Changelog

Demand for listing reviews has increased. Free listing reviews now take up to 35 days.

The new review window starts when a new free claim is verified. Existing claims keep their scheduled review dates. The listing stays public while founder edits and do-follow activation await approval.

Fast Lane and Plus still provide immediate approval after successful payment. Your listing's countdown and reminder emails use its saved review date.

Directree Plus members can connect an agent to read and update their verified listings. Create a key for one listing, choose read-only or update access, set an expiry and revoke it from your account. The beta covers listing content, pricing, integrations and founder-supplied features, with previews, revision checks, safe retries and recorded changes.

Included for existing and new Plus members. Manual editing stays free. Explore the API, read the setup guide or create a connection.

Every listing can now show its five newest updates, dated and sourced, inside the listing page itself. The entries come from GitHub Releases (stable releases only), an RSS or Atom feed the owner connects, and short founder posts on Plus (one a day, 200 characters). Owners can hide feed and release rows and edit or delete their own posts. Sources are connected from the Updates panel on the edit page, and the same entries are exposed in each tool's facts.json as recent_updates.

Every email we send now ends with a link to add directree to your Google Preferred Sources, with a boxed button in the claim-verified, go-live and Plus welcome emails. The footer button has been there since late August. Preferred Sources is Google's setting for sites whose pages you want to see more of in Top Stories and AI answers. The link runs through /go/preferred-sources so we can count clicks without adding tracking parameters that Google's deeplink would drop.

The badge widget told owners of listings still in review that their do-follow link was live, while the link stays no-follow until the listing is approved. The widget now shows a pending state with the go-live countdown. A daily check re-verifies approved listings whose badge was still pending, switches the link on when the badge is found (or when Plus skips the badge), and emails the owner. Approvals made by hand from our admin now render JavaScript-only sites too and send the same go-live email.

The GEO Monitor page now has a tour section with a two minute video showing the dashboard, alerts and the free check. The video has captions and is also on our YouTube channel. The in-page navigation on /geo scrolls to each section, and the main landing page links to the tour next to the plans.

Agency is a new GEO Monitor plan for people who track several brands: 10 products, 30 questions each, five engines and white-label reports, for $299 a month. Any paid plan can now add 25 questions or one more product for $19 a month each, bought from the plan panel in the dashboard. Free check results get a print view, and the monthly report has a Save as PDF button.

Sites built with Lovable, Bolt, TanStack Start or plain Vite send an empty HTML shell and draw the footer, badge included, in the browser. Our badge check only read the raw HTML, so owners who installed the badge correctly still failed verification. The check now runs a second pass in a headless browser when the first pass finds a client-side shell. The badge widget tells you when the badge was only found after JavaScript ran, since that is a weaker signal for search engines, and recommends placing it in server-rendered HTML where possible.

Managed is a new plan where we run GEO Monitor for you and send a monthly summary, at $149 a month or $1,490 a year. The same release fixed features that were sold but not working: alerts respect opt-outs, deliver to Slack and no longer fire on errored scans; Accuracy Watch was rebuilt so it judges full answers against the facts we hold for listed tools; and the dashboard reads history over the whole window with per-scan answers. The free check now uses grounded search answers with citations, and it has a local business mode where you enter a business type and city. Onboarding no longer wipes your history when you change questions.

We used several names for facts that a verified owner had corrected or confirmed. The label is now Founder-edited on the listing hero, the trust strip, landing page chips and the editor save message. On Compare, a listing that is claimed but never edited reads "Verified listing" so the two tiers stay distinct. The founder listing editor also got proper labels on every control, required fields that say so before you submit, and a sticky save bar.

Founders can now buy a labelled sponsor placement: a category sponsorship at $99 a month (one sponsor per category) or one of three sitewide slots at $299 a month. Sponsors edit their own creative from /account/advertising, manage billing through Stripe, and see renewal status there. Ads are marked as sponsored and never affect rankings, scores or what we write about a tool.

Free listings now go through a 14 day review queue before they go live and the do-follow link switches on. Fast Lane skips the queue for one listing for $19. Plus is a one-time $49 purchase that approves the purchased listing instantly, includes three Fast Lane skips for other listings, and comes with one free month of GEO Monitor Starter. Verified claims on existing listings enter the same queue as fresh submissions, and owner edits made during review are staged and merged at approval.

Updated 21 September 2026: New verified free claims now have a review window of up to 35 days. Existing claims retain their scheduled dates. See the current review policy.

AI agents can now query the directory directly. The MCP server at /api/mcp exposes four tools: search_tools, get_tool, compare_tools and list_categories. The same operations are available as plain REST endpoints under /api/agent. Every fact returned carries its provenance label (observed, AI-inferred or Founder-edited), the same as on the site.

Plus is no longer an annual subscription. You pay once and keep it: $39 during the early bird period, $79 after. Four new Plus perks shipped the same day. Versioned listing snapshots with a meaningful diff, a Verified Product Profile you can share as a PDF built only from verified facts, listing health checks that email you only when something on your site contradicts your listing, and a quarterly relaunch kit tied to a real Just Launched event.

Verified owners can book one of the next eight weeks and have their tool shown in the homepage showcase slot for that week, for $29. Paid placements are labelled Featured and carry a gold frame, so nobody mistakes them for editorial picks. Booking lives on your account page with a week picker, and taken weeks are disabled. On Jul 24 we added a permanent Weekly Spotlight article to the package.

Every tool now has a JSON facts document at /tool//facts.json, split by provenance: observed facts crawled from the tool's own site, AI-inferred fields with the model and date, founder-edited overrides, and community upvotes. /llms.txt describes the directory and its categories for answer engines and points them at those endpoints. We also launched a free GEO check that asks AI engines a three question battery about your domain and shows whether you are recommended. It now lives on /geo.

We opened surveys where logged-in users vote for one tool out of a shortlist. One vote per user, enforced in the database, changeable until the survey closes, then tallied and archived. directree never picks the winner and never seeds votes. Surveys started daily and moved to twice a week on Jul 26 so each one has time to collect real votes.