# How to Build a Tools Directory That ChatGPT Cites

By Justin Novak · https://www.tminus.ventures/playbook/tools-you-use-directory

Every tool you use in your business is a page someone is searching for. A directory of those tools, with honest notes on how you actually use each one, is programmatic SEO that AI search engines love to cite: dozens of indexable pages generated from one spreadsheet you could fill in from memory.

## Why it works

Tool searches are endless, specific, and commercial: best scraper for lead lists, Beehiiv versus alternatives, what CRM for a small agency. The aggregator sites answer those searches with scraped marketing copy. You can answer them with experience, because you actually run these tools every day. That's the thing Google and AI assistants are both trying to surface, and almost nobody gives it to them.

There's a compounding effect too. Every time a tool comes up in your articles, show notes, or case studies, you link your own page for it, and that page links back to the work. The directory becomes the hub your site's authority routes through.

![The live AI tools directory: 65 tools with categories, first-party usage notes, and episode tags](/playbook/img/tools-you-use-directory/ai-tools-directory.jpg "65 pages generated from one spreadsheet, each with how-we-use-it notes")

## How to run it

1. **One spreadsheet, honest columns.** Name, category, link, and the two sentences that matter: how we actually use it, and who it's for. If you've got nothing honest to say about a tool, it doesn't get a row.
2. **Generate pages, not posts.** A fixed template per row: what it is, how we use it, which projects or episodes it shows up in, who should pick it. Dozens of pages exist the moment the build runs.
3. **Make it machine-readable.** Structured data on every page, and the full set listed in llms.txt so Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Copilot can each walk the whole directory.
4. **Wire the mentions.** Tool comes up in your content, link your page for it. Every time.
5. **Maintain by addition.** New tool in the stack, new row in the sheet. The system handles the rest, which is why this survives a busy calendar.

## Real world example

For our AI webinar series we built a directory of 65 tools, generated from a single Google Sheet. Every page carries first-party notes plus tags for the episodes where the tool was used live, and it ships with structured data and llms.txt coverage.

The part I like most: it's fully automated, so the directory grows as a side effect of just running the show. One honest spreadsheet, maintained in minutes, working SEO, AEO, and GEO at the same time.