Why we started indexing AI tools.
We built Index because finding a genuinely good AI tool had turned into its own full-time job — twenty browser tabs, conflicting "best of" lists, and half of them written by nobody who'd actually opened the tool.
Index started from a pretty ordinary frustration. Every time a new AI tool launched, the search results filled up with lists that all looked identical — same ten tools, same copy-pasted descriptions, no sign anyone had actually spent real time using them. Meanwhile, the tools that were genuinely useful for a specific task often didn't show up at all, buried under whichever ones had the biggest marketing budget.
So we started doing it the slower way: opening each tool ourselves, testing it against real tasks, timing how long it took to get a usable result, and writing down what actually happened — including when a tool was mediocre, which most "best of" lists conveniently leave out. That became the directory you're looking at now.
We're not trying to be the biggest AI tools list on the internet. We're trying to be the one you'd actually trust a recommendation from — the difference between a list built to rank in Google and a list built by someone who opened every single tool on it.
A note on how we make money: some links on this site are affiliate links — if you sign up through them, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. This never affects which tools we recommend or how we rank them; every tool is scored the same way whether or not it has an affiliate program with us. Full details in our Affiliate Disclosure.