We Checked All Sixty AI Tools. Thirteen Were Wrong.

A list of sixty AI tools has been shared thousands of times. Before posting our version of it, we checked every entry. Thirteen were wrong.

That is more than one in five, on a graphic people are told to save so they do not fall behind. The irony is hard to miss: acting on an unchecked list is one of the faster ways to waste an afternoon.

Here is what we found, how a tool actually dies, the corrected sixty, and the five-minute check that catches this on any list you are handed.

The order to check a tool in five minutes

Failures show up in a sequence. Run the checks in this order and you stop as soon as one fails.

Most people stop at step two, which catches the dead links and misses everything more interesting. Steps three to five are where the quiet failures live: a working site that belongs to someone else, or a familiar name doing a completely different job.

Six ways a tool dies, and two ways a list breaks

Every problem fell into one of eight patterns. Six of them are things that happened to the product. Two are things that happened to the list.

Notice how different these failures feel to a reader. A dead domain is obvious – you type the address, nothing loads, you move on. A redirect is not. You land on a real, polished, working site, and unless you check who owns it and what it does, you assume the list was right and start learning the wrong product.

The duplicate is the most human failure of the set, and the easiest to make. On a sixty-item graphic nobody reads the whole thing twice, so the same tool appears in two categories and quietly steals a slot from something useful.

The post this came from

The corrected sixty

This is the version after every replacement, grouped as the reel groups them.

Two categories deserve a word of caution rather than enthusiasm. Detectors claim to identify AI-written text, and their accuracy is genuinely contested – false positives on human writing are well documented, so no result from one should be treated as proof of anything. Humanizers exist to make generated text read as human, which is fine as an editing aid and a poor foundation for a channel. Neither replaces the thing that actually earns trust, which is saying something true in your own voice and being open about how it was made, as in disclosing generated visuals.

For a channel, only about half of these twelve rows matter. Writing, image, voice, video, slides and productivity cover most weeks; the rest are for other jobs. Which rows are genuinely yours is the question we worked through in the wall is the signal, not the chart.

What a dead entry actually costs you

It is tempting to treat a broken link as a small annoyance. On a saved list it is worse than that, because of when you reach for it. Nobody opens a tool list while relaxing on a Sunday. You open it on the day you need a voiceover, a thumbnail or a deck, with the video already half made and a deadline in front of you.

That is when a dead entry costs real time: a search, a landing page that is not what you expected, ten minutes deciding whether you have the wrong name, and then the actual job of finding a replacement while the original task waits. Two of those in one afternoon and the upload slips a day.

So the checking is not pedantry about link hygiene. It is protecting the moment you will use the list – which is the same reason we care about where the hours quietly go in where do the hours actually go.

Why checking is worth the hour

Verifying sixty entries took about an hour. That hour bought three things.

Nobody wastes an afternoon. Every dead entry on a shared list costs each reader the time it takes to search, land on nothing, and wonder whether they got the name wrong. Multiply that by a few thousand shares.

The list is honest about what it is. A dated list – “all sixty checked live, September 2026” – tells a reader in a year exactly how much to trust it. An undated one looks equally current forever.

It is a real differentiator. Saying “we checked every one of these” and meaning it is one of the few claims in this space that is easy to verify and hard to fake. We made the same argument the last time we audited a list in we checked all eighty tools, and the same rot appeared in a hundred-prompt sheet in the hundred-prompt audit.

If you make list content yourself, three habits keep yours alive longer: name the job before the tool, so a reader whose tool has vanished still knows what to look for; keep a text version alongside the graphic, because text can be corrected in a minute; and date it. None of that is difficult. It just means treating a list as something that decays.

Frequently asked questions

How long does a list like this stay accurate?
Ours took one in five entries wrong within roughly a year. Assume any undated list you find is worse than that.

Is a renamed tool still the same product?
Usually yes, sometimes with a new owner and new pricing. Check what it does now rather than assuming continuity.

Should I trust a list that says it was checked?
More than one that does not say so, and less than your own check of the three tools you will actually use.

Why do lists circulate as images?
Because images travel well on social platforms. That is also why they cannot be corrected, which is the whole problem.

Check three before you save

Next time a tool list lands in your feed, do not save it. Pick the three entries you would actually use this month and run the five checks: resolve, load, redirect, owner, current job. If all three pass, the list is probably fine. If one fails, you have learned something about the whole graphic.

Save this one if you like. It was checked live this month – and by next year it will need checking again, like every list ever made.

Learning a lot does not make anyone good. Doing a lot does.

If you want the structure that turns that into a habit, that is what our free challenge is built for: no barrier to entry, a genuine commitment to action, and a refundable commitment fee you get back when you finish. You are not paying for the knowledge. You are betting on yourself finishing, and we hold the stake.

Which dead tool have you wasted time on? Tell us in the comments on the original reel.

For more on building channels for English-speaking audiences, that is what we work on at mmoyoutube.com.