:00 +0000

Originally published on LetsLaunch.

Search for "startup directories with dofollow links" and you get the same article
fifteen times. A table of forty names, a column headed "Dofollow?", and a row of
green ticks that nobody appears to have checked. Some of those ticks were true in

Some were never true. A directory can change its link policy in an afternoon by adding nine characters to a template, and no listicle notices.

So we checked. Not by reading each site's marketing page, which is where most of
these claims come from, but by looking at the markup on a real listing.

How we checked

We track 104 directories. For each one we could, a script fetched one actual
product page, found the outbound link pointing at the listed product's own
domain, and read the rel attribute off that anchor. That is the only thing
that decides whether a link passes authority. Everything else — a "dofollow
backlink" bullet in the pricing table, a claim on someone's blog, a screenshot
from last year — is hearsay.

Sixty-one of the 104 had a live listing page we could point the checker at. The
results, in plain numbers:

34 confirmed dofollow. We saw the outbound link and it carried no nofollow or sponsored value.
2 confirmed nofollow. We saw the link and it was marked.
25 blocked. We asked and the site refused to answer — and each of those listings now publishes exactly why, on the directory's own page.
43 not yet checked, because we do not have a listing URL on them yet. They stay unknown until we do.

Those last two buckets need saying clearly, because they are the numbers a
listicle would quietly round away into a green tick.

"Unverified" does not mean "bad"

Twenty-five directories were asked and would not answer. Most returned 403, two
rate-limited us with a 429, one failed with a 526, and four build their listing
links in the browser, so the HTML we fetched contained nothing to read. That is
a statement about our request, not about their links.

We tried the obvious workaround before writing this. Sending a Chrome user
agent instead of an honest one moved exactly one directory out of the unverified
column — these sites fingerprint the TLS handshake and the HTTP/2 frame order,
which no set of headers disguises. So we put our own user agent back, and each
of those listings now says on its own page which of the three things happened
and when we last tried. AlternativeTo,
G2, Capterra,
Crunchbase, StackShare,
Slant, Wellfound, GetApp,
Crozdesk, F6S, FinancesOnline, Startup Ranking, Toolify, There's An AI For That
and Hacker News all sit in this group, along with Dev Hunt, SideProjectors,
TopAI.tools and WIP, which build their listing links in the browser. Several of
them are worth submitting to for reasons that have nothing to do with links, and
some of them very likely are dofollow.

One finding surprised us enough to publish it on its own. We ran the identical
check twice from two different machines — a laptop on a home connection, and the
server this site runs on. Six directories answered one and refused the other:
Product Hunt, Futurepedia, SaaSworthy, LaunchIgniter, Smol Launch and Launching
Next all returned a verdict to the laptop and a block page to the datacentre IP.

The numbers on this page are the ones our own server sees, because those are the
numbers behind the directory index you can click through to. But
it means "is this directory dofollow" does not have one answer — it has an
answer per asker. Any article quoting a single number for a site it never
fetched, from a vantage point it never names, is guessing more than it knows.

We are not going to guess on their behalf. Guessing is the failure mode we are
trying to correct.

The 34 confirmed dofollow directories

Eight of these are free with no paid tier at all. If you do nothing else on this
page, do these:

Directory	Cost
AICyclopedia	Free
AIToolMall	Free
Future Tools	Free
Indie Hackers	Free, instant with an account
Insidr AI	Free
Startup Stash	Free
Startups.fyi	Free, curated
ToolHunt	Free

Twenty-three have a genuine free route with paid options alongside it. The free
route is often slower, queued, or conditional on a badge, which is worth reading
carefully before you plan around it:

Directory	Free route	Paid options
AITopTools	Free submission	Paid placement advertised
AIxploria	Free submission	Featured placement
Awesome Indie	Free listing	Placements around $10–$19
Dang.ai	Free tier	Paid tiers, prices behind sign-in
Fazier	Free, badge required, listed within 30 days	Lite $29, Premium $49, Super $149
MicroLaunch	Queued free option, not publicly documented	Pro Launch $39 to skip the queue
Open Launch	Free tier, heavily booked	Premium $12 per launch
OpenHunts	Free, 20 slots a week, long queue or add a badge to skip	Premium $9.90
OpenTools	Free submission	Paid launch package
PeerPush	Free, queued behind paid	Standard $39, instant
PitchWall	Free listing	$49 and $99 placements
SaaS AI Tools	Free submission	Paid options
SaaSHub	Free listing	Featured promotion
ScrollLaunch	Free, up to 20 a week, dofollow only while the badge is installed	Premium $19, Premium+ $39
Startup Fame	Free tier	Paid tiers publish faster
StartupBase	Free with a required badge, roughly a 4–5 week queue	Premium from $39, Outrank from $15
TheAIToolsDir	Free with badge	$19 badge-free featured
TheSaaSDir	Free with badge	$19 badge-free featured, $29 for both directories
TinyLaunch	Free standard launch, queued	Premium $39 per launch
ToolPilot	Free listing, badge referenced	Upgrades from around $6.99
Toolfolio	Free submission	Paid options
Twelve Tools	Free with a required reciprocal backlink, 72h review	Pro $36, 24h review
Webframe	Curated, no public submit form	—

And three are dofollow but paid only. BetaList charges
for submission and refunds if you are rejected. Uneed sells
fast-track at $14.99 and skip-the-line at $29.99, and its free queue is currently
closed, so treat it as a paid listing today regardless of what older articles
say. Find My AI Tool runs from $79.99 to $999.99 and
asks for a badge on top — at the upper end of that range you are buying
advertising, so judge it on referral traffic and not on the link.

The two confirmed nofollow

SourceForge and Tekpon mark
their outbound links: every external link we read on those listing pages carried
a suppressing rel. Both are still reasonable places to be — SourceForge has distribution most
directories cannot match, and Tekpon is a category site people actually search
inside. Neither will move a single ranking through the link itself, and you
should plan your time accordingly.

Does a nofollow directory link still have value?

Yes, but not as a ranking signal. A nofollow link can still send qualified
traffic, get your product in front of someone who writes about it later, and put
your name in a place a journalist or investor checks. What it will not do is pass
authority, which is the one thing it is usually sold as doing.

The badge pattern is now the norm

Six of the 34 confirmed dofollow directories tie the free listing, the dofollow
link, or both to a reciprocal badge on your own site: Fazier, Find My AI Tool,
StartupBase, TheAIToolsDir, TheSaaSDir and Twelve Tools. ScrollLaunch does the
same thing without recording it as a hard requirement — your link is dofollow
only while the badge is installed — and OpenHunts uses a badge to jump its
queue.

The logic is straightforward. A directory that hands out free dofollow links to
anyone who fills in a form gets scraped, spammed and eventually discounted. Tying
the link to a badge is a cost the spammer will not pay. ScrollLaunch is explicit
about the mechanism: your link is dofollow only while the badge is installed.

We use the same shape here. LetsLaunch is free with no queue, and the dofollow
link is earned by putting our badge on your site rather than bought.

Worth knowing before you install six badges: they are visible on your own pages,
and they point outward. One or two on a footer is normal. A wall of them looks
like what it is.

Be honest about what this is worth

Thirty-four dofollow links from directories will not rank a site. They are a
modest, one-off input: some early crawl paths to a new domain, a bit of
non-branded anchor variety, and a handful of pages that mention what you do. The
sites that win on search win on the thing itself — pages worth linking to, a
product people mention without being asked.

Treat a directory round as a day's work with a small, real payoff, not as a
growth strategy. If someone is selling you a package of 200 directory
submissions, they are selling volume of exactly the thing that has diminishing
returns.

The practical version: work through the eight confirmed free ones and the free
tiers above, budget for one or two paid listings if the audience genuinely fits,
and skip anything that only claims dofollow in its own sales copy. The full set
of 104 with what we could confirm on each lives on the
directories index, and if you want to be on this list yourself
you can submit your product.

How to check any directory yourself

You do not need a script. Two minutes per directory:

Open any live listing on that directory, ideally one for a product like yours.
Find the button that goes to the product's own website. Right-click it and choose "Inspect", or open the page source and search for the product's domain.
Look at the anchor tag. If you see rel="nofollow", rel="sponsored", or rel="ugc", the link does not pass authority. If there is no rel at all, or it only contains values like noopener and noreferrer, it is dofollow.

Two things to watch. Check a free listing rather than a featured one, because
some sites mark them differently. And check the outbound link, not the internal
links on the page, which are always dofollow and prove nothing.

Do that on any site before you pay it, and re-check a few months after you are
listed. Policies change quietly, which is how the listicles got it wrong in
the first place.

Frequently asked questions

Does submitting my product to directories hurt SEO?

No, not the legitimate kind covered here. What can hurt a site is mass-submitting
to link farms and low-quality directory networks built purely to sell backlinks —
the practice Google's link-spam policy targets. A handful of real, checkable
listings on sites makers actually use is a normal, small part of a new domain's
link profile, not a penalty risk.

How many directory backlinks does a new SaaS actually need?

Not many. Thirty-four dofollow links from directories is a modest, one-off
input — a bit of non-branded anchor variety and a few early crawl paths to a new
domain, not a growth strategy. Budget a day's work to go through the free tier
of the directories that genuinely fit your product, then move on to content
and links that keep compounding on their own.

Should I pay for a directory listing to get the dofollow link?

Only when the paid tier is buying real traffic or placement, not just the link
itself — a directory selling nothing but "guaranteed dofollow" is selling the
exact thing that stops working once everyone can buy it. Work through the free
options first; several of the confirmed dofollow directories above have a
genuinely free route.

What's the actual difference between a dofollow and nofollow directory link?

A dofollow link passes ranking authority to your site; a nofollow one — marked
with rel="nofollow", rel="sponsored", or rel="ugc" — does not, whatever
traffic or visibility it still sends. The label is the only thing that matters
for SEO purposes, which is why this whole piece is built around reading it
directly rather than trusting a directory's own claim.

How often does a directory's dofollow status actually change?

Often enough that a listicle from even a year ago is unreliable — a site can
flip its link policy by adding nine characters to a template. It can also
simply answer differently depending on who is asking: six directories,
Product Hunt included, gave our laptop a verdict and blocked our server
outright. Re-check anything you are relying on, and don't trust a single
number from a source that never says where it was checked from.

Why ChatGPT Can't See Your Site (Even Though Google Ranks It)

Costin Gheorghe — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 12:22:11 +0000

Originally published on LetsLaunch.

There is a failure mode that does not show up in any of your dashboards. Your
site ranks. Analytics look normal. You open the page in a browser and it is
obviously fine. And an assistant, asked about the exact thing you built, has
nothing to say about you — not because it judged your product, but because it
never received any words.

The cause is unglamorous. Googlebot executes JavaScript. The crawlers behind
ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity do not. Vercel and MERJ measured this across
more than 500 million GPTBot fetches and found no JavaScript execution at all.
So a single-page app that assembles its content in the browser is two different
documents depending on who asks for it: a full page for Google, and whatever
sits in the initial HTML for everyone else.

If that initial HTML is a <div id="root"> and a script tag, that is the whole
site as far as an assistant is concerned.

The same URL, two different documents

This is worth being precise about, because "AI can't read my site" gets said in
a vague way that leads people to buy the wrong fix.

Nothing is being blocked, hidden or penalised. The crawler makes an ordinary
HTTP request and gets an ordinary 200 response. It simply keeps what the server
sent and stops there. Google's crawler does a second pass and runs the scripts;
the AI crawlers have no second pass.

The practical consequence is that every rendering choice you made for
performance or developer convenience now has a distribution consequence you
were not thinking about. Content behind a client-side fetch, a tab that loads
on click, a pricing table hydrated from an API, a description rendered by a
framework with no server pass — all of it is present for a human, present for
Google, and absent for an assistant.

What "invisible" actually looks like

Three shapes, in rough order of how often they turn up.

The empty shell. The server returns 200 and about forty words: a title, a
noscript line, maybe a nav. Everything that explains the product arrives later,
in JavaScript. This is the classic client-rendered app, and it is the hardest
to notice because nothing anywhere reports an error.

The 403. Bot protection at the CDN or firewall refuses the crawler's user
agent before your application is ever reached. Your robots.txt says the
crawler is welcome; your edge disagrees, and the edge wins. Nobody chose this —
it usually arrives as a default when someone turns on bot filtering.

The accidental robots rule. Someone added a blanket disallow to keep the
site out of AI training and took out the search crawler in the same line. Which
brings up the distinction almost everybody gets wrong.

GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot are not the same bot

GPTBot collects training data. OAI-SearchBot fetches pages for the index
behind ChatGPT's search citations. They are independent, and blocking one has
no effect on the other.

Block GPTBot and you have opted out of training runs. That is a legitimate
choice and it costs you nothing in ChatGPT's answers. Block OAI-SearchBot and
you are removed from those answers entirely — you cannot be cited from an index
you are not in.

A blanket User-agent: * disallow aimed at "AI" does the second thing while
people believe they are doing the first. If you have ever pasted an AI-blocking
robots snippet from a blog post, this is worth thirty seconds of your time.

We hit the same wall from the other side

When we checked 51 startup directories for dofollow links, our
checker fetched a real listing page and read the rel attribute off the
outbound link. Most of what we could not verify was bot protection returning
403 — the second shape above, aimed at us.

But two directories defeated the check for the first reason: they render their
outbound links client-side. The anchor does not exist in the HTML that the
server sends. Our dofollow checker sees no link at
all, and neither does anything else that does not run a browser.

Those directories are almost certainly fine for humans. The point is narrower
and worth sitting with: if a link only exists after JavaScript runs, then every
consumer of your page that does not run JavaScript is working from a document
with no link in it. The same logic that hides your product description from an
assistant hides an outbound link from a crawler.

Check your own page in two minutes

You cannot see any of this in a browser, because your browser is the one thing
in this story that definitely runs JavaScript. You have to fetch the page the
way a crawler does.

The one-liner:

curl -sA "OAI-SearchBot" https://yoursite.com | wc -c
curl -sA "OAI-SearchBot" https://yoursite.com | grep -c "your product description"

If the byte count is small and the grep returns 0, the text is not in the
document. Repeat with ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot, because a block can be
per-agent, and check the status code separately — curl -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}"
will tell you whether you are looking at an empty shell or a refusal.

We built the AI crawler check to do this without the
terminal: it fetches your page as each crawler, once, and shows the status code
each one got and the text each one received. It is free and there is nothing to
sign up for.

Fixing it is a rendering change, not an SEO change

If the text is missing, the fix is to make the server send it. Server-side
rendering, static generation, or prerendering for bot user agents — any of the
three works, and which one you pick is an ordinary engineering decision about
your stack, not a marketing one.

Two things that do not fix it: adding structured data (it is markup about
content, and it is usually injected client-side too, in which case it is
equally invisible), and writing more content (content the crawler cannot see
does not get better by being longer).

If the problem is a 403, the fix is in your CDN or firewall rules, and the
tell is that robots.txt says one thing and the response code says another.

Be honest about what this buys you

Getting readable is necessary. It is not sufficient, and the gap between those
two words is where most of the AI-visibility industry currently lives.

Being readable means an assistant can receive your page. It does not mean an
assistant will mention you. We know of no evidence that any particular action
reliably causes an assistant to recommend a product, and there is a useful
counterexample: G2 and Capterra carry enormous authority and get near-zero
citations. Authority alone plainly does not convert into being named.

Directory listings, ours included, have not been shown to cause AI citations
either. What is observable is weaker and honest to state as such: consistent
descriptions of a product across independent pages correlate with that product
being named by assistants. Correlation is the whole of the claim. Nobody has
shown causation, and anyone selling you AI visibility as a deliverable is
charging for a mechanism that has not been demonstrated.

It is also harder to measure than it looks. Asking a model "do you know this
product" and writing down the answer is not measurement — between 9% and 28% of
such decisions flip on repeat runs, even at temperature zero. A one-shot check
presented as a score is a coin toss with a progress bar attached.

So the sequence that survives scrutiny is short. Make sure the crawler can
reach your page and receives the words on it, because that part is mechanical,
verifiable and identical on every run. Then describe your product the same way
everywhere it appears — your own site, your docs, and whatever independent
pages list it, including a LetsLaunch listing if you want one more.
Then stop, because past that point nobody can currently tell you what works.

Does ChatGPT render JavaScript?

No. The crawlers behind ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity execute no JavaScript —
Vercel and MERJ confirmed this across more than 500 million GPTBot fetches.
They read the HTML your server sends and nothing more. Googlebot does render,
which is why a client-rendered site can rank in Google while arriving at an
assistant as an empty page.

Will blocking GPTBot remove me from ChatGPT's search results?

No, and this is the most common confusion. GPTBot collects training data
while OAI-SearchBot fetches pages for the index behind ChatGPT's search
citations. They are separate crawlers, so blocking GPTBot keeps you out of
training runs without affecting search. Blocking OAI-SearchBot is what
removes you from ChatGPT's answers, and a blanket disallow rule does that by
accident.

Why does my site rank in Google but not appear in AI answers?

Usually because Googlebot renders JavaScript and AI crawlers do not, so the two
are reading different documents at the same URL. Fetch your page with a crawler
user agent and no browser to see which one you have — an empty shell means a
rendering problem, and a 403 means a bot-protection rule. Neither shows up in
your analytics, because a crawler that receives nothing has nothing to report.