How to get your software listed in comparisons

What gets a product dropped from a comparison

• Pricing that cannot be verified. The single most common reason. A guide that invents a price gets corrected in public, so it leaves you out instead.
• A dead trial or a broken signup. If the editor cannot create an account, your product is untestable and therefore unlistable.
• Claims that collapse on contact. "GDPR compliant", "AI powered" and "used by thousands" are not facts. "Hosted in Frankfurt, data processing agreement on this URL" is.
• Review gaming. Incentivised or written-for-you reviews are now a legal risk, not just an ethical one. The US Federal Trade Commission adopted a rule in August 2024 that bans fake and paid-for reviews, insider reviews without disclosure, and review suppression. Editors read review sites for signal, and a cluster of five star reviews posted in one week is signal of the wrong kind.
• Pressure. Asking for a better position, offering money for a ranking, or escalating to the publisher is the fastest way to be remembered as a vendor to avoid. At a guide with a working firewall it also cannot work, because the person who sells placements does not set the ranking.
• Silence after the fact check. An editor sends a draft row, asks two questions, and hears nothing for two weeks. The row gets cut, not corrected.

How to write a submission that gets read

Keep it to one screen. Editors read dozens of these.

1. One sentence on what it is and who it is for. "POS and invoicing for Luxembourg hospitality, built for the local VAT rules." Not "the operating system for modern commerce".
2. The three links. Product page, pricing page, trial or demo. In that order.
3. The two numbers. Cheapest paid plan with the unit, and how many paying customers you have. If you are at nine customers, say nine. Editors use it for context, not as a filter, and a vendor who says nine is a vendor whose other numbers you believe.
4. One honest weakness. Name the use case where you are the wrong answer. This is the single highest leverage sentence in the whole submission. It tells the editor you will not fight the published weaknesses, which is what they are quietly worried about.
5. The one thing competitors get wrong. A concrete, checkable claim, not an adjective. "Competitor X cannot apply a different VAT rate per article, which matters in Luxembourg because food and alcohol are taxed differently on the same ticket."
6. Assets and permission. Screenshot links plus one line granting publication rights.

What to leave out: the funding announcement, the award badges, the deck, the pitch video, and any sentence containing the word "revolutionary".

How long does it take to get listed in a comparison

Plan in months, not days. A serious guide publishes against its own editorial calendar, which means your submission sits until the category page it belongs to is written or updated. Realistic sequence: a reply within a week at a small desk, a fact check round when the relevant page is next touched, and publication whenever that page ships. The large directories work differently: a profile there is self-service and can be live in days, but the ranked comparison content on the same site is still editorial or paid, and the categories a reader actually reads are updated on a schedule.

Two things speed this up and they are both on your side. Keep your pricing page current, because the next update of a comparison starts by re-checking prices. And answer fact-check mail the same day, because an unanswered question becomes a cut row.

If you are deciding where else to spend the effort, start with the directories a European software vendor should be in and with what actually makes an AI assistant name a product. Those two and your own pricing page cover most of the ground.

What we do at Thinking specifically

We profile European business software whether the vendor pays or not, and submissions are read by a person. The rules are short:

• A paid plan buys verification of facts or a clearly labelled sponsored placement. It never buys a ranking position and it never buys an editorial score.
• Every paid link is rendered with rel="sponsored nofollow", which is what Google's own spam policy requires for links that change hands for money.
• Scores are set against criteria we publish before the ranking, and where a competitor is the better answer for a use case, we write that.
• Thinking is published by TTA Technologies, which also builds LUXPOS, Salonify, BoxBee and DepotGest. Those products appear in our comparisons, every page that names one carries a disclosure, and their position is justified against the same published criteria.

The full rulebook, including how to report a factual error, is on how listings work on thinking.lu. When your pricing page and trial are ready, submit at /en/get-listed. One screen is enough.