Four things before anything else, because they determine whether the rest of this is worth reading.
It is free. There is no paid route, no premium review, no expedited queue, and no amount of money changes any outcome in either direction. It is slow, because a person does the reading. We expect it to be refused more often than not, usually for ordinary and fixable reasons. And a listing here is unlikely to change your business's numbers, which we will come back to rather than leave as a hint.
What this is, and who it is for
This is the whole submission process, in order, written for an operator deciding whether to bother. It is also useful to anyone who wants to suggest a business they do not own, which is allowed and is often how good entries are found.
Scope: this article is the complete submission framework, not a claim that a staffed queue or populated register is operating. The criteria and method define what a conforming review requires. No turnaround time is claimed because this article supplies no dated request log from which to calculate one.
Before you submit: three things worth fixing first
Most refusals are avoidable, none of these fixes costs anything, and doing them first is more useful than submitting sooner.
1. Make sure a stranger can tell what you sell within about ten seconds. This is the most common failure of small sites and, by a distance, the failure we expect to refuse most often. The problem is rarely that the site is bad. It is that the operator knows what they sell so thoroughly that they have stopped saying it, and the homepage has filled up with language about values and craft instead. Run the findability checklist and fix the first sentence on the page.
2. Make sure there is a working way to reach a human, and test it from outside. Send a message from an address you do not control and see whether it arrives. Broken contact forms are common, silent, and invisible to the person who owns them. If nobody can reach you, nothing can be confirmed at review and nothing can be corrected later, which is a refusal on its own.
3. Read yourself against the bar your submission will be measured against, published at the entry bar, particularly the two about independent ownership and about not being primarily an affiliate or lead-generation vehicle. Those are the ones people misjudge about themselves.
What the form asks, and why each field is there
The form is short, and it is short on purpose: if a field would not change a decision, it is not there. Collecting information we do not use would be its own small dishonesty.
| What we ask | Why it is there |
|---|---|
| Where to find the business | The destination we will check, and, if it publishes, the address we will link to. |
| What it is, in a sentence | Your description helps us understand it. Ours will be written here, in our words. |
| What a customer can actually do | Buy, hire, book, read or visit. The specific action available to a stranger. |
| Who owns it, broadly | So the independence criterion can be assessed rather than guessed at. |
| A way to reach you | Only so we can tell you the outcome and ask about anything ambiguous. |
| Whether you are the owner | Third-party submissions are handled differently. See below. |
There is no field for a marketing description, a logo, a category preference, a budget, or anything that would look like the beginning of a sales conversation.
What we do with it, step by step
- The submission is logged. Nothing is published at this stage, and being logged is not being listed.
- An automated check confirms the destination resolves and responds, without redirecting somewhere unrelated. This is the only automated step.
- A named person reads it against all six criteria. No partial pass, no discretionary override. The same person's name goes on the record if it publishes.
- If it passes, a description is written here, in our words, and the entry publishes with the reviewer's name and the date of the check. If you said something about your business that we cannot check but want to repeat, it appears as an attributed quote with a capture date, never as our description.
- If it does not pass, you get the specific criterion that failed. Your business is never named publicly as a refusal, in the refusal file or anywhere else.
How long it takes, honestly
We do not know, and we are not going to invent a figure.
The queue is new. There is no completed-review history to draw a median from, and a turnaround time quoted from nothing is a guess with a decimal point attached rather than a commitment. When the log holds enough completed reviews to produce a real median, that number goes on the submission page and we hold ourselves to it, including publishing the occasions we miss it.
What can be said now is why it will be slower than you expect. Every step after the first is done by a person reading, and independence in particular is often the slow part, because establishing who owns something can take longer than everything else combined. There is no queue to jump, because there is no paid queue to jump into, and no way to escalate a submission.
If that is too slow to be useful to you, that is a reasonable conclusion to reach. Should you be on a directory at all includes the branch where the answer is not us either.
The reasons we say no
Plainly, and these are all of them:
- It is not yet a thing a person can buy, use, hire, read or visit. A waitlist, a landing page or a pre-launch announcement is a "not yet" rather than a no.
- We could not establish independent ownership. Where the question has no answer we can check, the answer is no rather than a guess. This refuses some genuinely independent businesses and we would rather say so.
- It is primarily an advertising, affiliate, dropship, lead-generation or content-farm vehicle. Carrying advertising is fine. The arrangement being the actual product is not.
- Nobody here could work out what it does well enough to describe it in our own words.
- We could not reach a human, so nothing could be confirmed and nothing could later be corrected.
- It sits in an excluded category. Adult commerce; gambling, betting and prediction markets; lending, credit and debt; supplements, health products and health claims; multi-level marketing and income schemes; crypto tokens, exchanges and trading; and anything requiring a licence or authorisation we cannot verify. That exclusion is about our verification and regulatory exposure, not about the business, and there is no editorial appeal because reopening a category takes legal advice rather than a persuasive submission.
A refusal is not an accusation and the message will not read as one. The refusal file sets out the patterns behind these in more detail, and how reconsideration works: fix the thing, submit again, free, unlimited, no blacklist and nobody counting.
What happens if we say yes
An entry page publishes with a description written here, what you can actually do there, the name of the person who reviewed it, the date they did, the date of the last check, and the versions of the method and the criteria that produced both.
What does not happen: no badge to display, no link back required, no paid membership, and no newsletter you are enrolled in. Submissions and owner tools use Login, and no ordering to be placed within. Nothing here is ranked or rated, so there is no position to have been given.
Being listed also creates no obligation on us. If a re-check finds the business no longer clears the bar, the entry is removed, and removal is not an accusation. What being listed does and doesn't do is the honest version of the expectations question, and it is deliberately deflationary.
What you cannot buy: priority, position, or a second look
There is no priced route into the register, no way to pay for a faster review, and no way to pay for reconsideration. There is no featured tier, no premium listing, and no position to purchase because nothing here is ordered by merit.
More specifically, and because this is the question people ask indirectly: buying anything from this site has no effect whatsoever on register consideration. Not a template, not a workbook, not anything that may exist in future. That rule is written into the entry bar rather than only stated here, precisely so that it cannot quietly erode later.
The enforcement is structural rather than aspirational. The record has no field for a sponsorship, a paid placement, a rating or a rank, and the build rejects those field names outright. Who pays for this site sets out every revenue model the category runs on and why none of them operates here.
Submitting someone else's business
Allowed and welcome. Two things follow from it.
We will normally contact the operator before publishing. A business has a legitimate interest in knowing it is being described somewhere, and someone who does not want to be listed should not have to discover the entry to find out.
And the operator can have the entry removed immediately, whether or not they were the one who submitted it, free, without giving a reason, and with nobody attempting to talk them out of it.
A hostile submission has nowhere to go here. We publish no assessment of any business, so there is no negative outcome available to arrange. The worst a bad-faith submission achieves is wasting a reviewer's afternoon.
Common questions
Can I submit more than one business?
Yes, and there is no cap. Each is assessed on its own against the same six criteria, and submitting several does not help or hurt any of them.
Do you need my logo, screenshots or marketing copy?
No. Descriptions are written here, and reproducing an operator's assets beyond fair quotation is not something we do.
What if my business changes after I submit?
Tell us. If it changes before review, the review uses the current state. If it changes after publication, tell us what changed and the entry is updated or re-checked.
Can I ask to be listed under a particular category?
You can say what you think it is, and it helps. The category shown is our call, and a category page does not publish at all until it holds three entries and an introduction written by a person.
In Plain English
Submitting is free, slow, and expected to be refused more often than accepted. Fix three things first: make the homepage say what you sell, make sure a message sent from outside actually reaches you, and read yourself honestly against the six criteria. The form asks six short questions and nothing else, because anything that would not change a decision is not worth collecting. A person then reads the submission against the criteria and either writes a description or tells you which criterion failed. We cannot quote a turnaround because the queue is new and we have measured nothing, and we would rather say that than invent a number. There is no way to pay for speed, position or a second look, and buying anything from this site has no effect on register consideration at all.
Submit a business when you are ready, or read the entry bar once more if you are not.