The obvious counterargument to everything I'm building is this: Google already does it. You type "best AI tools for video editing" into Google and an AI Overview surfaces a curated list, synthesized from the same kind of data I maintain, without requiring a click. My three directory sites — Top AI Tools , Find Games Like , and Open Alternative To — are competing with a feature baked into the world's dominant search engine.

I launched these sites on 2026-04-23, built on an architecture that runs at about $25/month . Traffic is essentially zero — the sites have been indexed for three weeks and organic crawling takes time. The question I keep returning to isn't whether Google will eventually index my pages.…