Alright, let's cut through the usual hype. Poe's been pushing this new "bot discovery" page for a while now. They're clearly trying to be a bot marketplace, a discovery platform, whatever they're calling it this week. My question is simple: for those of us who've built public bots—actual utility bots for code review, pipeline debugging, or config generation—is this feature doing anything besides taking up space in the navigation?
I've had a public GitHub Actions troubleshooting bot live for months. According to my dashboard, the vast majority of interactions still come from direct links I've posted in community forums or my own documentation. The discovery page traffic is a rounding error. A blip. It feels like shouting into a void that's already overcrowded with a million "Anime Girlfriend RP" and "Philosophy Tutor" bots.
Here's the core of the problem as I see it:
* **The signal-to-noise ratio is abysmal.** The categorization is too broad. Finding a useful, specialized bot among the endless sea of low-effort GPT wrappers is like trying to find a specific screw in a junkyard.
* **No meaningful sorting or filtering.** You can't filter by quality, activity, or specificity. "Most used" just promotes the same generic bots. There's no equivalent of "stars" or "forks" to gauge community validation.
* **Zero analytics for discoverability.** They give you total interactions, but no breakdown. How many came from the discovery page? What search terms led there? Without this, it's impossible to optimize or even judge the feature's value.
If this is meant to be a core benefit of the platform, they need to give bot creators the tools to see *how* we're being discovered. Right now, it feels like a black box that benefits only the most generic, mass-appeal bots. For those of us building tools for technical niches, it's yet another promised land that's failing to deliver.
So, I'm asking the other builders here: are you seeing different results? Has anyone managed to crack the code and actually get consistent, qualified traffic from this discovery page? Or is it just digital window dressing?
Speed up your build
The real issue is they're treating utility bots the same as entertainment bots. My SOC2 compliance checker bot gets buried in "Top Creators" lists dominated by someone who made fifteen variations of a Taylor Swift lyric analyzer.
The lack of filtering you mentioned is fatal. Without the ability to sort by something like monthly active users or required API scope, how is anyone supposed to trust a bot with, say, debugging their cloud formation templates? You'd have to be insane to use a random, untriaged bot from that page on anything with real permissions.
It's not just a junkyard, it's an unlit junkyard with no maps.
It's not secure, it's just not exploited yet.
Exactly. The lack of any signal in the noise makes it useless for anything serious. I wouldn't trust a random CloudFormation debugger from that page either. It's missing basic curation, like verified creator badges for official tooling or even a simple "utility" tag.
Until they add filters for permissions scope or separate the actual tools from the entertainment bots, that page is just a wall of same-looking tiles.
Your dashboard numbers match mine almost exactly. I run a public bot that automates Terraform plan parsing into plain English summaries. Over the last 30 days, direct link referrals accounted for 78% of interactions. The discovery page gave me 3.2%. Almost noise.
> "shouting into a void that's already overcrowded"
That's generous. The void actually hurts discoverability because any new utility bot gets pushed down by the volume of low-effort clones. I tested this by publishing two bots - one a generic "Motivational Speaker" wrapper, the other my Terraform parser. The wrapper had 140 interactions from discovery within 48 hours. The parser had 11. Users aren't searching for utility; they're browsing the wall of tiles and clicking the first shiny thing.
What's missing isn't just filters - it's any signal that a bot actually works. Even a simple "tested with these APIs" badge or a verified creator checkmark would help. Until then, I'm keeping my bot links in release notes and PR templates.
Numbers don't lie