App marketplace SEO: VS Code, JetBrains and Wix

The VS Code Marketplace is worth it for ranking listing pages, the Wix App Market for a followed link every crawler can see, and the JetBrains Marketplace for followed links on a smaller audience. Automation platforms bring reach inside your users' workflows, though most don't link back.

Google's AI answers mention the VS Code Marketplace about 8,100 times in the sample we pulled and JetBrains about 950, so a developer tool listed in either sits in pages AI answers already read.

Yes, for ranking: VS Code Marketplace listing pages rank for about 57,000 search terms in the US, such as "plantuml", where one extension's listing is second on Google. The links to your site stay nofollow until you become a verified publisher, which takes six months on the marketplace and a DNS TXT record.

The listing is built from your README and package.json, so write the README like a landing page: the task in the first line, then what the extension does, then setup.

{
  "name": "your-extension",
  "displayName": "Your Product: the task it does",
  "description": "One sentence with the task, in the words people search.",
  "publisher": "your-publisher-id",
  "homepage": "https://example.com/your-product",
  "keywords": ["the", "words", "people", "search"]
}

npm install -g @vscode/vsce
vsce package
vsce publish

Yes. On live JetBrains Marketplace listings we checked, description links have no rel value and the Documentation link uses noopener noreferrer, so both are followed, though JavaScript adds them.

A JetBrains plugin has no "website" field, so use Contacts & Resources, then Documentation URL, and point it at your product page. If the plugin relates to your business, you declare yourself a trader, and JetBrains verifies your business and banking details before approving the plugin, even when it's free. EU consumer law requires the check, and JetBrains shows a trader's name, email, address and phone number publicly, so have those ready before you upload.

Write the description as prose with measured claims, keep it under 1,200 characters, and leave the platform's own name out of it. The Wix App Market review includes an automated check of the description, and bulleted or step-by-step descriptions don't pass it.

The app's ID becomes the listing URL, so the address isn't readable, and new listings take a while to appear in the market's own search. The link makes up for it. Ours, "Visit our Website", has no rel and sits in the server HTML on a page set to index, as one curl command confirms:

curl -sL -A "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) Chrome/147.0 Safari/537.36" \
  "https://www.wix.com/app-market/b9407962-67b2-43c6-a0cf-3c9ed465a527" \
  | grep -o -E '<a [^>]*href="https?://(www\.)?workpods\.ai[^"]*"[^>]*>'

Our Wix App Market listing. Its link to workpods.ai is followed and in the server HTML; checked 11 Nov 2026.

Mostly not. On live vendor listings we checked, Zapier linked with nofollow, Make and Composio showed no link to the vendor's site, and Pipedream gave a followed vendor link.

An automation listing gives you reach. Your product appears where people build workflows, and each workflow that uses it keeps them using you. List there for your users, not for the link.

Start with the marketplace inside the tool your users already work in, then add the ones that rank or give a followed link. A developer tool starts on the VS Code Marketplace and then JetBrains; a website add-on starts on its builder's app market; a product with a public API starts on the automation platforms its customers use.

If you have an MCP server, start with Claude, ChatGPT and the MCP Registry instead, covered in MCP servers for SEO and GEO. To learn what a marketplace gives before you apply, check an existing vendor's listing with the method in dofollow vs nofollow backlinks. For browser extensions, read Chrome Web Store SEO, and for every venue side by side, the SaaS directories guide.

Before visitors arrive, check your landing page with Agent Ready, or have us handle the listings through our agent platform listing work.