The purpose of online business directories have changed

The pitch for wedding directories for the past 16 years of my celebrancy career has been

1. Pay us money
2. We'll send you couples/brides/enquiries/money

That doesn't work anymore. If you're operating a wedding directory on that premise your days are numbered.

Here's the story. Being found today - and ever more so tomorrow - is less and less about the ten blue links on the front page of Google, and it's almost never been about people visiting Such and Such Wedding Directory, but it's about your actual brand being found to be trustworthy, authority, and proximate to the search being made by the couple.

Here's an example of looking for a wedding celebrant in Esperance, Western Australia on ChatGPT.

Then I do my favourite move, asking how ChatGPT knows something.

So my takeaway is that business directories are now sources of authority, trust, context, and further information about the business, it's location, and information many of us leave off our actual websites.

That leads us to then judge the quality of a business directory listing.

Google and OpenAI, Anthropic and Apple are all judging websites - yours and the directories - in the same way.

They want websites that are easy to read by computers, websites that are fast (the slower a website, the longer it takes the crawler computers to read it so slow websites actually cost them money and they don't like wasting money), accessible to all people and computers, technically correct without errors, without bad or dead hyperlinks, good HTML, good website code/markup, and with schema.org schema.

Here's how I judge directories:

1. Page Speed Test: I run the home page, the category pages, and the vendor pages through the Google page speed tool: pagespeed.web.dev and you want 100, 100, 100, 100. Or a compromise is close to 100 on the first test and 100 on the back three.
2. Schema: I run the same pages through the Google Rich Results testing tool: search.google.com/test/rich-results
3. DA: I check the domain authority on Moz: moz.com/domain-analysis

You should judge them the same way.

How cool their Instagram is, or their website design, or how many visitors they say they get, in my humble opinion all does not matter - or if it did yesterday, it won't tomorrow.

The cost of joining a wedding directory should be correlated with how well it is sharting it's authoritym, trust, and information with your business in a way that matters to:

• Google (and Gemini and Youtube)
• Microsoft (and Bing and CoPilot)
• Apple (Spotlight, Siri, Apple Maps, Apple Intelligence, Apple Business Connect)
• OpenAI (and ChatGPT)
• Anthropic (and Claude)
• DeepSeek
• Mistral
• Meta (and Llama, Instagramm, Facebook, and WhatsApp)