Launch guides
AI Tool Directories, Compared: Which Ones Are Free, and Which Ones Link Dofollow
Of the 16 AI tool directories we checked on 6 September 2026, eleven give a dofollow link from a live listing page and five do not. AItoolMall, AI Tool List, Altern, AI Tools Up and AINave are free and dofollow. FutureTools, Futurepedia, AIxploria, AI Tools Board and aitools.inc either mark links nofollow or route them through a tracker.
Last updated September 2026
The comparison table
Two patterns decide whether an AI directory is worth your time. The first is the tracker redirect: FutureTools sends every outbound click through a /go/ path that its own robots.txt disallows, and aitools.inc uses a 301 tracker, so a free listing on either passes nothing even though the page is public. The second is the paid nofollow: Futurepedia has no free tier at all and its verified listing still links out with rel="nofollow". A price tag is not a link policy, so we read the attribute on a real listing rather than trusting the pricing page.
One directory conditions its free listing on a link back to itself through a badge. That is a reciprocal link requirement, which Google's link spam policy names explicitly, so the row says so and we would skip it. Everywhere else the choice is simple: submit to the free dofollow rows first, add the paid dofollow rows only if their audience matches your tool, and do not pay for a nofollow listing on the strength of a directory's own marketing.
Toolfound publishes this list and is included in it. We do not accept AI tools only, but every verified listing here gets a permanent page with a dofollow link, and the table states our trade-offs as plainly as the others. Unverified cells show a dash.
| Platform | Free listing | Dofollow link | Verified on |
|---|---|---|---|
| AI Tool List | Yes | Yes | |
| AI Tools Up | Yes | Yes | |
| AINave | Yes | Yes | |
| AItoolMall | Yes | Yes | |
| Altern | Yes | Yes | |
| Toolfound(ours) | Yes | Yes | |
| ToolPilot | Yes | Yes |
| # | Platform | Best for | Launch model | Dofollow link | Cost | Notes | Verified |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | ToolfoundOur platform | Agent-native launches and a permanent, dofollow directory listing | Daily ranking | Yes | Free (first 100 launches), then paid skip-the-line | Our platform — mandatory ownership verification, public queue and launch dates | — |
| 2 | Futurepedia | Paid exposure to a large audience, if you accept a nofollowed link | Tool database | No | Paid | Verified listing is 497 USD one time and the link is still nofollow; no free tier | 2026-09-06 |
| 3 | Altern | A curated, human-reviewed listing rather than a bulk index | Tool database | Yes | Free + paid options | Free submission, sign-in with GitHub or Google, human review before publication | 2026-09-06 |
| 4 | AI Tools Up | Makers who will trade a queue wait for a free followed link | Tool database | Yes | Free + paid skip-the-line | Free tier states listing within 30 days; 19 USD fast track, 249 USD promoted | 2026-09-06 |
| 5 | AINave | A permanent product page with an optional low-cost verification | Evergreen listing | Yes | Free + paid options | Free plan lists a do-follow link; a 5 USD one-time verified badge sits above it | 2026-09-06 |
| 6 | AItoolMall | A fast free listing where brand adjacency is not a concern | Tool database | Yes | Free | Free and permissive, but adult categories sit alongside general ones sitewide | 2026-09-06 |
| 7 | AI Tool List | Developers happy to open a pull request instead of filling a form | Evergreen listing | Yes | Free | Submission is a pull request against the awesome-ai-tool-list repository | 2026-09-06 |
| 8 | aiwizard | A curated AI index if you are willing to create an account first | Tool database | Yes | — | Submission is behind a login and no price is shown before signing in | 2026-09-06 |
| 9 | ToolPilot | Nothing we would recommend without reading the link-scheme warning first | Tool database | Yes | Free + paid options | Link-scheme risk: the free listing requires a mandatory badge or link back to them | 2026-09-06 |
| 10 | FutureTools | Audience and newsletter exposure, explicitly not link equity | Tool database | No | Free | Outbound links run through /go/, which their own robots.txt disallows | 2026-09-06 |
| 11 | AI Tools (aitools.inc) | A free listing in a large category index, with a long free queue | Tool database | No | Free + paid skip-the-line | Free queue quoted at 30 to 90 days; visit button is a 301 tracker, not a direct link | 2026-09-06 |
| 12 | AI Tools Board | A free, quick listing when you want coverage rather than links | Evergreen listing | No | Free + paid skip-the-line | Free review in 5 to 7 business days, 99 USD fast track; every outbound link is nofollow | 2026-09-06 |
| 13 | AIxploria | Multilingual discovery reach, with no link value attached | Tool database | No | — | Every listing link is nofollow; submission terms are not published on the public page | 2026-09-06 |
| 14 | AI Parabellum | A fast paid listing with a followed link and a refund if declined | Evergreen listing | Yes | Paid | 39 USD basic or 89 USD featured, 24 hour review, full refund if not approved | 2026-09-06 |
| 15 | AITopTools | A paid permanent listing when you want it live the same day | Tool database | Yes | Paid | 59 USD one time or 9.99 USD per month; no free tier at any step of the flow | 2026-09-06 |
| 16 | FindMyAITool | Paid category placement if you have budget and want a followed link | Tool database | Yes | Paid | Cheapest plan is 79.99 USD and payment comes before submission; no free tier | 2026-09-06 |
| 17 | ToolsForHumans | An editorial review page rather than a directory row, on their terms | Review site | Yes | Paid | No self-serve submission form exists; coverage is editorial or a paid partnership | 2026-09-06 |
Every platform, one by one
Each entry links to the platform’s own submit or FAQ page — the primary source. The full cross-segment comparison, sequencing advice and launch-day playbook live in the complete launch guide; how we source these facts is on the methodology page.
1. Toolfound
Toolfound is our platform, so read this entry knowing that. What it does differently: the entire launch lifecycle — submit, verify, track, claim — works over MCP as well as the web, so your agent can run the launch; ownership verification is mandatory for every listing; and the queue is public, so you see your exact launch date and position before you commit. Every verified listing keeps a permanent page with a dofollow link, never conditioned on a badge or a link back, which is written policy, not a promise; the page itself is indexed by search engines once its description passes 100 original words (the form and the dashboard show the counter). The honest trade-off: the audience is newer and smaller than the incumbents above and below it in this table. The first hundred launches are free, and the counter is public. If you want the biggest possible day-one spike, launch elsewhere first and here for the durable page.
2. Futurepedia
The best-known name in this category and, as of today, the least attractive deal in it. The submit page lists two options: a basic listing at two hundred and forty-seven dollars marked sold out, and a verified listing at four hundred and ninety-seven dollars one time. There is no free path. The verified listing we checked, on a page carrying the verified badge and a not-active sponsorship flag, links to the tool with rel="nofollow" written directly into the markup, which we read in both the rendered anchor and the server payload behind it. So the fee buys audience, not link equity, and the site self-reports over four hundred thousand monthly professionals to justify that. If you want the audience and can afford it, go in knowing the SEO column is a zero. If you came for a backlink, this is the wrong door.
3. Altern
Altern positions itself as a curated shortlist rather than an index of everything, and the submit page says so plainly: free to submit, no credit card, and every listing read by a person before it goes live. That gate cuts both ways. Rejection is a real outcome, and there is no published turnaround time, so plan for the listing to be a background task rather than part of a launch week. What you get if you pass is a permanent page with your logo, description and screenshots, plus inclusion in the alternatives and task pages that catch a lot of the long-tail search demand in this category. On the tool page we checked the outbound link was a direct anchor with no nofollow, ugc or sponsored value. Paid featured and leaderboard placements exist alongside the free tier, and they are kept visually separate from ordinary listings.
4. AI Tools Up
One of the few AI directories that writes its link policy into the free tier itself: the pricing table lists a do-follow backlink under the zero-cost option, and the listing page we checked matched, with a direct anchor carrying only noopener and noreferrer. The trade is patience. The free queue is quoted at up to thirty days, against twenty-four hours on the paid fast track. Two things to read carefully before you decide. The site self-reports around twenty thousand page views a month and eight thousand newsletter subscribers, and those numbers are not independently verified. The FAQ further down the same page contradicts the pricing table by saying a listing costs twenty dollars, so confirm the current terms in writing before you pay for anything. For a free submission the effort is a form and a wait, which is a fair price.
5. AINave
A small, tidy product directory whose pricing page is unusually direct about what the free tier includes: a public listing, a verified badge, and a do-follow backlink for zero, with a five dollar one-time upgrade that adds prominence and eligibility for a launch programme they describe as upcoming. The product page we checked carried a direct anchor with only noopener and noreferrer, and the same page used nofollow plus ugc on a third-party review link, which suggests the link attributes are set deliberately rather than by accident. Caveats worth weighing: the index is small, so expect little referral traffic on its own, and the five dollar tier makes the free and paid rows look similar enough that it is worth confirming which benefits actually differ. Treat it as a fifteen minute listing, not a launch channel.
6. AItoolMall
The submit page is a short form and a promise to reply within twenty-four hours, with an acceptance rule that amounts to anything legal gets published. That makes it one of the quickest free listings on this list, and the tool page we checked linked out with a plain anchor and no rel attribute at all, so the link is followed. The reason to think before submitting is the neighbourhood. The site runs a large adult and NSFW section across its footer and category navigation, on the same domain and templates as the general listings, and a monetised placement we sampled was nofollowed while an ordinary one was not. If your product is enterprise-facing or you care where your brand appears in a screenshot, weigh that. If you are optimising a checklist of free followed listings, it qualifies.
7. AI Tool List
An awesome-list rendered as a website. There is no submission form: you fork the awesome-ai-tool-list repository, add your entry to the right category in the README, and open a pull request. That is the whole process, and it is free. The upside of the model is transparency, since acceptance, rejection and the reason for either all happen in public on a diff you can read. The downside is that a maintainer has to merge, and no service level is promised anywhere. The rendered listings we checked linked straight to the tool with only noopener and noreferrer on the anchor, so the link is followed. The site is small and the design is minimal, so treat referral traffic as close to zero and value this as a clean, low-friction, permanently followed listing that costs you one pull request.
8. aiwizard
A mid-sized AI index that describes itself as curated rather than scraped. The listing pages are the good part: the tool page we checked linked out with a direct anchor carrying only noreferrer and noopener, so the outbound link is followed, and the site publishes an editorial standards page and an affiliate disclosure, which is more disclosure than most of this category offers. The friction is the submit route. Opening the submit URL redirects to a login screen, and no pricing page exists anywhere on the public site, so we could not confirm whether a listing is free, paid, or free with paid upgrades, and we are not going to guess. Create the account and read the terms before you invest time. Note also that the category list mixes adult categories in with the general ones, which may matter for brand adjacency.
9. ToolPilot
Read the warning before the pitch. The submit page states that a link back to their site is now mandatory for all free listings, and that adding one of their badges is what qualifies you. A link required as a condition of getting a link is the textbook definition of a link scheme in Google's own spam policies, and the risk lands on your site as well as theirs. The technical facts, for completeness: the product page we checked linked out with no rel attribute at all, so the link is followed, and the destination carried an affiliate parameter without a sponsored value, which is a second guidelines problem on their side. Paid placements exist alongside the free tier. Our position is that a free listing is not worth putting a reciprocal badge in your footer for, and we would skip this one.
10. FutureTools
A well-known, genuinely free directory with a short form, a human reviewer, and a large associated YouTube and newsletter audience. It is worth submitting to. Just do not submit to it for SEO. Every tool page routes its visit button through an internal /go/ redirect rather than linking to your domain, and the site's own robots.txt contains a Disallow line for that exact path, so crawlers are told not to follow the hop at all. The anchor itself also carries noopener and noreferrer. That combination means the listing passes no link equity to you by any reading. What it can pass is attention, because the surrounding audience is real and the newsletter reaches people who install things. Submit here for reach and treat the SEO column as a zero, which is the honest way to value it.
11. AI Tools (aitools.inc)
The free tier is stated openly on the submit page: zero cost, a queue of thirty to ninety days, and no guaranteed placement, against a one hundred and twenty-nine dollar fast lane with a refund if the tool is declined. The index itself is large and sliced by category, job and task, which is the taxonomy that earns this category its search traffic. The link is the weak point. The visit button on a tool page points at an internal path ending in /go/website, which returns a 301 to your site with tracking parameters attached, and the anchor carries noopener. The redirect is not blocked in robots.txt, so this is softer than an outright nofollow, but it is still a tracker hop rather than a direct link and we score it accordingly. Free, slow, useful for discovery, weak for links.
12. AI Tools Board
A small board with an honest submit page: free to submit, five to seven business days to review, ninety-nine dollars if you want that compressed to twenty-four hours, and separate monthly slots at forty and fifty dollars for the two featured boxes at the top of the homepage and category pages. What the submit page does not say is that outbound links are nofollowed, and they are: every tool anchor we sampled, on both the homepage and a category page, carried rel="nofollow". No paid tier we could see changes that, so this is not a conditional case, it is a flat no. The board is small enough that referral traffic will be modest too. Submit it if you are working through a coverage checklist and it costs you five minutes, but do not count it as a link.
13. AIxploria
One of the larger AI indexes, and unusually multilingual, with the interface offered in roughly thirty languages. That breadth is the reason to consider it, because a listing can surface for non-English queries that the English-only directories never touch. The link answer is unambiguous and it is a no: on the main index we counted well over a hundred outbound tool anchors and every one of them carried nofollow alongside noopener. The submission side is less clear. The add-your-tool URL redirects to a featured-listing page whose actual terms and prices are not rendered in the page we could fetch, so we cannot state what a listing costs or whether a free path exists, and we will not estimate. If you submit, get the terms in writing first and value the listing as discovery only.
14. AI Parabellum
Paid only, and priced low enough that the maths can work: thirty-nine dollars for a basic listing, eighty-nine for site-wide featuring, both one-time, with a stated twenty-four hour review and a full refund if your tool is not approved. There is also a free eligibility checker that tells you whether you would pass before you pay, which is a fair piece of design. On the link question this one rewards checking the right page. The cards on the index carry nofollow, but the tool's own listing page does not: across three separate tool pages the visit-website anchor pointed straight at the product domain with only noopener and noreferrer. So the listing you are buying is followed even though the index tile is not. Verify the page for your own listing after it goes live rather than assuming it matches.
15. AITopTools
The submit flow drafts your listing for you from a URL, then puts a paywall at the publish step. Fifty-nine dollars buys immediate publication and a permanent page, or nine ninety-nine a month keeps it live on a subscription. There is no free option anywhere in the flow, which is worth saying plainly because the funnel lets you build the whole listing before it tells you. The link itself checks out: on a live tool page the outbound anchor pointed directly at the product domain with only noopener and noreferrer, so what they sell is genuinely followed. Two things to discount. Their sales copy quotes a domain rating figure for that backlink, which is a third-party metric they are asserting rather than one we verified. And they upsell a two hundred and ninety-nine dollar package of submissions to a hundred other directories, which is bulk link building by another name.
16. FindMyAITool
Paid only, and the payment comes first: the FAQ states that you choose a plan and complete payment, after which you receive a link to submit your tool's details. Plans run from seventy-nine ninety-nine for a permanent listing up to four hundred and ninety-nine ninety-nine for the top visibility tier, with the middle tiers adding homepage rotation and seven days pinned to the top of a category. Submissions are reviewed and refunded in full if they do not meet the criteria. The link is real: the tool page we checked used a direct anchor to the product domain and, unusually, spelled the attribute out as rel="dofollow", which does nothing on its own but confirms nothing is blocking the crawl. The site self-reports up to a hundred thousand monthly visitors, which we could not verify independently.
17. ToolsForHumans
Closer to a review publication than a directory, and it behaves like one. There is no submit page at all: the URLs you would expect return 404, and the only route in is a partner page that describes sponsorships shaped around each tool. So there is no free listing path here, and the honest label is paid or editorial pick. What you get if you do land a page is better than a directory row, because each entry carries a verdict, a persona fit breakdown and search demand tracking that they say they revisit as the market moves. The outbound link on a live tool page was direct with only noopener and noreferrer, so it is followed. Their own audience numbers, including a claim of six hundred thousand people and six hundred and fifty-four reviews, are self-reported.
Common questions
Which AI tool directories are free and give a dofollow link?
On 6 September 2026: AItoolMall, AI Tool List, Altern, AI Tools Up and AINave had a free listing path and a dofollow link on a live listing page. aiwizard links dofollow but its submission sits behind a login and shows no price, so its cost is unverified. ToolPilot is free and dofollow but requires a link back through its badge, which is a reciprocal link condition, so treat it with care.
Why does a free listing sometimes pass no link value?
Because the link never reaches you directly. FutureTools and aitools.inc route outbound clicks through a redirect path, and FutureTools disallows that path in robots.txt. A crawler sees a link to the directory, not to your site. We mark those rows no, even though the listing itself is free.
Is a paid AI directory listing worth it for the backlink?
Only if the paid listing is actually dofollow. Futurepedia charges a one time fee and its verified listing links out nofollow. AI Parabellum, AITopTools, FindMyAITool and ToolsForHumans charge and do link dofollow. Decide on audience fit first, then on the attribute we recorded, never on the pricing page.
Should I add a directory badge to get the dofollow link?
Optional badges are fine. A badge that is mandatory for the listing or for the link is a reciprocal link scheme under Google's spam policies, and the row notes flag the one directory in this table that does that. On Toolfound badges are optional and never change the link.
How did you verify the dofollow column?
For each directory we fetched the submit page for its status code and free path, then fetched a real listing page with a browser user agent and read the rel attribute on the anchor pointing at the listed tool. Client rendered pages where no anchor appears in the served HTML, and pages behind a bot challenge, were excluded rather than guessed.
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