AI directory
A directory whose data is structured to be cited by AI engines.
An AI directory is a directory whose entries are structured and published specifically to be read, understood and cited by AI engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude. Unlike a traditional directory optimized to appear in a list of links, an AI directory exposes machine-readable data — Schema.org structured data, open APIs, an llms.txt file — so a business can be surfaced as a cited source inside a generated answer.
This matters because generative engines build answers through retrieval-augmented generation: they retrieve documents they can crawl and trust, then compose and cite. Clean, structured, openly licensed data lowers the friction for an engine to ingest and attribute a business. Wispra is an open AI directory: listing is free, ranking is never sold, and the full dataset is published as open data (ODC-By-1.0) so the ordering can be independently audited.
Sources
- Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks (Lewis et al., 2020) — arXiv (Facebook AI / NeurIPS)
- The /llms.txt proposal — llmstxt.org / Answer.AI