Let’s get this straight from the start: I hate AI, LLM’s whatever they are called and I don’t use them. They are not ready yet and are untrustworthy. The big breathless news you hear is 90% hype and 10% truth. The hype is there to sucker in VC bucks.
With that disclaimer out of the way, someday AI may be useful for running a categorized, human edited, directory like Indieseek.xyz. There are lots of tasks AI will someday be able to do.
- Detect Dead Links: it consumes a lot of time and is not fun.
- Detect Changed Website Subject: Domains expire and spammers buy them up and turn them into gambling sites, etc.
- Sort Websites into Categories:
- Write Descriptions for Listings: this is hard to do unless the editor is going to spend a lot of time.
- Write Keywords for listings: if you use this.
- Greatly enhance the directories search function to use more than URL, title, description, keywords. You could actually use some onpage data.
- Moving existing listings into new categories as they are created.
I’m sure there are other time consuming tasks AI could manage. But just doing the above would let one human editor run a larger directory.
I would still have a human editor decide what listings go into the directory. The “human edited” part really does matter and there are things that only a human would catch.
I don’t think directories will completely disappear, because 1. people like to make lists and 2. people like to collect, some collect links. But with that said, I don’t see new, extensive directory scripts being written. Most are over 15 years old and I doubt there is enough paying demand for somebody to incorporate AI into a directory script. But one can dream.
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