A short note on why this exists.
For most of the web's life, being found meant having a website. Then marketplaces made finding easier and quietly moved in between: delivery apps between restaurants and diners, booking sites between hotels and guests, lead sites between tradespeople and homeowners. Each one is useful. Each one also takes a cut and keeps the customer.
Now assistants are becoming how people find and book things. When an assistant books a table or orders dinner, it takes whatever path works. Today that path usually runs through a marketplace, for two reasons that have nothing to do with what owners want: the platforms wired in the marketplaces first, and most independent websites are invisible to agents. They block the crawlers without knowing it, keep the menu in a PDF, and offer nothing an agent can act on.
Owners keep the customer, customers reach the real place, agents get a straight answer. Direct is simply the shortest path, and agents prefer the shortest path, as long as it works.
So we measure whether it works. The Direct Index scans any business website for whether an agent can reach it, read it and act on it, and whether assistants send people there. It explains what to fix in plain words, and it keeps score city by city with open data, so progress is visible as a whole.
It is not a campaign against marketplaces. A business may choose one, and many should. The point is to be able to be found without one, so that choosing is possible.