--- title: "The AI Tools Index" canonical: "https://theaitoolsindex.com/blog" url: "https://theaitoolsindex.com/blog" content_type: "text/markdown" --- # Blog — The AI Tools Index > The AI Tools Index is a browsable index of live AI tools organized by category, including tools currently for sale. Every listing links to the maker's real product, and any paid placement is always labeled "Sponsored." Canonical HTML: https://theaitoolsindex.com/blog This representation: Accept: text/markdown on the same URL. Agent map: https://theaitoolsindex.com/llms.txt · OpenAPI: https://theaitoolsindex.com/openapi.json · MCP: https://theaitoolsindex.com/api/mcp/mcp ## Posts - [Welcome to The AI Tools Index: what we list and how it works](https://theaitoolsindex.com/blog/welcome) — What The AI Tools Index is, which tools appear here, and what the votes, dates, and verified revenue actually mean. - [New: light & dark badges, plus one-prompt AI install](https://theaitoolsindex.com/blog/light-and-dark-badges) — Listing badges now come in two variants, with a ready-made prompt so your coding assistant installs them for you. - [Why we verify revenue with Stripe \(and label everything else\)](https://theaitoolsindex.com/blog/why-verified-revenue) — How the revenue signal on The AI Tools Index works: verified means a read-only Stripe connection; everything else is labeled self-reported. - [How voting works here: 1 account, 1 vote, 1 day](https://theaitoolsindex.com/blog/how-voting-works) — The complete voting rules on The AI Tools Index: signed-in accounts only, one vote per listing per day, no bought votes and no bots. - [How we count AI tools: the index inclusion method](https://theaitoolsindex.com/blog/how-we-count-ai-tools) — This index counts one row per standalone product with its own live URL, filed in exactly one of 12 categories. Model endpoints without a product surface, features inside listed products, and renamed relaunches do not add rows. On 28 July 2026 the method produced 209 live listings. - [AI tool categories: why this index uses only 12](https://theaitoolsindex.com/blog/ai-tool-categories-explained) — This index files every listing into exactly one of 12 categories: agents, analytics, audio, chatbots, coding, design, images, marketing, productivity, research, video, and writing. One product, one category. The constraint costs some precision and buys a total that adds up and a browse path a person can finish. - [Why AI tool counts disagree by an order of magnitude](https://theaitoolsindex.com/blog/why-ai-tool-counts-disagree) — Published AI tool totals differ by a factor of ten or more because there is no registry and no shared definition. Four decisions explain nearly all the variance: whether features count as tools, whether wrappers count separately from models, whether dead links stay in, and whether renames create new rows. - [AI tool category distribution: the July 2026 split](https://theaitoolsindex.com/blog/ai-tool-category-distribution) — On 28 July 2026 this index held 209 live listings, unevenly spread: marketing 27, productivity 22, analytics 21, agents 20, coding 20, video 18, writing 18, design 18, research 13, chatbots 12, audio 10, images 10. The spread tracks how cheap a category is to enter, not how useful it is. - [The March 2026 core update and finding AI tools](https://theaitoolsindex.com/blog/march-2026-core-update-and-tool-discovery) — Search Engine Land's analysis of Google's March 2026 core update found 24.1% of top-ten pages dropped out of the top 100, with aggregators and comparison sites hit hardest. For anyone looking for AI tools, the practical effect is that fewer roundups sit between you and the product's own page. - [AI tools that shut down: keeping a catalog honest](https://theaitoolsindex.com/blog/ai-tools-that-shut-down) — Products in this market close on schedules, not silently. OpenAI set Sora's web and app shutdown for 26 April 2026 and its API for 24 September 2026, and PlayHT closed in December 2025 after Meta acquired PlayAI in July 2025. A catalog that never removes anything slowly becomes a museum. - [When AI tools change their name: an index problem](https://theaitoolsindex.com/blog/when-ai-tools-change-their-name) — Renaming is routine in this market and it quietly corrupts catalogs. OpenClaw previously shipped as Clawdbot and then Moltbot, and Google's Nano Banana began as Gemini 2.5 Flash Image in August 2025 before Nano Banana 2 arrived on 26 February 2026. Matching on names instead of identities duplicates rows and inflates totals. - [The half-life of a tool listing: rot in AI catalogs](https://theaitoolsindex.com/blog/the-half-life-of-a-tool-listing) — Catalog entries decay on three clocks: the URL, the price, and the capability. The URL is the only one a script can check. Kevin Indig's Growth Memo analysis found 64 of 365 AI-cited URLs were broken, costing 203 citations, which is the same decay measured from the citing side. - [How people search for AI tools in 2026](https://theaitoolsindex.com/blog/how-people-search-for-ai-tools) — Searches for AI tools cluster into three shapes: a job to be done, a named product plus a modifier, and a count question. Each needs a different page. Seer Interactive found comparison queries trigger AI Overviews 95.4% of the time across 49,353 queries, which changes what a click is worth. - [Why this index publishes no star ratings](https://theaitoolsindex.com/blog/why-this-index-publishes-no-star-ratings) — There are no star ratings here because we have no genuine first-party user votes to build them from, and Google's review snippet documentation, updated 24 July 2026, states plainly that you should not aggregate reviews or ratings from other websites. An invented average is worse than no average. - [How Skillselion counts 59,343 Claude Code skills](https://theaitoolsindex.com/blog/how-skillselion-counts-59000-claude-code-skills) — Skillselion, a directory of agent skills and MCP servers, reported 59,343 Claude Code skills and 8,427 MCP servers on 28 July 2026. Its counting rules, collapsing forks, excluding placeholders, publishing the snapshot date, are a working example of how any catalog number should be produced. - [What an AI-native directory looks like: the Skillselion MCP](https://theaitoolsindex.com/blog/what-an-ai-native-directory-looks-like) — An AI-native directory is one an agent can query as data, not a website a human must browse. The Skillselion MCP shows the shape: a free Model Context Protocol server exposing a 59,343-skill catalog through four tools, so the index itself becomes something an agent resolves mid-task.