For MakersDirectory SubmissionsUpdated September 2026

Why AI Tool Directory Submissions Get Rejected in 2026

Most "submission guidelines" pages are written by directories that will not tell you what actually happens to your row. This one is written from the other side of the form. Between June 21 and September 19, 2026 this directory took 824 submissions: 720 published, 92 rejected, 12 still held for a human. Here is what separates them.

✓ 824 real submissions, not an estimate✓ The 9 checks a free listing has to clear✓ 93% reviewed inside 24 hours

For makersReading this because you are about to submit? The form is here — free listing, reviewed in under a day.

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Quick Answer

87.4% of submissions publish and 11.2% are rejected. Almost every rejection is one of four things:

The URL is not a product site — a YouTube, TikTok or link-in-bio URL in the website field.
The URL does not answer — DNS failure, a bot challenge, or a redirect chain ending in a 404.
The page is not in English and declares no English alternate.
The listing is a model name, not a product — a domain built out of someone else's frontier model.

None of those are quality judgements about your product. Three of the four are fixable in ten minutes.

What the numbers actually look like

87.4%

published (720 of 824)

11.2%

rejected (92 of 824)

93%

reviewed inside 24 hours

The approval rate is high on purpose. A submission that clears the checks publishes unattended, which is why the median time from submitting to being live is measured in minutes rather than days. A submission that fails one of them is not rejected by a machine — it is held, and a person reads it. Held rows stay held indefinitely; there is no expiry that quietly deletes your tool after thirty days.

That asymmetry is deliberate. A wrong rejection costs a real maker a listing they will never know they lost. A wrong hold costs one glance at an email that was being sent anyway. If you have submitted something and heard nothing, it is far more likely to be sitting in a held queue than to have been thrown away.

The 9 checks a free listing has to clear

The link has to be a product site

What fails it: A YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, X, Telegram, Discord, Linktree or bit.ly URL in the website field.
Why the rule exists: A directory lists products people can open, sign up for and pay. A video about a product is not the product. This is the single most common failure we see, and it is almost never bad faith — it is someone who wanted the tool, not a listing for it.
How to pass: Submit the domain your product lives on. If you only have a landing page, that counts; a link-in-bio does not.

The URL has to resolve

What fails it: DNS fails, the request times out, or the certificate is broken.
Why the rule exists: Every listing page links out. A dead link on a listing costs the directory more than the listing is worth, so a URL that does not answer inside a few seconds is held until it does.
How to pass: Open your URL in a private window from a network you do not control before you submit. Staging domains behind a VPN fail this constantly.

The URL has to return 200

What fails it: A 301 chain that ends in a 404, a 403 from a firewall, a 503 behind a waiting-room.
Why the rule exists: A bot-blocking WAF is the quiet killer here. If Cloudflare returns a challenge page to everything that is not a logged-in browser, an automated check sees a failure and so, eventually, does Googlebot.
How to pass: Allow well-behaved crawlers. Test with curl and a bot user agent — if you get a challenge page, the directory gets one too.

The page has to be in English

What fails it: An English-language directory reading a page whose visible text is not English.
Why the rule exists: We check the visible text, not the domain. A page can score badly here for an unfair reason: a JavaScript bundle that has not hydrated leaves almost no readable text at all, and a heavily minified page reads as thousands of words with no sentences in them.
How to pass: If you have an English version, declare it. A page that carries a correct hreflang alternate to an English URL is followed to that URL and judged there — so an international product with an /en route is listable without translating the whole site.

The domain cannot be a throwaway TLD

What fails it: A handful of TLDs that, in this catalogue, have carried nothing but disposable brand-piggyback pages.
Why the rule exists: This is the least fair rule on the list and we know it. It is not a judgement about your product; it is a prior about who registers those domains. It holds for a human rather than rejecting, precisely because it will sometimes be wrong.
How to pass: If you are on one of them and the product is real, submit anyway and say so — a held row is a person reading, not a closed door.

You cannot be trading on someone else's model name

What fails it: Domains and product names built from a frontier model or vendor name — the Sora, Veo, Kling, Qwen, Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT clone pages.
Why the rule exists: Two different things wear this shape: a wrapper pretending to be the vendor, and a legitimate product whose whole job is that model. The first is worthless to a reader and dangerous to the directory; the second is real. No automated rule separates them, so both get held.
How to pass: Name the product after the product. If the model genuinely is the category, put it in the description, not the domain.

One person, five tools, one minute

What fails it: A burst of submissions from the same address in a single sitting.
Why the rule exists: The cheapest signal of the lot. Nobody ships five products in a minute. The burst pattern is what we actually observed in the junk we have caught, not a theory about spam.
How to pass: Submit your tools one at a time, and use an address on the product's domain.

The name cannot be a URL

What fails it: A pasted link, an email address, or a prompt in the name field.
Why the rule exists: It signals the form was filled in by someone who was not submitting a tool at all. We have received a video-editing prompt and a bare Gmail address in that field.
How to pass: Put the product's name in the name field. Three words, no URL.

No reserved or example domains

What fails it: example.com, example.org, and the .test / .invalid / .localhost TLDs, in the URL or the email.
Why the rule exists: These can never be a product. We learned this the direct way: a test row with the URL example.com published itself as a live, indexable listing page, because example.com answers 200 with an English page and that was the whole bar.
How to pass: Nothing to do — unless you are testing, in which case tell us.

The four shapes that actually fail

The pasted video

What we see: A youtu.be or vm.tiktok.com link in the website field, sometimes with the video's own title as the tool name.

What to do: These arrive from readers of clipping and captioning articles who found a form and pasted the thing they wanted edited. They are not makers and the submission cannot be saved — but if you are a maker and your site embeds a demo video, submit the site, not the embed.

The brand piggyback

What we see: A domain assembled from a model name and a version number, headed with that model's name, describing a thin wrapper.

What to do: If your product is a genuinely useful wrapper, lead with what it does for a user that the raw model does not. A listing that only says the model's name has nothing to review.

The wrong-language page

What we see: A product site whose visible text is not English and which declares no English alternate.

What to do: Add an English route and a correct hreflang alternate pointing at it. This is the most recoverable failure on the list — the check follows the alternate and judges the English page instead.

The unreachable site

What we see: A URL behind a bot challenge, a staging password, or a certificate that expired between building the product and submitting it.

What to do: Check it from outside your own network. If a crawler cannot fetch your homepage, no directory listing is going to fix your discoverability problem anyway.

A pre-submission checklist that works anywhere

None of this is specific to one directory. Every list with a review step is running some version of the same nine checks, usually less transparently.

✓Open your product URL in a private window, on a network you do not control, and confirm it returns the real page — not a challenge, not a password prompt.
✓Fetch it with a crawler user agent. If your WAF blocks bots outright, fix that first — it is costing you far more than a listing.
✓Make sure the homepage has real readable text above the fold without JavaScript. A page that renders nothing to a fetch renders nothing to an AI assistant either.
✓Not an English site? Ship an /en route and a correct hreflang alternate. That single tag is the difference between a hold and a publish.
✓Put the product name in the name field and the product domain in the URL field. Not a video, not a Notion page, not your Twitter.
✓Use an email on the product's own domain. It is the fastest way to be read as a maker rather than a burst.
✓Submit one tool at a time, and give the description two sentences that say what it does for whom — not what model it wraps.

You have read the checks. Submit against them.

A free listing publishes as soon as it clears the nine checks above — usually in minutes, and 93% of submissions are resolved inside a day. The listing is what ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google read when someone asks which tool to use in your category.

List my tool — free →or scan how often AI names it first

More guides for makers

Everything else on this site is written for people looking for a tool. These five are written for people who built one.

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