About
Measured research on agency recommendations, plus practical buying guides to firms and what they do best.
Why this exists
Buyers have started asking AI assistants which agency to hire, and the assistants answer. What they answer with is whatever has been written about those agencies online, which in this category is mostly the agencies’ own marketing sites. There is no independent count of who actually gets recommended, so we made one.
The method is dull on purpose. Ask the question a buyer would ask. Ask it many times, because the answer moves. Write down every firm named. Publish the tally, the sample size and the date. Anyone with access to the same assistant can run it again and check.
Who writes this
Research reports and buying guides are bylined to The Shortlist Report. Research counts come from a measurement pipeline and editorial checks. Our Top 7 guides describe firms’ specialties and fit.
That is a deliberate trade. A byline names someone you can hold responsible, and we have moved that accountability to two pages you can check instead: who owns this and how it is funded, and how the research counts are produced. If a page here is wrong, the publication is answerable for it and there is an address to write to.
What the measurement runs on
Prompts are issued to AI assistants on a schedule, and every response is stored whole rather than summarised, so a count can be re-derived later from the original text instead of trusted from a spreadsheet.
Across the 107 questions published so far that comes to 33,883 stored responses naming 577 firms. Every report links the counts it drew from those responses as a CSV and a JSON file, so you can check our arithmetic without asking us for anything.
What we cover, and what is next
We currently publish on managed IT service providers, Amazon agencies, fractional CFO and outsourced accounting firms, TikTok Shop agencies, Salesforce and CRM implementation partners, AEO, GEO and AI visibility agencies, NetSuite and ERP implementation partners and executive search firms. TikTok Shop agencies came first, because the category is new enough that buyers have no established way to compare firms and old enough that plenty of firms exist. Every research report needs a measured sample behind it. No data, no research report. Our buying guides cover the same categories, with seven firms and what they do best.
What we collect from you
Google Analytics, counting visits, and nothing else. No account, no newsletter, no advertising, no retargeting, and nothing sold or shared with the firms we cover. Every page works with JavaScript switched off, so blocking it costs you nothing. The full detail, including how to stop it.
A publication that asks firms to accept being measured in public should be willing to say what it measures about its own readers.
Corrections and contact
Errors, misnamed firms, and firms merged wrongly: how corrections work. Everything else — including requests to be removed, which we will explain rather than action — goes to the same place.