Every "launch your side project" checklist has the same list on it. Product Hunt. AlternativeTo. BetaList. There's An AI For That. Toolify. Futurepedia. G2 if you're feeling corporate.
I run a small free photo-filter tool. Before spending a weekend submitting to all of them, I did something I should have done first: I pulled the backlink profiles of the competitors who are beating me, and looked at where their links actually come from.
Not one of those directories showed up. Not one.
Here's what I found instead, and how I checked it.
The setup
Four domains, all in the same niche (browser-based retro/glitch photo effects):
| site | total backlinks | what I sampled |
|---|---|---|
| competitor A (direct rival) | 417 | 333 (80%) |
| competitor B (much bigger, older) | ~13,000 | top 356 follow links by page authority |
| competitor C (new, same idea) | 57 | 46 |
| my own site | 38 | 36 |
I pulled these from Semrush's backlink report, paginating the table and scraping each row into a flat list: source URL, page authority, follow/nofollow, first seen. Then I grouped by domain and sorted.
Sampling caveat up front, because it matters for how much you should trust this: for competitor B I only looked at 356 of its ~7,100 follow links, about 5%. That's not a random 5%. It's the highest-authority 5%. Directory listings tend to be high-authority pages, so if they existed I'd expect them near the top. Their absence there is meaningful, but it's an inference, not a census. For competitor A I have 80% of the profile, which is solid.
What was actually there
I grepped both profiles for every directory name from the standard checklist: altern, producthunt, saashub, toolify, futurepedia, theresanaiforthat, betalist, slant, capterra, g2., stackshare.
Zero hits.
What I got instead, dominating everything:
204 links from 185 different personal websites, nearly all dofollow. Mostly Neocities and Nekoweb sites: the free-static-hosting corner of the web where people still hand-write HTML and keep a page called /links or /resources or /cool-sites.
One single Neocities site linked competitor B 168 times (it's a big personal directory, one link per tool it catalogues).
The striking part: those 185 sites barely overlap. Exactly one of them turned up in more than one competitor's profile. These aren't a network. They're 185 individual people who each found a tool and added it to their own list.
There's a second tier that's smaller but real: Substack newsletters doing "18 free tools for X" roundups, niche wikis, a couple of .edu pages where a lecturer keeps a digital-art tool list, and, in competitor B's case, a cluster of Chinese design-navigation sites that accept submissions.
The part I got wrong before I looked
My assumption was that "free web tool" is a category that lives in tool directories. For SaaS, maybe. For a thing you use once in a browser and never sign up for, the people who link to you are the people who collect things like that. And the people who collect things like that, in this niche, keep personal homepages.
That's not a growth hack. It's just: your links come from wherever your actual audience hangs out, and that's a different place for every niche. The generic checklist encodes someone else's niche.
A warning about the noise
Something else fell out of the data that's worth flagging if you ever run this check.
Competitor A's profile contains 122 links from a network of near-identical junk domains: beer-brand names, .xyz TLDs, all serving the same template. That's a third of the 333 links I pulled. My own tiny profile has the same shape: of 38 backlinks, 36 are auto-generated "Boost your Google rankings!" scraper pages that also point at everyone else in the niche.
I want to be careful here, because it's easy to read that as an accusation. You cannot tell from a backlink report who put a link there. Nobody asks permission to link to you. Scraper networks and spam farms hoover up domains and link at them automatically; showing up in one says approximately nothing about the site being linked. I'd assume mine arrived exactly the way theirs did. By robot.
The practical takeaway is just: when you read a profile, filter the junk before you count anything. Competitor A looks like a 417-link site. Strip the template spam out of what I sampled and roughly 210 links are left. And don't panic-disavow. A handful of obvious template spam is noise every site accumulates.
What I'm doing with this
Two things.
First, I stopped planning the directory sprint. Not because directories are bad, but because in this niche the evidence says they pay nothing.
Second, I made an actual site in that community: a small hand-written page about why old digital camera photos look the way they do, with the slider values I use, hosted on Nekoweb like everyone else there. Not a landing page. That crowd can smell a landing page from orbit.
And I made an 88×31 button, because that turns out to be the actual unit of exchange. That's how those 185 links happened: someone put your button on their links page. There's no form. There's no submission. You make a thing, you make a button, and you participate.
If you want to run this on your own niche
- Pick 2–3 competitors who are genuinely ahead of you, not aspirational giants. Their links should be links you could plausibly also get.
- Pull the backlink profile and export or scrape the whole table, not the summary.
- Filter out the spam networks first. Look for many near-identical domains sharing a URL path pattern.
- Group by registrable domain, but keep subdomains separate if the host is a platform (every Neocities user is a subdomain; collapsing them would have hidden this entire finding).
- Ignore the totals. Read the shape. Ask "who is this person and why did they link this," and the pattern shows up fast.
The answer for me was "people who keep link pages." It'll be something else for you. But it's a couple of hours of scraping to find out, and it's cheaper than a weekend of directory submissions that go nowhere.
I build digicamfilter.online, a free in-browser retro photo filter. It runs as a WebGL shader in your own tab, so nothing gets uploaded anywhere. The community site from this post is dead pixels club.
Top comments (1)
You already scraped the column that answers the next question and then didn't use it: first seen. Sort those 185 personal sites by date and the one-off links tend to clump. A clump means one upstream mention, a forum thread or a Substack roundup, sent four or five curators to their /links page the same week. The report tells you where links landed, not where the discovery happened. That gap is the part I work on with Viewfy: find the thread the niche is asking in, draft the reply, hold it for your approve.