---
title: About · The Direct Index
url: https://directindex.org/about
---

[The Direct Index](https://directindex.org/)
[Scanner](https://directindex.org/scan)[Cities](https://directindex.org/cities)[Why](https://directindex.org/why)[Method](https://directindex.org/methodology)[About](https://directindex.org/about)

 About

# Who is behind The Direct Index

A small, independent project with a public method and a named person behind it.

## The person

The Direct Index is built and run by **Antonio Curado**, an engineer in Lisbon. It started in October 2026 with a simple question: when an assistant books a table, does it book with the restaurant or with a middleman, and what decides that? The first city indexed was Lisbon.

## Funding

Funded by the founder. No outside investors, no money from marketplaces, no advertising. If that changes, this page will say so first.

## What is free and what might cost money

Scanning any site, every report page, the city indexes, the data, the API and the MCP server are free. Any paid service in the future will be things like help fixing a site or monitoring it over time, disclosed on the page, and it will never change a score or a rank.

## Where the data comes from

Business listings come from OpenStreetMap contributors, under the ODbL licence. Scan results come from our own requests to each site, nine of them, once. Assistant citations come from the public APIs of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Perplexity. Nothing is bought from data brokers.

## If a page is about your business

Every business page has a free rescan and a claim form. If a check is wrong, the rescan usually settles it; if not, write to us from the page and we will look. Language on every page stays factual: a site is "not reachable by agents", never "bad". If you own a site and want its page removed, ask and it will be.

## Our own site

It would be odd to grade others without passing ourselves. This site publishes every agent standard the scanner looks for, and our crawler signs its requests so any site can verify that a visit came from us. Cloudflare's independent checker rates directindex.org Level 5, Agent-Native.

## Contact

 Your email Message
Company

Send

Read by a person, usually within two days.

 Independent, no marketplace money Open methodology and data No pay-to-rank, ever Agent-Native: Level 5 on Cloudflare's checker

#### The Direct Index

[Why direct](https://directindex.org/why)[About and principles](https://directindex.org/about)[Methodology](https://directindex.org/methodology)[Privacy](https://directindex.org/privacy)

#### Use it

[Free scanner](https://directindex.org/scan)[City indexes](https://directindex.org/cities)[Common fixes](https://directindex.org/fix)[What agent-direct means](https://directindex.org/agent-direct)

#### For agents

[llms.txt](https://directindex.org/llms.txt)[llms-full.txt](https://directindex.org/llms-full.txt)[OpenAPI](https://directindex.org/openapi.json)[MCP server](https://directindex.org/.well-known/mcp/server-card.json)[A2A agent](https://directindex.org/.well-known/agent-card.json)

#### Data

[Sitemap](https://directindex.org/sitemap.xml)[City data, JSON](https://directindex.org/api/city/lisbon)

Business data from OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL. Built in Lisbon.

```json
{"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://directindex.org/#org","name":"The Direct Index","url":"https://directindex.org/","logo":"https://directindex.org/favicon.svg","founder":{"@type":"Person","name":"Antonio Curado"},"description":"Independent measurement of whether AI agents can find, read and act on a business's own website."},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://directindex.org/#site","url":"https://directindex.org/","name":"The Direct Index","publisher":{"@id":"https://directindex.org/#org"},"inLanguage":"en","potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://directindex.org/scan?url={url}"},"query-input":"required name=url"}},{"@type":"WebAPI","name":"The Direct Index API","url":"https://directindex.org/openapi.json","documentation":"https://directindex.org/llms-full.txt","provider":{"@id":"https://directindex.org/#org"}}]}
```