How to start with Cantera: from install to your first published listings, step by step

A well-made directory listing takes between half an hour and an hour: find the business website, check the phone number, see what people say about it, write a text that does not read like filler and add the markup Google needs to understand it. Multiply that by five hundred businesses and you have months of work. That is why most directories are either empty or full of three-line listings that never rank.

Cantera exists for that. It is a program that lives on your computer and does that work while you do something else, on the listings you already have in your directory. This guide takes you from install to your first published listings without assuming anything.

What Cantera is (and what it is not)

Cantera connects to your WordPress and, listing by listing, does what a careful person with a lot of free time would do:

• Researches the business: its official website, its social profiles and its Google Maps entry. From there it gets the phone, opening hours, address and what the business actually does.
• Writes the listing with that data. Several AI models work as a team: if one is overloaded, another takes over.
• Scores it from 0 to 10 before publishing. That is the gatekeeper: below 6 the listing does not go out; between 6 and 7 it waits in review for you to take a look.
• Publishes it on your WordPress with the structured data Google uses to show stars, map and phone in the results.
• Pings Bing instantly about the new listing, so it does not take weeks to discover it.

And what it is not. First: it is not magic without control. Since 1.0.1 it can seed a directory from scratch (open sources or your list) and fill in the one you already have, but you choose what, where and how many, and you review what comes out. Second: Cantera does not invent businesses or data. If it cannot find the phone number, it leaves it empty rather than making one up. It is not a cloud tool with your data on someone else’s server either: the engine runs on your PC and your keys stay with you.

Before you start: what you need

Three things, none of them complicated:

1. A Windows PC. No admin rights. The graphics card is optional.
2. A WordPress site with the Directorist plugin. It is the most used directory plugin and the one Cantera understands best. It can be empty (Cantera seeds the first listings) or have half-finished listings (it researches and fills them in). What it does not do today is create them out of nothing; if you are starting from scratch, create them by hand or import them from a CSV with the Directorist importer, and Cantera takes care of the rest.
3. At least one AI key. Free accounts work. The wizard shows which ones we recommend and the link to get each one in two minutes.

Step 1: Download and install it

Cantera is a Windows program with a double-click installer.

1. Go to the Cantera page and click the download button.
2. Open the downloaded file (it is about 60 MB because it carries everything it needs inside) and follow the installer. It takes less than a minute.
3. When it finishes, tick “Open Cantera now”. A tab with the panel opens in your browser.

Windows may show you an “Unknown publisher” warning. It does not mean the program is dangerous: the installer is simply not yet signed with a paid certificate. We are a small Spanish startup and for now the products are free, precisely to see if people like them before we take on signing costs. When the warning appears, click “More info” and then “Run anyway”. Microsoft explains that warning in its SmartScreen documentation.

One detail worth knowing: the Cantera panel opens in your browser, but it is not on the internet. It is your own computer talking to you. If you close the tab, the program keeps working; you reopen it from the desktop icon.

Step 2: The onboarding wizard

The first time you open the panel, a wizard walks you through it. There are only a few steps and each one explains what it is for. The important ones:

Your AI keys. Paste the keys you got. Cantera tests them on the spot and tells you whether they work. You can start with just one and add more later: the more you have, the more listings per day. If you have a graphics card, this is also where you enable Ollama to generate locally.

Your WordPress. Your site address, your username and an application password. That password is created from your WordPress profile, under “Application Passwords”, and is used only so Cantera can publish; your regular password is never touched. The wizard checks the connection before moving on.

The connector. It is a small file you upload once to your WordPress, into the wp-content/mu-plugins folder. It adds the structured data to each listing and keeps itself updated from then on. The wizard gives it to you to download and has a “Check” button that confirms it is in place.

The real test. Before letting you go, the wizard researches and writes a real listing in front of you. If something fails, you see it there and not after a night of work.

The pace. How many listings you want it to attempt per hour and the minimum score to publish. It defaults to 6, which is where we keep it in our own directories. You can raise it if you prefer fewer, better listings.

Step 3: Let it run

Your part ends here. Cantera starts picking listings from your directory, one by one, and pushing them through the chain: research, write, score, publish. In the panel you see live which listing is in which stage, which model is working on it and how long it has taken.

The first thing you will notice is that not every listing makes it to the end. Some get parked because the business has no trace on the internet and there is nothing to tell; others stay in review because the score did not reach 7. That is not a failure. It is the gatekeeper doing its job: better an unpublished listing than a bad one with your domain underneath.

On a normal day, with a couple of free keys, you will see dozens of published listings. With several keys or with your graphics card, hundreds. In our own directories, with a mix of free quotas and a home graphics card, we pass 400 a day.

Step 4: Read the panel

The panel is not for configuring, it is for understanding. The four things worth looking at:

• The command center, at the very top: listings per hour, average score of the day, how many are left in the queue and which models are working right now.
• The budget: how much it is costing you. If you run on free quotas you will see a zero and, below it, how much quota each provider has left today.
• Quality: a histogram with the scores of all your listings. If the average drops, something changed (a weak model, a provider with problems) and it is worth a look.
• Local AI, if you have a graphics card: which models you have installed, which one is loaded and how many listings each has written with what score.

Step 5: Let Google and Bing know

Every published listing carries local business structured data: name, address, phone, opening hours and category in the format search engines understand. That is what makes a listing show up with stars and a map instead of as one more blue link.

On top of that, as soon as a listing is published, Cantera pings Bing through IndexNow. It looks like a minor detail and it is not: in our directories Bing brings almost three times more traffic than Google and crawls new listings within hours. If your site is not registered with Bing yet, here is the step by step.

Step 6 (optional): Connect Search Console

Once you have been publishing for a few weeks, connect your Google Search Console from the panel. With that data Cantera spots the listings that almost rank, audits them and rewrites them using the keywords that actually bring visits. Without changing the listing URL or losing what already works. It is the step that turns a big directory into a directory that grows on its own.

How a listing is made, under the hood

If you are curious about the technical side, in SEO directories with 9 AIs in parallel we explain how the models split the work and why we use several instead of one. And the model comparison measured on 168 real listings shows which model writes best, with numbers rather than opinions.

The fine print, no tricks

I would rather say it clearly before it happens to you:

• The computer has to be on for Cantera to work. That is what comes with the work being done at your place and not on someone else’s server.
• Free quotas have a daily cap. When a provider runs out, Cantera jumps to the next one; if all run out, it waits until tomorrow. That is why having more than one key helps.
• A high score does not guarantee ranking. It helps a lot, but the domain, the competition and time also count.
• It is a beta and Windows only. It works and we use it daily on eight directories, but it may have rough edges. If you find one, write to us.
• The installer is not signed yet. We explained it above: it comes with being small and free for now.

None of this is fine print to hide from you. It is the opposite: so you know what you are getting into.

Closing

Getting started with Cantera is easier than it looks: install it, connect your WordPress, paste a couple of free keys and let it run. The next day you have published listings that it researched and wrote, each with a score underneath. The rest is checking the panel from time to time and letting the directory grow.

If you would rather start from a domain with authority instead of from zero, the previous step of the path is Tesora. And if you have any question getting started, write to us at [email protected]; reading from people who are just starting is a pleasure.

Keep reading

• SEO directories with 9 AIs in parallel
• Model comparison measured on 168 real listings
• Bing brings us almost three times more traffic than Google