LittleStoryForty rows of roundup pages, every one of them listing four bedtime story apps with a single line each, and none of them listing mine. The gap wasn't a marketing problem. It was a sentence I had never written down.
seobacklinksbing webmaster toolsindie devbedtime storiesForty rows of everyone else
There is a free report I ignored for two years because it lives inside a tool I only ever open to submit a sitemap. Last week I opened it, typed in the two sites that outrank LittleStory for "bedtime story app", and ticked one checkbox: show domains not linking to my site. Forty rows came back. Roundups, resource lists, a school newsletter — all of them cheerfully recommending four bedtime story apps, none of them mine.
LittleStory takes one photo, a few seconds of your recorded voice and a single line of text, and turns them into an illustrated story read back in your own voice. I have explained that to investors in person. After reading those forty rows I wasn't sure I could say it that fast.
The checkbox that stings
The report gives you three columns: where the link lives, which of your pages it points at, and the words they used to describe you. The checkbox is the one that actually hurts. It doesn't show who links to you. It shows you the pages that have already decided what your category is — and wrote that decision down without asking.
I scrolled expecting to feel robbed. Instead I noticed something duller. Almost every one of those forty pages was a list where each tool gets a single line. "X: offline receipts." "Y: focus timer." One line, every time, no exceptions. The format of the page was the reason I wasn't on it.
Nobody had a sentence for us
So I looked at my own anchors — the words real sites used when they did link to me. "click here". The bare domain. One blog post that wrote "this app". Two years of work, and not one stranger had a sentence for it.
Which is the same problem I have at home. My daughter asks for "the one with the whale". I scroll through thirty stories opening them one at a time, because I never named them well enough for either of us to point at. She can't ask for the right story and the internet can't describe the right app, and both failures are mine to fix. If I can't put LittleStory in one line, I have no business asking a stranger's roundup page to do it.
Three steps, no budget
Read your own anchors first, before you touch anyone else's list. That is the honest version of how the world describes you, and it is usually less flattering than the version on your landing page. Then add two competitors in your own weight class, not the giants — a four-person team's backlink gap is a list you can actually finish. Then export the checkbox and judge every row before you email anybody: is the page real, is it about this, does my product genuinely belong there.
The email that gets answered isn't "please add my link". It's the one that finishes the sentence: here is what this page is missing, and here is why your readers would want it. I can write that sentence about LittleStory now. It took forty rows of other people's names to make me sit down and write it.