Know what every backlink really costs before you fill the form

The catch is at step 3 of the form

When I launched Pantheon, my ad research SaaS, I did what every launch guide says: grab a list of directories and submit to all of them. The lists promised hundreds of sites, almost all "free" and "dofollow".

So I opened the forms one by one, and the pattern repeated. The homepage says free. You write your tagline, your 160-character description, your long description, you pick categories, you upload the logo. Then step 3 asks you to put their badge in your footer, or to pay $19, or to wait seven months.

Directory lists are compiled from homepages. The truth sits in two places nobody on those lists looked at: the last step of the form, and the listings already published, where you can see whether the link is dofollow, nofollow, sponsored, or missing.

Then I read the published listings of 285 directories. 124 of them gave no dofollow link to the products they list.

If you work through a list like that, two forms out of three end in a badge, a bill you didn't expect, or a link that doesn't count. And you find out after you've written the description.

A badge request isn't free. A badge is a link from your site to theirs, in your footer, on every page.

Every rejection explained, every live link checked again

BacklinkVet started as the agent I built to do that checking for my own products. It reads a site the way you would if you had the time: the traffic it really gets, the spam signals, the listings it already published and, when we submit, the form down to its last step.

Every site that fails gets a written reason, and the reason stays in the catalog. When we find that a directory asks for a badge, it drops for everyone. When it publishes a real dofollow link, it moves up.

What's left is a catalog of 1,660 sites out of the 2,456 we analyzed: 1,285 directories, plus launch platforms, review sites, marketplaces and communities. 1,129 are marked recommended. 531 are usable with a note you should read first, about the cost, the link or the access. We re-check the catalog and publish an update every week.

Not every site has been through the form by hand yet. 95 have their cost confirmed at the last step and 174 have their link read on published listings; traffic is measured for almost all of them. For the rest, the kit tells you exactly what to check before you write a word, and every check we make goes back into the catalog.

Your Claude does the part that has to be about you: it chooses the sites that fit your product and writes each listing.

From install to your first submission in one sitting

1. Install it in about 5 minutes

   Accept the GitHub invite, clone the repository, run the installer. It adds four commands to Claude Code.

   Next: Claude learns your product.

2. /backlink-profile reads your site

   It writes your product profile: niche, languages, the facts you can claim and the claims to avoid. You check it once.

   Next: today's sites.

3. /backlink-today picks the sites and writes the listings

   Each site comes with the reason it fits you. Each draft follows that form's real fields and character limits, and is checked against your other listings so no two read alike.

   Next: the form, in your browser.

4. Claude fills the form in your Chrome and stops

   You read the listing, change what you like and click Submit. Captchas, email confirmations and logins stay with you.

   Next: keep track.

5. /backlink-status and /backlink-check keep score

   Where each submission stands, and whether each live listing still carries a dofollow link on a page Google can index. Run the check once a week; the self-hosted version runs it on its own.

> /backlink-today
Profile: pantheon.ad · English · ad research SaaS
Catalog 2026-10-30 · 1,660 sites · 154 done

Today's sites
 1  fstlaunch.com · launch platform
    free (verified) · dofollow on listings
    why: startup launches, can go live same day
 2  queststack.io · directory
    free (verified) · dofollow on listings
    why: free directory of software tools
 3  saashub.com · review platform
    free (verified) · traffic 100k+
    why: review site with a free listing

Skipped
 -  semilaunch.com  free needs a badge or X post
 -  toolfinder.co   paid only ($19)

Draft for fstlaunch.com
 tagline       58/60 chars
 description  157/160 chars
 similarity: 0.07 (limit 0.60)
 claims: ok, no prices or user counts

Filling the form in Chrome...
Stopped before "Submit".
Review it in the open tab.

An example session, written from the kit's real steps and checks, with our own product as the profile.

The slow part of directory submissions was never the Submit button

By hand, most of the time goes before and around the form: finding sites worth the effort, discovering at step 3 that one wants a badge, rewriting your description to fit 160 characters for the twentieth time, typing the same fields again. AI Directories, a submission service, puts that work at 20 to 70 hours for 30 to 100 directories.

BacklinkVet takes those parts off your hands. What's left to you is reading each listing and clicking Submit, which is how we sent 14 submissions for Reveal Ad Spend in a single day, and how Pantheon went from Domain Rating 0 to 6 in three days.

A new domain needs its first links to get crawled and taken seriously. The sooner they're live, the sooner they start counting.

What BacklinkVet won't do

Some of these are limits, some are rules we chose. All of them are better to know now than after you pay.

"Using automated programs or services to create links to your site" and "excessive link exchanges" are listed as link spam.Google Search Central, spam policies