How to list software on MakeItLast

This is the long version of get listed. If you want the short version: paste the product URL, edit the draft, save. Review runs while you wait. If it passes, the card is public. Then you pick how the outbound link works.

If you want the version that saves you a reject, a bad tagline, and a week of wondering why Google still does not know the product exists, keep reading.

MakeItLast is a catalog of software that lasts. It is not a launch week, not a paid magazine, and not a human editorial queue. A listing is a public page, a markdown twin, and a row in a catalog that search and AI can keep reading. The work is to make that page true.

What you are actually submitting

You are not submitting "an upvote." You are submitting a record:

• Name
• Official URL
• Tagline
• Description
• Category
• Tags
• Logo
• Optional screenshots
• How the link to your site should be treated (dofollow with a badge, dofollow paid, or nofollow)

That record becomes /tools/{your-slug}. It also becomes /tools/{your-slug}.md. The live catalog is in llms.txt. The full dump is in llms-full.txt.

If those files still list you in a year, the listing did its job. If you disappear from your own homepage but the listing still says the old name, you did not update the record. The catalog will faithfully repeat a stale sentence. That is on you.

Before you paste the URL

Open the site the way a bot would. No logged-in session. No blocking of unknown user-agents if you can help it. MakeItLast fetches the public page to draft the card and to review it.

Checklist:

1. HTTPS works. Redirects should land on the real product, not a parked registrar page.
2. The homepage says the product name in text. Not only in a logo image.
3. There is a real sentence. What the software does, in English.
4. The site is not adult, gambling, or a scam. Those are hard rejects.
5. You control the domain, or you are about to claim it. If someone else submitted your URL first, do not fight in email. Claim it.

If the page is a JavaScript shell with no title and no description, fill may return a thin draft. You can still type the card by hand. The review still has to fetch something that looks like a website.

Cloudflare Bot Fight, aggressive WAFs, and "under attack" modes sometimes allow your laptop and block a datacenter. If fill fails in production with a fetch error and works on localhost, allow crawlers or paste the details yourself. The listing does not require AI fill. Fill is a shortcut.

The submit flow, step by step

Sign in. Google or a magic link. The session is a cookie. There is no public API for creating a listing. Agents should send you to /get-listed, not POST a card on your behalf.

Open submit. Paste the URL. Use the canonical product URL, not a campaign redirect, not a Notion doc, not a Google Drive folder.

Let AI fill, or skip it. Fill reads the page, drafts a name, tagline, description, category, and tags, and tries to pull a logo. Read every field. The model will sometimes pick a poetic name you never use. Change it.

Write the description like a stranger will quote it. Two to four short paragraphs. English. Markdown is allowed. Lead with what the product is. Then who it is for. Then what is unusual. Do not write a manifesto. Do not end with "Learn more." The page already has a link.

Pick a category and tags. Categories are lanes in the catalog. Tags are filters. Both should be true. "AI" as a tag on a calculator that calls an API once is a way to look like everyone else.

Upload a logo if fill missed it. A square mark. Not a screenshot of the marketing site. Screenshots are optional and separate.

Choose the link type before you save, or right after, from your studio. The three options are below. You can exist as nofollow and upgrade later.

Save. Review runs in that request. Pass, and the listing is live. Fail, and you get a reason. There is no waitlist and no "we'll email you in five business days."

What automated review actually checks

Review is automatic. It is not a taste panel.

It blocks:

• Adult and sexual content
• Spam, malware, phishing
• Gambling and scam patterns
• Parked "for sale" domains with no product

It allows:

• Software products
• SaaS
• Apps
• Agencies, studios, consultancies
• Marketplaces and directories
• Launch platforms
• Portfolios that are real sites

It does not reject you for being an agency, for selling services, for missing a signup button, or for being unfashionable. When the model is unsure, the default is approve, after the hard checks pass.

If OpenAI is down, the hard checks still run. A site that is clearly a product can still go live.

English: the listing copy should be in English. The product UI can be more than English. The catalog is English so search and answers stay in one language.

If you are rejected, read the sentence. Change the listing or the site. Submit again. If you think the decision is wrong, email the address on the legal notice. Do not open five new accounts. That looks like spam because it is spam.

The three link types, without the pitch

Free dofollow, with a badge. You put a Featured on MakeItLast badge on the listed site's homepage (or that exact host's front page). The href must point at the MakeItLast landing page. No rel="nofollow", sponsored, or ugc. The image must be the official badge, or the exact alt text. We re-check weekly. If the badge disappears, the listing stays live and the outbound link drops to nofollow until you re-verify. Picking this option does not grant dofollow by itself. The badge has to be found.

Paid dofollow, no badge. After review passes, you pay a one-time fee (currently $9). Checkout happens after the listing is saved, so a failed card never bills you. The followable link is permanent. No weekly badge check.

Nofollow. You are in the catalog. People can find you. Search can still read the page. The outbound link just carries no ranking weight. This is a fine first choice if you want to be listed today and decide later.

There is no "pay to skip review." There is no "pay to rank above other cards." Order in the catalog is not an auction.

How to write a card that still makes sense next year

Name. The product or company name only. Max 80 characters. Not "Name - Best AI Tool 2026." The title tag on the listing page already adds context.

Tagline. One sentence. Under 140 characters on fill, a little more on the form. Say the job. "Local-first Markdown notes with folder sync" beats "Notes, reimagined."

Description. Long enough to be an answer. Short enough to finish. A good shape:

1. What it is, in one paragraph.
2. Who it is for, and who it is not for.
3. How it is different, without insulting competitors.
4. How to start (free tier, demo, download).

Avoid:

• "We are passionate about..."
• "The OS for X" with no X explained
• A wall of keywords
• Trailing ellipses that look truncated
• Copy that only makes sense if you already watched the launch video

Category. Pick the lane a stranger would browse. If you are a studio that also ships a product, list the product in the product lane, or the studio in the agency lane. Do not split the same URL across two fantasies. One URL, one card.

Tags. A few true ones. Platform tags if you ship apps. "Free" or "freemium" only if that is real.

Logos, screenshots, and the fetch

Fill tries to grab a logo from icons, Open Graph, JSON-LD, and obvious img tags. If your mark is an inline SVG with no alt="logo", it may miss. Upload the file.

Screenshots should show the product, not a conference booth. One good UI shot beats three identical hero crops.

Remote images are fetched from your site and stored on Cloudinary. If your CDN blocks bots, upload from disk.

After you are live

Share the listing URL. It is a public page. Put it in the changelog. Put it in the footer if you want.

Keep it true. Rebrand? Edit the card from your listings. Change the official URL only if the product moved. Do not point it at an affiliate redirect.

Claim, if needed. If the card existed before you signed in, claim with a token on the site (meta tag or a well-known file). Then the studio is yours.

Badge, if you chose that path. Follow the badge rules. The checker looks at the listed URL or that host's front page. A /blog page does not count. A sibling subdomain does not count. The bot identifies as makeitlastbot/1.0. Allow-list it if you block unknown user-agents.

Do not treat the listing as a press kit. Journalists may still use it. Write it as facts, not as a pitch deck.

How search and AI see the card

The HTML page has title, description, Open Graph, and software structured data. The markdown twin is the same facts without layout. The catalog API is at /api/v1/catalog. MCP is at /mcp.

None of that ranks you by itself. It makes you quotable. A crawler that is willing to read directories can find the name, the official site, and a paragraph that is not a slogan.

If you want that paragraph to be good, write it. Models will not save a vague product.

Common rejects and how to fix them

Parked domain. Put a product on the domain. A "buy this domain" page is not a listing.

Empty SPA. Add a server-rendered title and description. Or a static HTML shell. Review needs text.

Adult or scam language. Do not list it here. This catalog is not that.

Thin copy. Two sentences that say "AI platform for teams" will pass review and still fail as a public record. Expand it because you want the page to work, not because a human editor is waiting.

Wrong URL. You submitted the blog, the app subdomain, or a stale Webflow project. Use the URL customers type.

Fetch failed. Your firewall blocked the bot. Allow it, or fill the form by hand. Review still needs to fetch the live site when it can.

A realistic timeline

• 10 minutes: sign in, paste URL, edit the draft, save.
• 0 minutes extra: live, if review passes.
• 15 minutes: badge on the homepage, if you want free dofollow.
• 5 minutes: checkout, if you want paid dofollow.
• 5 minutes a quarter: update the description when the product changes.

If this takes you three weeks, the bottleneck is not the form. It is usually the homepage that still does not say what the product is.

Editing later without making a mess

A listing is cheap to update and expensive to abandon. When the product changes, open your listings and change the fields that stopped being true. Do not create a second card for a rename. Do not leave the old tagline because it "performed."

Good reasons to edit:

• The name customers use changed.
• You shipped or killed a platform.
• Pricing is no longer "free" and the tag still says it is.
• The official URL moved, with a real redirect from the old host.

Bad reasons to edit:

• You want to stuff a new keyword every Monday.
• A competitor launched and you want to shade them in paragraph three.
• You are bored.

If you change the URL, review may fetch again. Keep the new host fetchable. If you only change copy, keep the same slug so existing links still work.

A markdown twin updates with the card. Answer engines that cached the old paragraph will catch up. You cannot force that clock. You can keep the live document honest so they have something true to fetch next time.

What this catalog is not

It is not a guarantee of traffic. It is not a review score. It is not proof that a missing product does not exist. It is not a place to launch a fake waitlist for a course about launching waitlists.

It is a public shelf. You put a box on the shelf. You label the box. People and machines can read the label later.

Short answers

Do I pay to list? No. You pay only if you want dofollow without a badge.

Can an agent submit for me? No. Send the maker to /get-listed. The session has to be theirs.

Can I list a client site? If you control it or the owner claims it. Do not spam other people's domains.

Can I have two listings for one URL? No. One URL, one card. Claim or edit.

When does paid checkout run? After the listing is saved and review passed.

Will you feature me on the homepage? Newest listings show up in the newest index. There is no paid homepage takeover.

Paste the URL. Make the sentence true. Save once. Stay findable.

If you only remember one thing: the listing is the public sentence. Fill is optional. The badge is optional. Paying is optional. Being honest on the homepage is not.

After the card is live, MakeItLast may add review, pricing, audience, facet, alternatives, and compare pages. Those are not copies of the tagline. Each URL has a job. The longer version is in where to list software in 2026 and software alternatives without doorway pages.