How to write an app listing that ranks and gets cited

A directory listing has two readers who want opposite things. A person wants to know in four seconds whether this is for them. A machine, whether a search crawler or an answer engine, wants short, self-contained, attributable statements it can extract without guessing.

The good news is that the second reader’s needs are almost entirely a subset of the first’s. Nobody has ever complained that a product page was too specific. This guide goes field by field.

The tagline is the highest-leverage field on the page

Ten to eighty characters. It appears in feeds, in search results as your meta description, on your badge embed and in every card anyone ever sees. Uneed enforces the same 10 to 80 range, which tells you the constraint is not arbitrary.

Three rules. Say what it does, not what it is like. Do not use your own product name in it, because the name is already rendered next to it. Do not use “powerful”, “seamless”, “effortless” or “modern”, because all four survive being deleted.

A weak tagline: “The modern, powerful platform for developers.” A strong one, from a real listing: “Self-hosted, open source alternative to Vercel, Heroku and Netlify.” The second one tells you what it is, what license model it follows, where it runs and who it competes with, in nine words.

The short description sets up the page, it does not summarize it

Up to five hundred characters. This is the block a person reads immediately after deciding, from the tagline, that they might care.

Write three sentences. The first says what the product does in slightly more detail than the tagline. The second says what is genuinely unusual about it. The third says something concrete: who uses it, what it runs on, what it costs, what license it carries.

Do not spend it restating the tagline in different words, which is what most listings do.

Features: one claim each, no slogans

Three to eight features, each a title under sixty characters and a body under three hundred. On this site a listing cannot publish without at least three, and that is deliberate.

The rule that fixes most feature blocks: a feature is a thing the product does, not a quality it has. “Blazing fast” is not a feature. “Git-push deploys with preview environments and automatic SSL” is.

Bad:

Powerful analytics. Get powerful insights into your data with our best-in-class analytics engine.

Better:

Conversion attribution on every link. Ties a click through to signup and revenue, so a launch link shows up in your funnel rather than as direct traffic.

The second one is forty percent shorter and says something. It is also quotable, which the first one is not, because there is nothing in it to quote.

Order matters more than most people think. The first feature is the one that gets read and the one most likely to be extracted. Lead with the thing that is true of you and not of the obvious alternative.

Use cases: persona plus scenario, always

Two to seven, each written as a specific person in a specific situation. This is the block that answers the query someone actually typed, because people search in scenarios and not in feature names.

Bad: “Great for teams of all sizes.”

Better: “A growth team running a launch across five directories, who needs to know which one sent the signups rather than which one sent the clicks.”

The pattern is: role, situation, the thing they cannot currently do. Write the ones you have actually seen, from support conversations or user interviews. Invented personas read as invented.

Fazier’s listing pages carry a use-cases block as numbered persona scenarios and it is, by some distance, the most quotable page in the ten directories we benchmarked. It is not a coincidence that its listings read as if written to be extracted.

Differentiators: name the alternative

Up to five statements of how you differ from the obvious alternative. Two rules: name the alternative, and be fair to it.

Naming it is what makes the block useful, because “unlike other tools” is a comparison against nothing. Being fair to it is what makes the block credible. A differentiator that concedes something is dramatically more believable than one that does not, and both a reader and a model treat a page that admits a tradeoff as a better source than one that does not.

“Unlike a hosted PaaS, this runs on servers you own, which means no per-seat pricing and no vendor lock-in, and also means you are responsible for the server.” That is a differentiator. It is also honest, which is why it works.

This block feeds the alternatives pages, so it is the one place where writing well produces a second page for free.

FAQ: the most directly quotable markup there is

Three to six questions. We auto-draft them and you edit, which is the right split, because the drafting is mechanical and the answers are not.

An FAQ block emits FAQPage structured data, which pairs a question with an answer explicitly. There is no markup on the web more suited to extraction, and it is why FAQs show up in AI answers out of proportion to their length.

Answer the questions people actually ask before they buy or install, which are usually: what does it cost, is there a free tier, what platforms does it run on, how is it different from the thing I already use, what happens to my data, and can I self-host it. Answer them in two to four sentences with a number in them wherever a number exists.

Do not write an FAQ entry whose answer is “yes”. Write the sentence that makes the yes useful.

The structured fields are content too

The fields that look like metadata are the ones most likely to be cited, because they are unambiguous.

Platforms. Multi-select, all of them. This is what puts your listing on the platform hubs and the category crosses. A tool that is macOS and Linux and CLI should say so three times, because those are three pages.

Install command. Up to 120 characters, rendered as a copy-button code block with the registry named. No other directory in our benchmark carries this field, and for a terminal tool it is the single most useful string on the page.

Repository, license and open-source flag. If you are open source, say which license. “Open source” without an SPDX identifier is a claim; “Apache-2.0” is a fact.

Pricing model, starting price and free tier. Structured, not prose, because these drive the free and open-source facet pages and because a price in a sentence cannot be filtered on.

Store links, versions and minimum OS. One entry per store, with the version and the minimum OS. These make your listing answer “does this run on my device”, which prose never does cleanly.

Screenshots and alt text

One to eight, real, with alt text under 125 characters on each. Alt text is not a caption: describe what is visible and what it demonstrates, not what you wish the reader to feel. “Terminal showing a deploy completing with the preview URL printed” is alt text. “Fast and beautiful deployments” is not.

Facts with dates survive being quoted

The strongest single habit in listing writing is attaching a date to every number.

“62,123 GitHub stars as of 2026-09-21” can be quoted years later and remains true, because it says when it was true. “Over 60,000 stars” decays silently and cannot be safely attributed by anything careful. The same applies to funding, user counts, ratings and awards: name the number, name the date, and where the claim is load-bearing, name the source.

This is also the discipline that keeps a listing honest. A number you cannot date is usually a number you cannot support.

Things that will get the listing rejected or ignored

Copying your homepage hero text verbatim into every field. Writing in the third person about yourself in a way that reads like a press release. Keyword stuffing the tagline. Claiming an award you can find no primary source for. Leaving the features block at the minimum with three one-line entries. Uploading a mockup instead of a screenshot. Submitting a waitlist.

The last pass

Read the listing once as a person who has never heard of your product and is comparing eleven of them. Then read it again and ask, of each block, whether a stranger could quote that sentence on its own without it becoming false or meaningless.

Anything that fails the second test is a slogan. Delete it or replace it with the fact underneath it. That fact is what you wanted to say in the first place, and it is the thing that gets ranked, quoted and cited.

When it is written, submit the app. The form pre-fills what it can crawl from your own page, so the only work left is the part above, which is the part only you can do.