About
How it works
DirectoryBuilder answers one question before you spend a weekend building a directory website: is anyone looking for it, and is anyone already serving it?
What a report contains
Demand
Monthly Google search volume for the niche's keyword cluster: the seed phrases ("{niche} directory", "best {niche}", "{niche} near me", "{niche} {city}") plus every keyword that contains the niche, with keyword difficulty and intent. Phrasings Google reports with one shared volume are collapsed so the total is not inflated.
Competition
The live top 10 for the money keyword ("{niche} {city}" when a location is given, otherwise the highest-volume seed), each result labelled as a dedicated directory (a site built for this niche), a general aggregator (Yelp, Maps, Reddit, marketplaces), a single business's own site, or other content, with estimated monthly traffic to the domain.
Supply
For location-based ideas, how many businesses match the niche on Google Maps within about 20 km. The exact Google category is tried first; if the niche is narrower than Google's categories ("dog groomers" vs "Pet groomer"), the broader category is used and the report says so.
Plan
Name ideas, categories, listing fields, the best-fit monetization model with a realistic revenue range, and ten articles that would earn search traffic. Drafted by an AI model from the numbers above, so treat the revenue range as an order of magnitude.
The score
The opportunity score is out of 100 and made of three parts. Each report shows the points earned in each part, so you can see why an idea scored what it did.
Demand
up to 45
Log scale on monthly searches. National reports: 100 searches a month is 10 points, 1,000 is 20, 10,000 is 30, 100,000 is 40, 300,000 or more is the full 45. Local reports are scored on the city's own searches one decade lower: 100 is 20, 1,000 is 30, 10,000 is 40, 30,000 or more is 45.
Gap in the SERP
up to 35
How much of the top 10 a new directory could realistically take. 5 points plus 5 for every beatable slot (a content page such as a listicle or blog post from a domain with under 10,000 visits a month), minus 6 for each dedicated directory already ranking and 2 for each general aggregator beyond three. A single business's own site is not a beatable slot: Google chose a business for that query, not a list. A page of giants scores close to zero even when no niche directory is on it.
Supply
up to 20
From the number of businesses available to list: 300 or more is 20, 100 to 299 is 15, 30 to 99 is 8, 10 to 29 is 3, fewer is 0. Ideas without a location get a neutral 10.
Where the data comes from
Search volumes and keyword difficulty come from Google Ads keyword data: 12-month averages for the report's country. Competition comes from the live Google Search results for the money keyword, pulled when the report runs. Traffic estimates are modelled from each domain's rankings and are best read as orders of magnitude. Business counts and examples come from Google Maps. Locations are geocoded from the text you type, so "Austin, TX" works better than "Austin".
Who makes it
DirectoryBuilder is built and run by one person, the solo founder of Directify, a no-code directory website builder behind more than a thousand directories. After years of watching people build directories nobody searched for, this tool is the check I wished they had run first. Validating an idea is half the job; the other half is building it well. That is why every report ends with "Build this directory": the plan in the report, categories, fields, tags and sample listings, loads straight into a new Directify site, and the businesses counted in the Supply section can be imported in one click. The report is yours to use with any tool; the button is there for the people who want to go from idea to live site the same day.
Free, with limits
Every report costs real API calls, so new reports are limited per day. Reports already in the library are unlimited and free to open.
- Visitors: 1 new report a day. It is public, and joins the library after 24 hours unless you claim it.
- Free account: 3 new reports a day, private by default, all in one place, with an email when each one is ready. Sign in with a link or Google, no password.
- Pro (coming): no daily limit within fair use, one niche compared across many cities, CSV exports and on-demand refreshes.
Reports older than six months are refreshed the next time someone opens them.