The method
How this index is built
Where the agencies come from
Agencies are found by open-web research — existing directories, brands that credit their agencies, case studies, conference and podcast rosters. Partner directories are one source among several, not the boundary of the list. Being listed here is not an endorsement, and no agency has paid to appear.
How the facts are gathered
A crawler reads each agency’s own public pages, identifying itself as AgencyFieldGuideBot and honouring robots.txt without exception. A language model extracts specific fields from those pages. Nothing it extracts is published automatically.
Every claim is one of three things
- Verified by a third party
- Confirmed on a source the agency does not control — a partner program’s own directory, for instance. The page it was read from is linked.
- Stated by the agency
- Taken from the agency’s own website. It is what they say about themselves, and it is labelled that way. We link the page we read it on so you can check.
- Derived from the client roster
- Calculated from clients named on the agency’s site — which verticals they serve, the typical size of client, how concentrated their work is.
- Inferred, and used only for search
- Where an agency’s site does not say what industry a client works in, we sometimes infer it from the client’s name. These inferences only help buyers find agencies through search — they are never shown on a profile as something the agency stated, and they never replace an industry the agency did state. We keep one only when the model is confident, which still leaves it wrong about one time in ten.
A person approves every fact
Nothing reaches this site automatically. Every extracted claim is queued for review, and a person approves or rejects it before it publishes. Where a claim was wrong and we were told, it was rejected and is not shown.
What is not published
A profile appears when either of two things is true: we hold enough about an agency to be useful and can name at least one client, or a partner directory has listed the agency, its site is live, and we were able to read at least one thing off it. An agency that told us about itself directly counts the same as one a directory listed. An agency that meets neither is not listed until it does. Either way, a profile shows only what we actually hold, so some are sparse. What we could not read at all we do not publish as a page. Claims we could not confirm are left out rather than guessed at.
Corrections and removal
If something here is wrong about your agency, or you would rather not be listed, email support@agencyfieldguide.com and say so. Corrections are made by hand. Removal does not require a reason.
Who runs this
Agency Field Guide is run by Tim Kilroy. Nothing here is paid placement, and no agency has paid to appear or to rank.