DO NOTE THAT I DO NOT WORK FOR DISCORD NOR DO I REPRESENT THEM, I DON'T HOLD RESPONSIBILITY IF YOU GET REJECTED DUE TO OTHER METRICS.
Read the whole thing, I put some tips too :).
Here are some steps on how to organically grow your Discord Bot.
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Make good product that will satisfy people's needs in their Discord Servers.
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Let's say that you have made your good product, now let's grow it, start talking about and bring people's attention around your bot, tell them what it does, and if they like it, they may invite it to their servers and if it is actually good they may recommend it to others ( that's better way to grow a bot instead of straight going to top.gg or other bot lists to advertise it, and is fully organic growth)
Do note that Bot lists won't prevent your bot from being verified, but I'd suggest to you to not advertise on bot listing sites until after you're verified.
Staff suggests just talking about the product and growing it that way as it seems more organic.
Of course it is always up to you whether or not you should advertise, but telling that your bot exists and what it does is not straight up advertising as its just you talking about it, not posting it directly somewhere where random people would add it.
Because talking about your bot mouth to mouth is better since its more controlled than bot lists since its just you talking about it, bot developers have full control on how to grow bots, if they have tools like logging which prevents their bot from being added to said below ghost, bot farm and such servers.
To not get manually rejected due to inorganic growth by Discord your bot should not be in ghost servers, bot farms and should be in active use, make sure it doesn't have too many shared ownerships too
How would you track that, well you can implement logging system in a private channel and log guild joins and leave them if they're sus guilds.
What is a bot farm and ghost server?
A bot farm is server(s) with dozens of bots in it.
ghost server is a server that is there only to "help" you qualify for bot verification, where the bot is not actively used.
If you got any more questions or something you didn't understand from this github page go ahead and ask anything related to bot verification in https://discord.gg/discord-developers people there will help you, make sure to keep on topic in the correct channels.
Some Tips A lot of users, like 50%, will just kick the bot out after trying it out. You can lower this percentage by providing the best user experience and, most importantly, an easy setup. This is the most important factor in my opinion.
Have an invite command, like /invite . I've noticed a lot of users use such commands to get the invite of the application and add it into their servers.
Have a clear and brandable bot name because many people will just search for your bot online after seeing it in a server. Having "Mod Boat" as a name is not useful, try to make it unique and original.
Have a website that will get indexed when looking for your bot (Top.gg page is good enough though).
Display your website and the main command (like /help) in your bot's status, insert an invite to it in its /help command as a Button or a hyperlink [text](link) for example Bot invite.
You can lock some of your features and require users to vote your bot in order to use them, I've noticed that having a higher vote/positive review counts on Top.gg or other bot listing sites increase your chance of growth.
Most importantly, make sure your bot is easy for users and understandable by everyone.
I am not affiliated with Discord or Discord Staff in any way.
Thanks to fellow developers on Discord for helping me gather tips and intelligence on the topic!