How we score agencies

The five components

Third-party reviews, 30 points

Each platform gives a signal between 0 and 1: the rating out of five, multiplied by how much of a full review base the agency has. The review base is on a log scale and saturates at 50 reviews, so the first ten reviews say the most and the five hundredth adds almost nothing. A rating of 4.9 from 60 reviews is stronger evidence than 5.0 from 3, and a plain average would say the opposite.

The signals are weighted by how hard the platform is to game: Clutch 1, G2 0.8, Google 0.6. Clutch interviews reviewers; anyone with a Google account can post a Google review. The weighted sum is divided by 1.8 and clamped, which means a full-strength Clutch profile alone earns about 17 of the 30 points, Clutch plus G2 at full strength earn all of them, and a third platform adds nothing once the component is full. No single source can carry the component.

We cite the rating, the count, the URL and the date we read it. We never copy review text, never average platform scores into a rating of our own, and never publish review markup for reviews collected elsewhere.

Founder credibility, 25 points

For each founder with a LinkedIn URL: up to 10 points for years in search, capped at 15 years; up to 6 for prior roles at named companies or agencies, capped at 3; up to 9 for notable items such as published work, conference talks and prior exits, capped at 3. The strongest founder counts in full and the second strongest adds 20% of their own score. A founder without a public profile does not count.

Company track record, 20 points

Up to 6 points for years in business, capped at 10; up to 9 for named case studies with a URL and a stated result, capped at 3; up to 2.5 for certifications and 2.5 for awards, each capped at two and each needing a URL. A case study that does not name the client, or names a client but states no result, does not count.

Own AI visibility, 15 points

An agency that sells visibility in AI answers should have some. We test each agency's own domain against a fixed set of category prompts, typically forty, across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, and record the share of answers that name it. That share maps straight onto the component: 60% of prompts is 9 points. The test date is shown on the profile. An agency we have not tested scores zero here until we do.

Transparency, 10 points

4 points for pricing published on the agency's own site, with a link; 2 for a named team; 2 for a published address; 2 for a contact route we have confirmed reaches a person. These are the things a buyer needs before a first call and the things an agency can fix in an afternoon.

The rules

• Every proof needs a URL. No URL, no points. A claim we cannot open is a claim we cannot score.
• Every component is clamped. A huge review base, a founder with thirty years, ten awards: none of them can push a component past its maximum, so no single strength dominates the score.
• Unverified claims score zero. A review profile without a date we read it, a case study without a result, a founder without a profile: each counts for nothing.
• The score is recomputed on every build. Nothing is stored by hand. Change the record and the score follows.
• Ties go to the most recently verified agency. Two agencies on the same score are ordered by the date their record was last checked.
• Nothing can be bought. No agency pays to be listed, to be ranked, or to be placed. We do not take reviews on this site.

Listed, claimed, verified

Listed means we wrote the profile from public sources and the agency has not been in touch. Claimed means someone with an email address at the agency's domain has confirmed the facts and we are re-checking each proof. Verified means that re-check is complete and every proof on the profile was opened and matched. The status is shown on every profile and every ranking row, together with the date the record was last verified. We re-verify every agency at least every six months.

Ranking pages

A ranking page exists for every service, every service and industry, every service and region, and every service, industry and region that three or more agencies match. Below three we neither generate the page nor link to it. If a narrower page would show exactly the same top ten as a broader one above it, we generate only the broader page and redirect the narrower address to it, so no two pages on this site say the same thing.

Corrections

We do not invent facts and we write every profile from sources anyone can check. If an agency's situation has changed, the place to change it is the source: update the review profile, publish the case study, put the pricing on the site, then claim the profile and send the links. The listing follows the record.

Conflicts of interest

Agencies connected to this site's operator are listed under exactly the same rules, score from the same formula, and carry a disclosure notice on their profile.

The weights on this page are read from the same file the scorer runs on, so the published formula and the one that produced today's scores for all 23 agencies cannot drift apart.