Directories are one of the opportunity types Serpfeed finds: sites where you submit your business to get listed. Filling out those forms by hand is tedious, so Serpfeed can do it for you. This is directory auto-submit.
How it works
When a directory opportunity has a clean, fillable form, Serpfeed completes it with your details and submits it. You don’t open the form or retype your information; it happens as an Autopilot action in the background, and you get a notification of the result.
Submissions go out a few at a time rather than all at once, so if several are waiting you’ll see its place in the queue instead of an endless spinner. You can close the window and carry on. The result reaches your notifications either way.
Who gets it
Automated submission is included on every paid plan, with a monthly cap that grows with the plan. On Free you can still fill and submit every directory yourself by hand. Nothing to switch on: open a directory opportunity and, when its form is one Serpfeed can handle, the submit option is right there in Take action.
What it costs
A directory submission costs 20 credits, charged when Serpfeed submits the form on your behalf. If it can’t submit (the form is broken, needs information Serpfeed doesn’t have, or hits a wall it can’t clear) then it is handed back for you to finish, and you are not charged. Directories review listings on their own schedule, so the credits cover the submission, not their decision.
If a submission gets interrupted
Once in a while a submission is interrupted partway through, and afterwards there’s no way to tell from the outside whether the directory received it. Serpfeed will not quietly try that one again, because a second attempt could leave you listed twice on the same site, and a duplicate listing is far more annoying to undo than a missing one. It comes back marked for you to check instead, with everything it had filled in, so you can open the directory, see whether your listing arrived, and either finish it or mark it as submitted.
Anything handed back this way lands in Needs you in your Linkbuilding sidebar, along with forms that asked for a detail Serpfeed didn’t have and listings waiting on a confirmation email. It walks you through them one at a time. See “Things that need you” for what each one asks for.
When a listing says “Checking it landed”
Not every directory says clearly whether it received a submission. Some show a confirmation, some just quietly reload the page, and a few show wording that looks like an error even when everything worked. When Serpfeed can’t tell for certain, it says so: the listing shows Checking it landed and a person confirms what actually happened before it is called done either way.
There is nothing for you to do while a listing sits there, and it will not be submitted again in the meantime, because submitting twice is how you end up listed twice on the same site. If it turns out the submission did go through, the listing moves to Submitted. If it turns out nothing was ever sent, the credits go back to you.
This is deliberately different from a listing that failed. Failed means Serpfeed knows it did not get through, and telling you something failed when it actually worked is worse than telling you we are still checking.
The details Serpfeed fills forms with
Everything a directory form gets comes from one place: your business profile, in Settings, under Linkbuilding. Phone, email, location, address, opening hours, categories and logo are there, and so is everything else Serpfeed has picked up along the way. Contact details used to also sit on the General page; they do not any more, so there is only one place to change them and no way for two screens to disagree.
You don’t have to fill it in up front. When a directory asks for something Serpfeed doesn’t hold, like a VAT number or the year you founded, it asks you once, uses your answer for that form, and saves it. Every later form that asks for the same thing is filled from it automatically. Those saved answers are listed under Other details, so you can read what Serpfeed is putting into other people’s listings, fix a typo, or delete something that shouldn’t be there. You can also add one before it’s ever asked for.
The name on each detail is what matches it to a form field, so renaming vat_number to tax_id changes which fields it fills. It is not just a label.
Your logo is uploaded rather than linked. Pick a PNG, JPEG or WebP file up to 2 MB and Serpfeed hosts it for you, so the image a directory publishes cannot quietly change or disappear later. It saves the moment you choose the file, without pressing Save, and Remove takes it back off. If you had pasted a link to a logo before, it still works and still shows here; replace it by uploading the file itself.
One more thing the form will tell you about rather than let you discover later: there is a generous limit on how many saved details one profile can hold, so if you ever reach it you will be asked to remove one before adding another rather than have it quietly not save.
Correcting a detail after forms are prepared
Submitting several at once
You don’t have to do these one by one. Select the directories you want in your opportunity list and Serpfeed will submit them as a batch, after showing you how many it can do now, what it costs, and roughly how long it will take. Batches go out a few at a time and you can stop the ones that haven’t started at any point. See “Working in bulk”.
Some listings are yours to make
Not every listing is a form. On a lot of the best sites you create and own the profile yourself (a business profile, a review-site vendor account) or you post to a community under your own name. Those are deliberately left to you: an account is yours to hold, and a community post carries weight precisely because a real person wrote it.
You will spot them straight away. Instead of a submit button, the opportunity opens with the exact steps for that site, a link to the right page, and a Mark as submitted button for when it’s done. Nothing is charged for these, and once you mark one as submitted, follow-up reminders work exactly as they do everywhere else.
What about CAPTCHAs?
Some directory forms protect their submit button with a CAPTCHA. If you turn on the Let Autopilot solve CAPTCHAs toggle in your Linkbuilding settings, Serpfeed will attempt to clear the CAPTCHA for you when it submits your listing. It is an explicit, one-time authorization because solving a CAPTCHA acts on the directory’s site on your behalf. If Autopilot can’t clear it, the form is handed back for you to finish yourself, and you are not charged. Forms that also require an account or span multiple steps are always left for you to do by hand. Leave the toggle off and CAPTCHA forms simply stay on the manual path.
When one comes back to you, you don’t start from scratch. Serpfeed opens the form for you and shows every answer it had prepared, in the order the form asks for them, each with a copy button. So the job is paste, paste, solve the CAPTCHA, submit, then tell Serpfeed you’ve done it so the listing carries on through follow-ups like any other. The form itself opens blank, which is why the answers are there to copy rather than already filled in.
Keep an eye on it