Short answer: mostly no. We checked the rel attribute on eight agency directories that promise or imply a backlink. Six returned nofollow, including the two most expensive at $90 and $449 per month. The cheapest paid option, $14.99 one time, returned a genuine dofollow.
Below is the data, a ten-second method to reproduce it, and the part almost nobody discusses: why a nofollow link can still be valuable if you care about being recommended by ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity.
What we found: 8 agency directories tested
Every result was read from the live page rel attribute in the browser DOM, not from the directory marketing copy.
Read that table twice. The two most expensive options are nofollow. The $14.99 one is not.
How to check whether a backlink is dofollow yourself
You do not need a tool. Open any directory page that links to a listed company, open your browser console, and run this:
document.querySelectorAll('a[href]').forEach(a => { let host; try { host = new URL(a.href).hostname } catch (e) { return } if (host && !host.includes(location.hostname)) { console.log(host, '| rel =', a.getAttribute('rel') || 'NONE'); } });
If nofollow does not appear in the output, the link passes equity. If it does, it does not. Anything routed through the directory own domain first, the way Clutch does with r.clutch.co, is a redirect and passes nothing regardless.
Two mistakes that cost us time
Check a profile page, not a category page. Semrush shows zero outbound links on its list pages and only links out from individual agency profiles. Ahrefs is the opposite and links straight from the list page. Check the wrong page type and you get the wrong answer.
Check somebody else live listing, not your own pending one. A profile that has not been approved yet may show no outbound link at all, which tells you nothing about what you will eventually get.
Why do most directories use nofollow?
Sort the results and a clean split appears. Editorially curated pages pass equity. Listings products do not.
Adam GTM Index is a page a human maintains. Ten outbound links, zero nofollow. The Answer Engines Optimization directory has an open application form. Forty outbound links, forty nofollow.
That is an incentives fact more than an SEO fact. If a person chooses who appears, the links are editorial endorsements and get treated as such. If anyone can apply, the operator assumes a share of applicants only want the link, so they blanket-nofollow everything.
Which restates a rule that has held for fifteen years: the easier a link is to get, the less likely it is to be worth getting. Directories do not exempt you from it. We saw the same dynamic when we mapped the 50 most influential domains shaping AI search rankings: the sources that carry weight are the ones that are hard to get into.
Do nofollow links matter for AI search?
Yes. Large language models do not read rel attributes.
This is where the standard SEO reading of this data is incomplete. When ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or Perplexity assembles a set of recommended vendors, it works from what pages say, not from what a link tag permits a crawler to do. A nofollow listing on a well-crawled directory can still place your brand in front of a model answering a buyer question.
So those six nofollow listings are not worthless. They are worthless as link equity and potentially valuable as citation surface. Two different assets, two different scoreboards. Most teams keep one scoreboard and call it link building.
If that distinction is new to you, it is the same one we draw in AI visibility monitoring vs AI search demand generation, and it sits underneath our whole approach to AI search demand generation. For the mechanics of how models actually pick brands, see how Perplexity, ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini choose which brands to mention and the 5 signals AI engines use to decide which brands to recommend.
What this means for paid directory listings
It changes how you should judge them entirely.
Semrush Agency Partners at $90/month is a poor link purchase and a defensible visibility purchase. It has live category pages for AI search services and country pages with very few competitors on them. Judge it on referral leads and AI citations, not on crawl equity.
Ahrefs at $449/month requires an Advanced plan or higher, so $5,388 a year. Its outbound link is also nofollow, and it has no AI, GEO, AEO or LLM service category at all, so you get filed as a generic digital marketing agency. Worth claiming only if you need the tool anyway.
If you are weighing agency options more broadly, we wrote how to choose an AI SEO agency and how to choose a GEO agency, plus a comparison of the best SEO, GEO and AEO agencies for SaaS.
What we are doing differently
Verifying before paying, not after. The check takes ten seconds. Both expensive options here would have failed it before any money moved.
Keeping two lists. Equity sources and citation sources, scored separately. Merge them and you get a link count that looks healthy and a link profile that is not.
Spending less time on directory forms. Both dofollow results came from places with a human in the loop. Every free-to-submit directory in the set was nofollow. An hour on one genuine editorial placement beats a day of form filling. The same logic applies to the assets you already own: we covered that in the internal linking case study, where connecting existing posts outperformed publishing new ones.
The technical layer most teams skip
If you are auditing how machines read your site, rel attributes are one input among several. What crawlers can actually access matters more, which we covered in what AI crawlers actually read.
The practical starting point is an llms.txt file. We checked adoption across the market in our study of 30 leading SaaS companies, wrote the implementation guide in how to create an llms.txt file, and built a free llms.txt generator that runs entirely in your browser with no signup and no crawler.
Frequently asked questions
Are agency directory backlinks dofollow?
Usually not. In our audit of eight directories, six used nofollow, including Semrush Agency Partners, the Ahrefs agency directory, Clutch and Answer Engines Optimization. Uneed and Adam GTM Index were the two exceptions.
Is a nofollow backlink worthless?
No. It passes no ranking equity, but it can still drive referral traffic and, more importantly, it can still be read and cited by AI assistants. Nofollow affects crawlers, not language models.
Do paid directories give better links than free ones?
Not in our data. The two most expensive directories we tested were both nofollow, while a $14.99 listing and a free curated index both passed equity. Price signalled nothing about link quality.
How do I know if my brand is being recommended by AI?
Run a check across the major assistants rather than relying on a single screenshot, because outputs vary between runs. Our free AI visibility checker gives you a starting read, and this guide walks through the manual method.
What should I do instead of buying directory listings?
Earn editorial placements, publish original data, and make your site legible to AI crawlers. That combination is what we run as a program, described in how it works.
Want to know where you actually stand?
Backlinks are one input. What decides whether a buyer sees your name is whether AI assistants recommend you when asked, and that is measurable.
Start free with our AI visibility checker, or read the benchmark data in the State of AI Search Visibility 2026 and our study of 100 SaaS brands in ChatGPT results.
When you want a full picture rather than a spot check, an AI Visibility Audit maps where you are being recommended, where competitors are winning, and what is causing the gap. Here is what an audit finds and why teams run one first.
If you already know you need help executing, Arobis AI works with B2B SaaS companies as a GEO agency, an AEO agency, an AI SEO agency and a SaaS SEO agency, depending on which surface you need to win. AI visibility for SaaS explains the outcome, and our pricing is published rather than gated.
Methodology and caveats
Eight directories is an anecdote with sound methodology, not a study. It is the set one agency encountered while doing this work, not a survey of the category. We are widening it and will republish.
Directories change rel policies without announcing it. Everything here was verified on the publication date. Re-check before citing it as current.
We tested whether links are followed, not whether pages are crawled and indexed. A dofollow link on a page nobody crawls is still worth nothing. We did confirm Uneed listing pages carry index, follow.
Disclosure: we run an agency in this space, which is why we were applying to eight directories in the first place. The method is published above specifically so you can reproduce it and disagree with us.
