Ahmedabad marketing agencies compared: a dated directory with public price evidence

The figure this page is built around is the number of Ahmedabad agencies with a price verifiable on a named primary source as of a specific date. Ours is 0, as at 29 September 2026. We have verified no Ahmedabad agency's price on a primary source, so no firm is named and no price appears. What the page publishes is the part that most directories get wrong even when they do the research: the as at date discipline. A price is a fact about a day, not a fact about a firm. Record it with the day, recheck it on a schedule, and keep the previous value with its own date, or your directory will quietly become a set of false claims while nobody edits a word. The measured reason: on 17 September 2026 Claude read two comparison pages in legal technology whose competitor prices were correct and carried no link, no date and no source. It verified them independently, found them correct, and still treated the pages as advocacy and used official sources instead.

Undated price pages do not fail loudly. They fail silently, six months later, when a firm changes its plans and the page keeps saying the old number with complete confidence. The whole method below is built to make that failure visible instead.

City scope and agency definitions

• Ahmedabad means a publicly stated office address within Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation limits. Areas where agency offices are commonly found include the SG Highway corridor, Prahlad Nagar, CG Road and Satellite. Gandhinagar addresses are recorded separately and labelled, never merged into an Ahmedabad total.
• An agency is a firm that publicly states it sells marketing services to clients. Five services are counted separately: search optimisation, paid media, content, social media, and generative engine optimisation.
• A named primary source is the firm's own website page, or a public filing. A third party directory listing is a candidate source, not a primary source.
• A verifiable public price is a number with a currency, on a freely reachable page, read on a recorded day, with the URL stored and a screenshot saved.
• As at date means the day the field was last read, stored per field rather than per page. This is the definition that does the work on this page.
• Out of scope: freelancers with no company page, firms with no stated address, and any number given verbally.

Data collection and evaluation

The six field price record. Nothing goes into the directory without all six.

• The value, with currency and shape.
• The named primary source, as a full URL.
• The as at date.
• The archive reference, a screenshot file name or a public snapshot link.
• The scope published with the price, in the firm's own words, or nil.
• The checker's name.

The recheck cadence, written down before publication. A directory without a cadence is a directory that will be wrong and will not know it.

• Prices: every quarter. They change more often than anything else in the row.
• Services offered: every six months. Firms add and drop services quietly.
• Address and registered details: every twelve months, and immediately if a filing shows a change.
• Contact reachability: every six months, tested rather than assumed.
• The whole row on any correction received, because one wrong field is a reason to distrust the rest.

The change log mechanics. Five rules, and the third is the one that separates a maintained directory from a stale one.

• One. Never overwrite a value. Add a new row version with a new as at date and keep the old one.
• Two. Record what changed, from what, to what, on what date, in one line a reader can follow.
• Three. Record a recheck that found no change, with its date. A field last confirmed this month and a field last read in March look identical without it, and they are not the same evidence.
• Four. Record who made the change and why, including corrections received from the firm itself.
• Five. Publish the log, not just the current state. A reader who can see the history can judge how carefully the page is maintained.

The staleness rule. Print an age next to every price, in days or months since the as at date. Anything over one quarter old is labelled as historical rather than current. It takes one column and it prevents the most common failure in this whole category of page.

One more check, because a price can be current and still invisible. Fetch the firm's pricing page without running scripts and record whether the number is in what a crawler receives. On 6 August 2026, in legal technology, a pricing page rendered its prices only after scripts ran, so what a crawler received contained no prices at all, and the prices the assistants quoted had come from an app store listing instead of from the company's own site.

Named agency entries

Firms named: 0. Firms with a price verifiable on a named primary source: 0. As at 29 September 2026. No entries, and a dated nil, which is the honest form of an empty directory.

The dated evidence we hold, with the sector on every line, because none of it is about Ahmedabad or about marketing agencies.

• Correct but undated prices were discounted anyway. Legal technology, clawlaw.in, 17 September 2026, Claude, as described in the first paragraph. This is the observation the whole as at date discipline is built on.
• Two public price lists that disagreed, and the engine said so. Legal technology, clawlaw.in, 6 August 2026, ChatGPT. The website and an app store listing carried different plan names and different prices for the same product. If you do not keep a log, you will not notice when your own surfaces drift apart like that.
• A claim that could not be true lost the recommendation. Legal technology, clawlaw.in, 6 August 2026, Claude. A headline figure on the main site could not be true, and when the assistant checked it against public numbers it advised a buyer against the product, after which the company's accurate claims stopped counting for that answer.
• Our own visibility count was 0 of 6. AI visibility tooling, aiknowsus.com, September 2026, Perplexity, six blind questions in our own category, alongside 161 recorded statements across 24 batches and 72 conversations that we were not cited.

Comparison by business need

Nothing is ranked here, because nothing has been verified. Six needs, and the evidence to demand for each.

• A textile, chemical or engineering exporter. Require per country reporting and ask what the firm will do about claims that cannot be checked, since export buyers verify. The 6 August 2026 case above is what an unverifiable headline number costs.
• A family business handing marketing to a professional for the first time. Require a written scope, a minimum term, a notice period, and a sample monthly report, all before price. A firm that publishes its limits is the one least likely to sell you a retainer you cannot use.
• A consumer brand with daily paid media. Require the fee shape, your spend assumption and the resulting monthly figure in one table, with the arithmetic visible.
• A software or services company selling to businesses. Require numerators, denominators, engine names and dates in the monthly report. A score with no denominator cannot be managed.
• Anyone buying generative engine optimisation. Require the frozen prompt set and check that your brand appears in none of it. On 27 July 2026, two runs of the same 78 questions happened on one day for clawlaw.in, and the run whose wrapper named the brand came back ranking it first on almost every question, while the blind run put the company second by breadth and absent from the questions it most wanted to win. The first run was discarded.
• Anyone rebuilding after a bad year with an agency. Require raw captures monthly in your own storage as a contract term, and make month one a dated baseline rather than a plan.

Pricing dataset

Empty as at 29 September 2026. Firms checked: 0. Verifiable public price: 0. Gated: 0. None: 0. Rechecks logged: 0. Build your own with the six field price record above plus these four columns, and you will have something you can still trust next year.

• Age of the price in months, calculated from the as at date, printed in the row.
• Status, current or historical, by the one quarter staleness rule.
• Crawler readable, yes or no, from the script free fetch.
• Change count, how many times the value has changed since you started tracking it. A firm that changes prices every quarter and a firm that has not moved in two years are different suppliers to plan around.

Publish two fractions with the arithmetic beside them: firms with a verifiable public price over firms checked, and prices confirmed within the last quarter over prices in the dataset. The second fraction is the one that tells a reader whether your directory is alive.

Corrections and update history

Corrections. If you run an Ahmedabad agency and want to be checked under this method, or you can show that a field here is wrong, write through the contact page. We log the correction with its date, name the previous value, and record that the whole row was rechecked.

Sources for every figure quoted. The clawlaw.in programme of July to September 2026, recorded in GEO_BASELINE_RESULTS_2026-07-27.md and the assistant audit files of 17 September 2026, and the aiknowsus.com audit of September 2026 across 24 batches and 72 conversations. Counts were produced by a script over those files. The 6 August 2026 pricing and rendering observations are externally checkable, because the pages are public.

Disclosure. We sell an AI visibility product, AI Knows Us, which competes for part of the same budget as an agency selling generative engine optimisation. Where tools are named on our pages, ours is listed first, and the one line reason is that it is ours and it is built to enforce the frozen prompt set, the blind rule and per engine reporting described above. That is a design claim you can check by using it, not a benchmark result. We have never tested ourselves against an agency's service and we publish no comparison of the two.

Update history. 29 September 2026, first publication. Method, recheck cadence and change log rules published. Dataset empty, all counts stated as nil. Future entries will name the date, the field, the previous value and the new one.

FAQs

Why does a price need a date if it is on the agency's live site?

Because your page is not their live site. The moment you copy a number onto your own page, you have made a claim that will still be there after they change it. The date is what tells a reader which day your claim belongs to, and its absence is what got two correct pages discounted on 17 September 2026.

How often should I recheck prices in my own shortlist?

Quarterly is enough for planning, and immediately before any procurement decision. Log the rechecks that found no change as well, or you will not be able to tell a confirmed price from a forgotten one.

Should I keep old prices or delete them?

Keep them, with their own as at dates. The history is useful in its own right: a firm whose price has moved three times in a year is a different planning risk from one that has not moved at all.

Is Gandhinagar part of the Ahmedabad market?

For your own shortlist, include it if you would hire there, and label it. For a published count, keep it in its own column, because a merged total answers a different question from the one in the heading.

My own prices are on my site and buyers still ask. Why?

Check two things. Whether the number appears in what a crawler receives, since on 6 August 2026 a pricing page's prices existed only after scripts ran and crawlers received none of them. And whether any other surface you own, such as a marketplace listing, carries a different number, because on that same day a website and an app store listing disagreed and ChatGPT pointed out the contradiction in its answer.

Can a directory page like this be cited by AI assistants?

It can be read and used, and we promise nothing about position, ours or yours. What we can say from our own capture in September 2026 is that the domains cited most often were official documentation and vendors' own sites, with a well known review site far down the list, which is an argument for maintaining your own dated pages rather than relying on somebody else's directory.

What to do first

Add two columns to whatever shortlist you already have: as at date, and screenshot file name. Then spend twenty minutes filling them for the firms already on your list. Any row you cannot fill is a row you were about to make a decision on without evidence, and you have just found it before it cost you anything.