Directories are super hot right now. Almost everyone’s talking about them. And for good reason.

Check out this traffic graph:

That may not look like much, but this site is just three months old.

50,000+ monthly visits in that timeframe is impressive.

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The traffic graph above is for the site mcp.so.

It’s an MCP server directory.

MCP was introduced by Anthropic on November 25th, 2024. You can read about it here.

Almost immediately, a few MCP server directories popped up.

MCP.so was launched on December 3rd. So was pulsemcp.com, which also has a nice traffic graph:

The oldest MCP server directory I found was claudemcp .com, registered on November 27th, 2024. It’s not an official Anthropic website, even though they try to get you to believe that. They link to several non-Anthropic projects in the footer and the Blog link takes you to a Chinese website, so yeah… not Anthropic. Be careful.

Another fascinating MCP directory I found is cursor.directory. It’s more than just an MCP directory though. It’s got a Cursor rules generator, a job board, an activity feed (“Trending”) that’s a lot like HackerNews, an AI-built games directory, and more.

But the most interesting thing is that they have open analytics (view here), so you can see exactly how much traffic they’re getting.

In the last 30 days, they had 159,000+ visitors just to the MCP directory page. Proof there’s a lot of traffic to be had in this niche!

There are new trends all the time in the AI niche, so keep an eye out for things like MCP in the future, where a directory would make sense. Examples from the past include a GPT directory (when OpenAI launched custom GPTs), AI agent directories, and of course AI tool and prompt directories.

Non-trend based directories are hot too

Directories can work in just about every niche you can imagine, so don’t worry about chasing the latest trend.

Frey Chu shares lots of examples of traditional directories on his YouTube channel.

He even shares a few of his own, AND has a video where he shows you exactly how to build a static directory in WordPress (including data scraping and enrichment):

I’m not sponsored by him, I just wanted to share because he has lots of experience and does a way better job covering the topic than I can.

If you don’t want to use WordPress, check out Directify. It’s extremely easy to use, but not as customizable. That said, it works great for most types of directories.

You could also use AI to code a directory, although deploying it will require a bit of technical expertise (nothing AI can’t walk you through though).

Alright, that’s all for today. Hope this was inspiring!

Ian

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