How to promote an AI tool: 9 channels ranked by what they return

Four founders paid for a directory listing and published what came back. The results run from 15 visitors in two weeks to 800 visitors in one day, and from about 9 to about 50 real sign-ups. One found that 97% of more than 300 sign-ups were fraudulent. That is the best-documented paid channel we found, and it is four forum posts.

Below are nine ways to promote an AI tool, ranked by cash cost, time to a result and what founders report getting back. The ranking is a judgment: where nobody has published numbers, the table says so and the order rests on cost and rules. Prices and rules come from each venue's own pages, read on October 10, 2026.

How the ranking works

Three tests, in order: cash cost, how long until you know whether it worked, and whether anything is left after six months. A page that keeps ranking counts as a return: the maker of a study tool, after a week on a paid TAAFT listing, called the lasting value "borrowed SEO equity", not referral traffic.

We did not rank by audience size. Directories publish one (TAAFT claims 5M+ monthly visitors, Toolify 5.1M+, Dang.ai 270K+) and we could not verify any of them. A commenter on r/SaaS gave the better test: "Ask for the click number rather than the audience size."

The nine channels, ranked

What founders reported

Four data points, not a distribution: one founder and one listing each, on different tiers. Three of the four judged the listing worth the money (one only as a one-off, for the backlink); the $99 buyer did not. Three things repeat. An audience claim is not your audience: the Gistr maker points out that TAAFT's visitors are shared among more than 10,000 tools. Sign-ups need a fraud filter: Tufa's payment processor let through billing addresses in South Sudan paired with cards from Brazil, and about half of the early traffic came from India, outside their market. And the spike is short: nearly all of Gistr's 2,962 video views arrived around launch day.

Channel notes

1. Free lanes in AI directories and review sites

Free lanes exist, and each has a catch. Dang.ai's free lane needs a crawlable backlink to dang.ai and takes up to four weeks. Futurepedia and Toolify show no free path. FutureTools is free and says over 75% of submissions are not approved. AlternativeTo is free, with a queue of several thousand apps and a $5 priority review that, in its words, "does not buy approval". The free-path list sorts the rest.

alternativeto.netOct 11, 2026

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One free check before paying anyone, from an r/SaaS commenter: search the exact name of a tool already listed and see whether the directory's page appears; plenty, they say, do not.

EffectHub is itself an AI directory, so weigh our view of directories accordingly. We list AI tools too: free with our badge on your site, or $24 without it.

2. Free lanes on launch platforms

Product Hunt is free to launch on. Its guide caps the tagline at 60 characters, refuses shortened and UTM-tagged launch links, and tells makers to ask for feedback, not upvotes. Uneed gives free launches a date 30 days to 5 months out.

uneed.bestOct 11, 2026

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Skipping a queue runs from $9.90 at OpenHunts to $39 at TinyLaunch, and some free lanes are effectively closed: OpenHunts shows a wait of about 60 weeks. A property-management founder traced a week's six card sign-ups to BetaList, Indie Hackers, LaunchPact and PeerPush. Rules: the launch platforms hub and the Product Hunt profile.

3. Show HN

The title starts with "Show HN"; the project must be something people can try, ideally without a sign-up or email; sign-up pages, landing pages and newsletters do not qualify; and you must be around to discuss it. We found no first-hand 2026 numbers for an AI tool; the one verified first-hand figure is from February 2020: an SMS tool's Show HN reached the front page with 91 points and brought 2,221 visits and about 20 free-trial sign-ups, roughly 1%. See the Show HN profile.

news.ycombinator.comOct 11, 2026

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4. Communities

Reddit's Rule 2 says: "Participate authentically in communities where you have a personal interest." Each subreddit also sets its own rules. Indie Hackers sells IH+ at $198 a year and lists skipping the wait to post as a benefit. The property-management founder above treats community posts as credibility, not sales, and advises against mentioning your product in them after a 30-day ban from the biggest forum in their niche. See the Indie Hackers profile.

5. Integration marketplaces

If your tool has an API, these are where users already work. The official MCP Registry is in preview, hosts metadata only (your package must already be on npm or another registry) and verifies your namespace through GitHub or DNS. Claude's Connectors Directory accepts remote MCP servers from anyone on a paid Claude plan: a submission is scanned automatically and listed as a Community connector by default, and some get a human review. OpenAI's plugin directory for ChatGPT and Codex reviews plugins and states no review time.

Zapier limits public integrations to developers who work for, or are contracted by, the API's owner, and the app must be fully launched, not invite-only or beta. None of the four pages states a fee; we found no founder numbers for any of them.

6. Your own comparison pages and AI answers

Search and AI assistants can only use what they can crawl. OpenAI documents OAI-SearchBot as the crawler behind ChatGPT's search features, says a site that opts out will not appear in those answers, treats it separately from GPTBot, and says a robots.txt change can take about 24 hours to apply. Beyond that nobody can sell you a recommendation: RightAIChoice, an AI directory, says on its own submit page that it "cannot promise rankings or AI citations". What remains is unglamorous and slow: an honest comparison with each close alternative, a plain pricing page, the same description everywhere. The property-management founder's search impressions rose from about 2,000 to about 8,000 a day and produced no sign-ups in 14 days.

7. Paid directory listings

Entry prices on October 10: TAAFT $49 or $437, topai.tools $47 or $229, Dang.ai $49, Toolify $99, and Futurepedia $497 with a guarantee of 1,000 clicks and a pro-rata refund if they are not delivered within a year. Two founders above paid TAAFT $347 and $437 for newsletter-featured listings, in posts 16 days apart in 2025: read today's price from the page.

In the r/SaaS thread on whether a TAAFT launch is worth it, two commenters gave the same order: free directories first, measure visits to sign-up to activation, pay only if the free placement converts. See also are AI directories worth it.

8. Newsletter sponsorships

Ask for clicks. The Ben's Bites ads page prints them: a $2,500 main ad gets about 250 clicks, about $10 each, and a $1,800 tool placement about 300 clicks, about $6 each, on 140,000+ subscribers. Ben's Bites' second sponsor page lists higher prices and no clicks. Big Brain lists a $500 main ad, a 1.1% ad click rate and a target cost per click under $2. Directory newsletters are smaller: Uneed sells a slot for $399 to 26,000+ subscribers and Fazier one for $39 to 2,500+, about $15 per thousand subscribers either way, on the sellers' own counts. A seller who will not say what its last three placements sent has answered the question.

9. Bulk "100+ directories" services

Uneed sells auto-submission to 100+ directories for $249 and TinyLaunch a 110-directory service for $279; TinyLaunch says its named sites are examples and no specific site is guaranteed. Google's link-spam policy lists "low-quality directory or bookmark site links" among its examples.

developers.google.comOct 11, 2026

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In the $99-directory thread, one commenter submitted to 15 directories by hand in about four hours and saw traffic up about 20%; another found a virtual assistant beat the services, which do the easy sites and skip the rest. The list is the directory table; see also directory submission services.

The 30-day order

The sequence follows lead times: slow queues first, spikes in the middle, money last. The launch checklist has the day-by-day version.

1. Days 1 to 3. Write the submission kit once (name, tagline, descriptions, logo, screenshots, pricing, three alternatives). Allow OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt.
2. Days 1 to 7. Enter every free queue in ranks 1 and 2, longest waits first.
3. Days 8 to 14. Publish comparison pages for your three closest alternatives. Answer questions in two communities without linking your product. If you have an API, start the marketplace submission.
4. Days 15 to 21. Launch on one platform, then Show HN on a different day, and be in both threads.
5. Days 22 to 30. Count visits, sign-ups and activated users per channel. Spend only where a free listing already produced activated users.

Mistakes that cost money

• Paying before a free listing has shown that visitors understand the product.
• Buying a followed link. Google lists buying or selling links for ranking as link spam unless they carry rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored". Check the rel on a live listing yourself; our guide to directory backlinks shows how.
• Counting sign-ups, not activations. With 97% fraud in one report, sign-ups mislead. Count first successful use.
• Stacking Product Hunt and Show HN on one day. Hacker News expects you to be around to discuss the project, and Product Hunt's guide has the maker open the thread asking for feedback; one person cannot be in two.
• Submitting what will be refused. FutureTools no longer accepts waitlist-only products or custom GPTs; BetaList refuses free hosting subdomains and app-store links; SaaSHub rejects unreleased products, waiting-list pages and free subdomains.

Questions people ask

Is it worth paying to list an AI tool in a directory?

Not first. The reports above run from 15 visitors for $99 to about 9 real sign-ups for $437. Use the free lanes, measure visits to sign-up to first use, and pay only for a venue whose free listing already converts.

How many clicks does a directory listing bring?

The reports give 75 clicks in a week, 312 in a day and 15 visitors in two weeks. No directory we checked publishes a distribution of results, so ask for the clicks sent by its last three placements.

Do directory links help SEO?

The Gistr maker credits TAAFT's pages ranking in Google for their tool's queries; one commenter in that thread could not find a TAAFT backlink in Search Console or Bing. For what Google allows, see do AI directory backlinks help SEO.

Can I get my AI tool recommended by ChatGPT?

Nobody can promise it. What is documented is that OAI-SearchBot must be allowed in robots.txt for a site to appear in ChatGPT's search features.

Where do I start with no budget?

Ranks 1 to 3. EffectHub is an AI directory too: listing is free if you place our badge on your site, or $24 once without it. We check the badge daily: a free listing without it comes down and returns when the badge does. The free queue runs a few weeks, and you see your place in line when you apply; the $24 route is reviewed within 48 hours of payment, and we email you how to pay — the site has no card form. Both get the same checks, a rejection always comes with its reason, and our outbound links are marked nofollow sponsored.

Sources

• Product Hunt: launch guide
• Product Hunt: ad campaigns help
• Hacker News: Show HN guidelines
• Reddit Rules
• Indie Hackers Plus
• Google: spam policies
• OpenAI: crawler overview
• OpenAI: plugin submission
• MCP Registry quickstart
• Claude: connector submission
• Zapier: publishing requirements
• TAAFT: launch page
• Futurepedia: Enhanced Listing
• Toolify: submit
• topai.tools: submit
• Dang.ai: pricing
• FutureTools: FAQ
• AlternativeTo: FAQ
• SaaSHub: submit
• BetaList: FAQ
• Uneed: pricing
• Fazier: advertise
• TinyLaunch: pricing
• OpenHunts: pricing
• RightAIChoice: submit
• Ben's Bites: sponsor rates
• Big Brain: sponsorships
• r/SaaS: Gistr on TAAFT, April 2026
• r/SideProject: Vidsembly on TAAFT, July 2025
• r/SaaS: Tufa on TAAFT, August 2025
• r/SaaS: $99 startup directory, July 2024
• r/SaaS: paying to be featured, August 2026
• r/SaaS: is a TAAFT launch worth it, June 2026
• Indie Hackers: signups dropped to zero, August 2026
• Indie Hackers: FounderPhone on Show HN, February 2020