AI Start

AI Start is a heavily populated AI tools directory containing thousands of pre-listed products. It prominently features major AI laboratories, but the overall platform appears primarily designed to sell backlinks and featured placements rather than provide a genuinely useful product-discovery experience.

What’s included? ¶

AI Start offers three listing options:

• A free permanent listing
• One promised dofollow backlink with the free listing
• Manual review and publication within seven days
• A $4.99 Pro listing with immediate publication
• Homepage and featured-list placement with Pro
• An additional dofollow backlink from the ai-138.com directory with Pro
• A $9.99 Sponsor placement linking from every tool page
• One Sponsor position made available each week

The Sponsor placement effectively places the promoted product across the entire directory. This resembles a sitewide footer backlink more than conventional directory promotion.

The free submission was used for Truly Analytics. As the submission remains unpublished, none of the promised listing or backlink benefits currently exists.

What do you need to supply? ¶

The submission process begins with the product’s website URL. AI Start then attempts to collect and populate the listing information automatically.

The process is simple when the automatic import works. However, the JavaScript-heavy interface is clunky and can make an otherwise straightforward submission unnecessarily awkward.

Results ¶

Truly Analytics was submitted to AI Start for free on 2 August 2026.

The free plan promises manual review and publication within seven days. Nearly a week later, the listing had still not appeared. Consequently, no permanent product page or dofollow backlink was available when checked.

No submitted listing had been found by Google or Brave. This should not be treated as an existing page failing to rank: the Truly Analytics listing had not yet been published, leaving nothing for either search engine to index.

First Party Attribution recorded no traffic from aistart.ai:

No measurable referral traffic reached Truly Analytics from AI Start during the reviewed period.

Paid vs Free ¶

The free plan is the only option tested during this review. It had not produced a listing within the stated timeframe when checked.

Pro removes the approval delay and supplies significantly more visibility at $4.99.

The $9.99 Sponsor plan is an explicit backlink play. Appearing across every tool page may produce a large number of links, but sitewide backlinks are not automatically valuable as each domain backlink is considered once by indexers.

Final verdict ¶

Use the free submission if it eventually publishes

AI Start presents the scale and appearance of a major AI directory. Its prominent placement of well-known AI laboratories lends superficial credibility and thousands of pre-populated tool pages make the catalogue look substantial.

The experience underneath is less convincing - the interface feels heavily vibe-coded, is awkward to use and appears designed principally around selling backlinks and featured placements. There’s no reason to believe that actual humans are browsing it as a serious product-discovery platform.

The free option promises a permanent listing and dofollow backlink, making it reasonable to submit if the process takes only a few minutes. However, our submission was approaching the stated seven-day review period without being published. Truly Analytics recorded no events from aistart.ai, and there was no live page for Google or Brave to index.

AI Start may eventually provide a free backlink if the submission is approved. Until that happens—and until the resulting page is indexed or generates traffic—there is no evidence that the directory provides genuine value. The paid plans should be treated as high-cost, speculative SEO purchases.

Truly Analytics ¶

Truly Analytics established that the AI Start submission had not generated measurable referral activity while awaiting publication.

First Party Attribution makes it possible to distinguish between a directory’s promised exposure and traffic that genuinely reaches the submitted website. In this case, no listing, backlink or attributed visit had materialised.

Truly Analytics helps organisations understand who is visiting their website, what their real traffic looks like, where it came from, and which marketing and sales activity delivers genuine value.