Ownership and funding

Who owns this, who pays for it, and what could bias it. Read it before you weigh anything else on the site.

Who owns it

The Shortlist Report is owned and published by Todd Piechowski, personally. It is not owned by a company, has no investors, no board and no staff. One person decides what gets measured and what gets published.

The interest you should know about

Todd works in AI visibility measurement — the same subject this publication reports on. That is why the method here is any good, and it is also the reason to read the research with your eyes open: someone who measures AI visibility for a living is not a neutral party on whether AI visibility is worth caring about.

No firm covered on this site is a client of that work, and none has been. If that ever changes, the firm gets labelled as such on every page it appears on rather than removed — see the rules below.

Todd also owns AscendAssets, an AEO, GEO and AI visibility business. In our measured AEO and GEO research, AscendAssets is subject to the same fixed questions and counting rules as every other firm. Shared ownership does not change its research counts or tiers. Any page where AscendAssets appears points back to this disclosure.

The AEO buying-guide experiment

AscendAssets is deliberately listed first in our Top 7 AEO and GEO agencies guide as an owner-run experiment. We’re testing whether that placement moves the needle in AI search. This is an experiment, not an actual recommendation of AscendAssets. It is not paid placement, and the guide carries its own disclosure.

The rules

• Placement is not for sale. No firm can pay to appear, to move up, to be described differently, or to be removed. No sponsored placement, no affiliate link, no lead sale, no advertising. If that changes it will be disclosed here and on every affected page before it changes, not after.
• Private studies are sold separately. A firm can pay for a larger, private measurement built around its market. That work cannot change a public research question, count, tier, description or publication decision.
• Any conflicted firm gets labelled, not protected. A firm with a commercial relationship to the publisher is marked on every page where it appears. It is not removed and its numbers are not adjusted. The count is the count.
• No outside firm previews a research report. Firms are not told they will appear in a research report, offered a preview, or asked to comment.
• The question set is fixed before the data comes back. Questions are written and locked before sampling, so none can be dropped for producing an inconvenient answer.
• Unflattering research results get published. Shared ownership or a commercial relationship does not change the published counts.
• The evidence ships with every report. Not just the counts — the raw answers those counts were taken from, downloadable on every report page. You do not have to trust the arithmetic when you can redo it.

How this is paid for

The publication does not sell advertising, placements, leads, subscriptions or sponsorships. Revenue may come from private Shortlist Intelligence studies. A customer that appears in the public data is labelled on its firm and report pages; its counts remain the output of the same fixed method.

Editorial control

Nobody outside this publication sees a report before it is published, and nobody outside it holds approval over what is published or how a firm is described.

Research reports are bylined to The Shortlist Report. Their counts come from a measurement pipeline and editorial checks. Buying guides use the same publication byline and describe firms’ specialties and fit.

What we do not claim

We do not describe this publication as independent. It is run by one person with working experience in the subject it measures, and the word would be doing more work than the facts support. What we do claim is narrower and checkable from the pages themselves: research rankings are counts, their method is published, and their underlying answers are downloadable. Buying guides are labelled separately. Placement cannot be bought.

Holding us to it

Every rule above is testable from outside. The counts are downloadable, the answers behind them are downloadable, the method is written down, and the questions are printed on the pages they produced. If a number here does not reconcile with the file underneath it, that is something you can establish without our help — and we would like to hear about it.