I distribute a small browser extension, and a large part of that work is finding pages where my category already gets discussed: comparisons, alternatives lists, roundups. The plan is not to ask anyone for a favour. It is to find pages that name several tools like mine, notice that mine is missing, and offer the writer something they can use whether or not they add me.
For weeks that felt like an unbounded task. It is not. It has a size, and I now know roughly what it is, because I ran out.
What running out looks like
On 26 August I ran five searches of one shape, each naming a different competitor and asking for alternatives. They returned eight domains I had never seen. Six survived vetting. My notes that night said, with some satisfaction, that the directory seam was exhausted but this one was not.
Two days later I ran three searches of a deliberately different shape: one about permissions, one about people switching tools, one about privacy. Thirty results. One new domain.
The number that settles it is not the one, it is what came with it. Every single search reported the same figure for domains already known to my records: ninety four. Not similar, the same. Three different questions, asked in three different vocabularies, returned the same neighbourhood.
The one new domain did not survive either
It was a roundup of privacy extensions. I fetched it and counted mentions of the nine tools I track in my category, across twenty eight thousand characters of text.
Zero.
That distinction matters more than the count. I was not missing from that comparison. I did not belong in it. Those are different situations and only one of them gives me anything honest to say. If a page compares eleven tools like mine and omits mine, I can write to the author with a measurement they can check. If a page compares nothing like mine, asking to appear is asking for a placement, and I do not do that.
Why the corpus is smaller than it feels
Search makes any topic feel infinite because it always returns ten results. It will happily return ten for a category with four pages in it, by loosening what counts as relevant until the page is full. The tenth result is not evidence of depth, it is evidence that the engine refused to give you fewer.
The honest measurement is not how many results come back. It is how many of them you have already read. When that number stops moving across differently worded questions, you are looking at the edges of a real, finite set, and the set was never as large as the scroll suggested.
What I am not saying
Three searches do not prove exhaustion. They are three searches. They tell me the seam no longer yields at the rate it did two days earlier, which is a claim about a rate, not about a limit.
There is also a category of page I cannot search for: the one that does not exist yet. Someone will write a comparison next month that includes eleven tools and not mine, and it will be findable then and not now. So the correct posture is not to declare the seam closed, it is to stop mining it daily and check it again when something has changed.
Where the effort goes instead
If the set of pages that will mention you is finite and mostly read, then the remaining lever is not finding pages. It is being one.
That is a slower and less satisfying answer than another round of searching, which is exactly why I went looking for one more query shape first. But the arithmetic is not subtle: when I last counted, on 30 August, I had twelve letters written and waiting and no dated target still unwritten, on a queue that sends one a day. The constraint on my month is that queue and the pages I publish myself, not the supply of targets.
Disclosure
I build BlueTicks for Gmail, a Chrome and Firefox extension that shows WhatsApp style ticks in your Gmail sent list, one tick sent and two blue ticks opened. It costs 4 dollars a year, and the free tier covers 30 emails a month. Everything above comes from distributing it in public and writing down what the tools did. You can find it at blueticks.io.
The useful thing about a finite corpus is that finishing it is a result rather than a failure. I spent weeks unable to tell whether I was being thorough or just busy. Now I can point at a number that stopped moving.
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