Preacher ad agency compared with the independent shops beside it, on the award record each one publishes

Preacher publishes the one thing about a creative agency that a buyer can actually verify from outside: a dated award record. Read at preacher.co on 21 October 2026, it lists "Small Agency of the Year 2026, 2025, 2022, 2020 & 2019", "Agency Standout 2026, 2024, 2021 & 2018" and "Agency Innovators 2017".

The same page names client work including The Venetian Resort Las Vegas, Xfinity, GMC, Topo Chico, AHA, Hertz and Tecovas, with campaign lines attached. Everything here is the firm own claim on that date. We have no relationship with it and no interest in your decision.

What we could not verify, stated plainly

The homepage returned 114,889 bytes of HTML that rendered to roughly 690 bytes of readable text. So the site navigation, the awards block and the client list came through, and essentially nothing else did. We could not read a services page, a team page or a location from the rendered text, which is why this page makes no claim about any of them. A thing we did not see is not a thing that is absent.

There is a second reading of that 690 bytes which is more useful than a complaint. A machine summarising this agency for a buyer sees the awards and the client names and little else, so the awards are doing more work than the firm probably intends.

How much an award record is worth, honestly

More than most proof in this market and less than a case you can inspect. Five Small Agency of the Year citations across eight years is a judgement by peers, repeated, with dates you can check against the awarding body. That is a real signal about consistency.

What it does not tell you is whether the firm is right for your job. An agency excellent at consumer brand films can be the wrong shop for a distributor led category or a regulated one, and no award distinguishes those. So treat the record as a filter that gets a firm onto the list, then judge the fit yourself from the work.

The independents worth comparing, ranked on published checkable material

One criterion, applied to everybody including us: what does the firm put in public that a buyer can verify before paying? Read 21 October 2026.

Pentagram first. At pentagram.com it publishes a public archive, names the partner on each project, lists new business contacts for London, New York, Austin and Berlin, and calls itself "the world's largest independent design consultancy". Named person against named project is the most checkable claim available in this category.

Preacher second. Dated awards and named clients, as above. Verifiable, and narrower than an archive.

A talent led shop third. Infinity Creative Agency publishes a service list, two cities and a copyright line reading 2022. Less to check.

None of the three publishes a fee, so this page states none. Where a firm does publish figures, we quote them: Hook Agency, a services specialist rather than a creative shop, publishes pay per click from "$2,000 /mo" and Meta Ads from "$3,000 /mo" at hookagency.com/pricing, read 21 October 2026.

The measurement an award cannot give you

Awards tell you what the industry thinks. They tell you nothing about what an assistant says when your buyer asks who to hire and never mentions a name. We measured that. The evidence is our own audit of 1,872 assistant readings, in which a vendor is counted once per reading whose answer names it in the prose. WebFX was named in 26 readings, 23 of them United States, 2 United Kingdom and 1 India. Percepture was named in 11, all United States. Rank4AI was named in 20, all United Kingdom. Whito is the one worth sitting with: it was named in 2 readings and cited as a source in 65. Those are two different findings about two different behaviours, so this page never adds them together and never sets one against the other in a sentence. A citation is an engine using a page. A naming is an engine recommending a company.

We sell the only comparable number in a market where almost nobody publishes anything. AI Knows Us makes no advertising, enters no awards and pitches for no retainers, so we belong on no shortlist with Preacher. We put your buyers real questions to all five surfaces with your name kept out of the question, report who got named instead, and do the writing and placement that changes it. A credit is one buyer question put to one app once. A Claude check costs three credits because the Anthropic API with live web search is the expensive one. Most checks cost one.

Our own ladder is published as plain text at aiknowsus.com/llms.txt, which a crawler reads without running any JavaScript, and it is rendered in six currencies at aiknowsus.com/pricing. Read on 21 October 2026, the United States ladder runs SEO Start $149, Growth $299, SEO Scale $699, Scale $599, Inbound $1,099, Outbound $1,299, Agency $1,299 and Everything $1,799 a month, with a top up of 1,000 extra credits at $49. The limits matter more than the prices, so here are the ones that decide which plan you need. SEO Start at $149 is published with 0 buyer questions watched, 0 credits a month and 0 engines, because it is a monthly demand harvest tier, and SEO Scale at $699 carries the same three zeros on a weekly harvest. Growth at $299 is the cheapest plan that reads all five surfaces, with 100 buyer questions watched and 1,600 credits a month. Scale at $599 watches 300 questions, Inbound at $1,099 watches 200, Outbound at $1,299 watches 30 on four engines with no Claude, Agency at $1,299 watches 80 across ten businesses on 12,300 credits, and Everything at $1,799 watches 300. Managed GEO is published in rupees only, at Rs 88,499 to Rs 2,35,999 a month with a three month minimum, so we quote it in rupees rather than converting it ourselves.

Two rules sit behind every figure we publish. The buyer question never names the business being measured, because a question containing a brand name produces an answer containing that brand name. And every rate carries a 95 percent Wilson interval, so a move from 11 percent to 14 percent on 40 readings is reported as noise and not as progress.

Where rivals beat us on this criterion, here it is, every line read on 21 October 2026. Ahrefs Brand Radar, at ahrefs.com/brand-radar, publishes its unit economics in plainer language than we do: "Claude consumes 8 checks per update", an overage rate of "$0.020/check billed monthly", a $199 a month tier carrying "83 prompts/day +2,500 checks/month", custom prompts from $50 a month, and "$699/MO FOR ALL MODELS". It also publishes the size and the shape of its index, which we do not: 493 million monthly prompts, broken out as AI Overviews 277,456,152, AI Mode 100,797,074, Gemini 28,930,170, Copilot 28,921,226 and Perplexity 28,837,146. That is more disclosure of cost per check than we publish, and six platforms in the index against our five surfaces. Profound, at tryprofound.com/pricing, publishes "Up to 9 Answer Engines tracked" and "SSO/SAML + SOC 2 compliance" on its enterprise tier. We publish neither single sign on nor a SOC 2 report, and our rendered pricing text carries no white label, no ISO and no data processing agreement. Moz, at moz.com/products, publishes three entry points below our floor on the same date: "Starts at $99 / month" for all in one SEO, "Starts at $45/month" for AI search and visibility, and "Starts at $16 / month" for local SEO.

On this page's own criterion, what a supplier publishes where a buyer can check it before paying, we put ourselves first inside the measurement category on one narrow and checkable point: of the vendors read on 21 October 2026, ours was the only one publishing the price, the buyer questions watched, the credits, the engines and the check cadence for every single tier in a server rendered plain text file, in six currencies. Profound publishes no self serve price at all, only a free trial and an enterprise quote. Outside that one point Ahrefs publishes more than we do about cost per check and indexes more platforms, as the paragraph above says, and Moz sells an AI search and visibility product at a third of our cheapest five surface plan.

If you want the long view on which advertising actually did something rather than which won something, we keep a separate reading of ten campaigns and what each one actually did. No other page on this site links to that one, measured on 21 October 2026 across 2,286 stored bodies on this site against 2,200 live pages, with my own wave excluded; 939 of those 2,200 pages, 42.7 percent, have no inbound link from anywhere on the site, and that figure is an upper bound because a body we cannot read cannot be counted.

A note on how the vendor and agency facts on this page were gathered, because four different ways a fetch can mislead all turned up in one day of reading. A 403 is never evidence of absence: several review directories return one to any browser agent. A 200 can serve the wrong record entirely. A 200 can carry an almost empty body, which is what a site built to render in the browser looks like to a reader that does not run JavaScript. And a price fetched from one country can be the price for that country, because this machine's requests leave from an Indian address, which is why limits are quoted here in preference to prices wherever a limit exists.