The advice is everywhere and it sounds right: get listed on G2, Capterra, AlternativeTo, SaaSHub, Crunchbase and Product Hunt, because that is where AI assistants learn which products exist.
I believed it enough to block out an afternoon for it. Before spending the afternoon, I measured it. I am glad I did, because in the data I have, the advice is close to backwards.
What I measured
I run a tool that asks ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity the questions buyers actually type, as live web searches, and records the source pages behind each answer. I ran it across four software categories:
- AI SEO tools
- Email marketing software
- Help desk software
- Social media scheduling tools
Two of those, help desk and email marketing, are the classic directory categories. If G2 and Capterra drive AI answers anywhere, it should be there.
172 source citations in total. Here is what the directories got.
| Category | Total citations | From SaaS directories |
|---|---|---|
| AI SEO tools | 47 | 0 |
| Email marketing software | 44 | 0 |
| Help desk software | 40 | 1 |
| Social media scheduling tools | 41 | 0 |
| Total | 172 | 1 |
One. It was g2.com, cited once, in help desk software.
Across all four categories, AlternativeTo, Capterra, Crunchbase, SaaSHub, GetApp, Product Hunt, StackShare, Software Advice, TrustRadius and SourceForge were cited zero times between them.
So what is being cited
The winners were consistent and they were not what I expected either.
Reddit, in all four categories. 6 citations in help desk, 6 in social media scheduling, 4 in email marketing, 2 in AI SEO tools. In my own category, measured separately across 44 full answers, Reddit appeared in 27 of them. 61%.
Independent roundups from people who cover one niche properly. Not general directories. Specific publications:
- Email marketing: emailvendorselection.com 6, mailtrap.io 5, emailtooltester.com 3
- Help desk: proprofsdesk.com 4, crm.org 3, thecxlead.com 3
- Social scheduling: statusbrew.com 5, technologyadvice.com 5
- AI SEO: onelittleweb.com 6, freddiechatt.com 4, rankability.com 4, whatagraph.com 4
Two names that showed up across multiple categories. zapier.com was cited in email marketing (6) and social scheduling (4), and separately in 7 of my own category's answers. pcmag.com appeared in both email marketing (4) and help desk (4). If you want one target that pays off in more than one category, Zapier's roundups are the closest thing in this data.
Quora, more than I expected. 5 citations in social scheduling, 3 in help desk. It quietly behaves like Reddit does.
Why it goes this way
I am guessing at the mechanism, and I want to be clear that this part is the guess and the numbers above are the measurement.
A directory listing is a database row. Name, category, price, a paragraph you wrote about yourself, and a star rating. When an assistant is asked "which help desk should I use and why", a row does not answer it. Somebody's post explaining why they moved off Zendesk after two years does.
The pages that get cited have an argument in them. They compare, they take a position, they say who something is not for. Directories are built to be comprehensive and neutral, which is exactly what makes them useless as a source for a recommendation.
What I am not claiming
Four categories and 172 citations is not the internet, and it is one measurement per category rather than a trend.
Directories can still be worth doing for reasons that have nothing to do with this: human buyers do browse Capterra, a G2 badge is social proof, and the backlink is a backlink. If someone shows me a bigger sample where directories drive AI answers, I will publish that too.
The narrow claim is the one I can defend: in these four categories, the assistants building the answer were not reading the directories. If your reason for spending an afternoon on submissions is "so ChatGPT finds me", that reason did not survive contact with my data.
What I did with the afternoon instead
I dropped the directory plan and rewrote the priority order to match the citation counts. Reddit first, because 61% is not a close call. Then the specific roundups I can name from my own data, approached with the measurement rather than a request to be added, because those editors all write about this subject and none of them have data on it. Then the categories where one publication pays off twice.
The uncomfortable part is that I had the plan written down three days before I measured it, and the plan was aimed at the wrong channel with total confidence.
Run it on your own category
You can do the manual version in twenty minutes and I would rather you checked than believed me. Ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity the question your buyer types. Open every source each answer cites. Count how many are directories and how many are somebody's opinion. Then decide where the afternoon goes.
The automated version is what I build, at glotier.com. Free, no card, no account. It asks the three assistants your buyer questions and shows you which products got named and every source page behind each answer.
I would rather publish a number that costs me an afternoon of planned work than keep repeating advice that four categories of my own data say is wrong.
Top comments (1)
worth naming the mechanism behind that 1: when a directory does get cited, the cited url is almost always its "best X software" roundup, not an individual profile. and placement in those roundups is usually sponsored. so submitting gets you into the database, which is not the part that gets read.
we've been grinding through the usual list (g2, capterra, getapp, saasworthy) for a few weeks and your framing matches it from the inside. the profile is a form. there's no argument on it and nowhere to put one.