Do directories actually work?

Mostly they don't, and the good news is you can tell which ones will before you spend the time.

Two things quietly kill a listing and both are invisible unless you look. Either the anchor to your site carries rel="nofollow", so you are listed but it passes no ranking signal at all, or the listing page itself is noindex, so Google never indexes it and the link cannot be discovered from search in the first place.

The check is about thirty seconds per directory. Open a live listing logged out in a private window, because logged in you often get an owner view that differs from what a crawler sees. View source, search for "robots", and if that page is noindex, stop there. Then search the source for a listed domain and read the rel attribute on that anchor.

One detail worth getting right: do this on a listing that is already APPROVED, not on your own pending one. A pending page often has no outbound link yet, which reads as nofollow when it is really just unpublished. That single distinction is what tells you whether a platform's sixty-day queue is a backlink lane or just a brand page.

On your actual question, the ordering that works better than volume is to find the handful in your category that pass both checks, then go deep on those: full description, categories, screenshots, and a real tagline. On several platforms the tagline field becomes the page title, so it is the string that actually competes in search results, and writing a benefit there instead of your brand name is usually the highest-leverage edit available on a listing you already own.

For the automation part, contentmation.com/score scores your directory presence next to SEO, social, content, technical and email in about thirty seconds, free and with no login, which is a cheap way to see the gap before paying anyone for bulk submissions.

I submitted every app I built on dozens of directories, and the only ones that got us any traffic are pretty much just ProductHunt, BetaList, and PitchWall - and in that order when it comes to the number of visits.

The only benefit of submitting to other directories are backlinks.

Automation on directories isn't ROI +ve activity and hence wouldn't make much sense. Moreover directories often do not expose APIs to automate things, at least the top DR directories from which you can benefit at least in terms of backlinks, if not visibility. I've curated the directories one time while submitting my own product, you can take a look, sort by DA, for all 80+ DA, do submit manually, because you can't automate that. And consider your output as backlinks, traffic/ visibility as bonus. You can get the list here - 100+ directories

I think instead of tackling every directory, focus on major ones with relevant audiences. Quality over quantity! Automation tools can help, but choose wisely. Don't forget to explore other marketing strategies too!

backlinks will help you with your SEO ranking.

some directories do bring in some nice traffic.

we curated a list of free directories for AI products.

check it out here https://webdirectorycenter.com/