This agency began in the first five for 1 of 100 buyer questions and finished at 79 of 100, between 5 July 2026 and 24 September 2026. The first citation arrived 9 days after publishing, the fastest of the four runs.
One placement in a hundred questions
Started from almost nothing. One placement in the first five across a hundred questions, which is the position most service businesses are in without knowing it.
This is roughly the number most service businesses would get if they measured today, and the reason is not that they are doing badly. It is that an assistant asked to recommend an agency has nothing to go on. Agency websites describe services and show logos. Neither answers the question a buyer asked, and neither gives an assistant a sentence it can repeat.
It is worth sitting with how low one in a hundred is. It does not mean the agency was ranked last. It means that on ninety nine of a hundred buying questions it was not part of the conversation at all, while somebody else was.
What changed it
Writing down what the work costs and what it involves. A page that gives a real range for a real piece of work, and says what changes the price, gets quoted quickly, because almost no agency publishes it.
Answering the questions that come before hiring anyone. How to tell whether you need an agency at all, what to ask on a first call, and how to check whether the last one did anything. Those are the questions people actually ask an assistant, and the answers are useful whether or not they hire you.
Being listed where assistants look for agencies. Directories and genuine review sites, in the sectors and cities the agency actually serves.
Naming a specialism and losing the rest. The agency stopped presenting itself as able to do everything and started answering questions about the two things it genuinely leads on. Fewer questions became winnable and more of them were won.
A worked example, and it cost them work
The page that produced the first citation was about how to tell whether you need an agency at all, and it said plainly that a business below a certain level of activity should not hire one.
It lost them enquiries. It also became the page assistants used to answer exactly that question, and the enquiries that did arrive had already read it and arrived qualified. Being the source of the neutral answer turned out to be worth more than being one of the names inside somebody else's.
The uncomfortable part
Most of what this agency had published before, the thought leadership and the trend posts, did nothing at all. Not because it was badly written, but because nobody was asking those questions, and an assistant only answers what it was asked.
This is the hardest conversation in the whole method, because that content was expensive and somebody chose it. The honest framing is that it was written for a channel where being interesting earns attention, and assistants do not browse. They answer.
What this run does not tell you
A service business is easier to move than a software product because the bar is so low, and that cuts the other way too: the same lack of published substance means competitors can follow quickly. Nothing here is defensible in the way a real measured capability is.
We also measured mentions rather than new business, and for an agency the gap between the two is wide, because most agency work still comes through referral.
Common questions about this run
Can I see the 100 questions?
Not yet, and that is a fair thing to hold against the numbers until we publish them. The sets were built and run by hand before this product existed, and they are being prepared for publication. Until they are, treat these figures as a vendor's own account. The scan on this site is free and it will give you your own number, which you do not have to take on trust.
Why should I believe a vendor reporting on its own client?
You should discount it, and so does every assistant we tested. That is why the most useful number in these studies is not a rate at all. It is the first citation: a named page, a named assistant, the question it was cited for, and 14 days between publishing and being quoted. A dated fact with a URL behind it survives scepticism in a way a percentage does not.
How much of this was the pages, and how much was the assistants changing?
We cannot separate the two with this data, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. The assistants changed what they do during every one of these periods. What we can say is that the movement showed up first on the questions the new pages were written for, and that the first citation in each run was of a specific new page.
Would this work in my sector?
The method worked in all 4 sectors we tried it in, and the ceiling was different in each. The limit is set by who is already trusted for your category. If your questions resolve to government portals or large analyst firms, expect to do well on the buying questions and to keep losing the purely informational ones.
How long before anything moves?
The first citation of a new page arrived between 9 and 16 days after publishing across these 4 runs. A change in the overall rate takes longer, because a rate over 100 questions only moves when many questions move. Expect weeks for the first signal and months for the rate.
What would you do differently now?
Fix the existing site before publishing anything new. In the run below, an assistant searched a client's own site, found a headline figure that could not be true, and advised a buyer against them. The new pages were accurate and the old site around them was not, and the site is what got checked.
What to do first if you sell services
Publish one real price range for one real piece of work, with what changes it, and a date. Then write the page that tells a prospect how to decide whether they need you at all. Those two pages took this agency from 1 of 100 to being part of the conversation, and neither of them is about how good the agency is.
How this was counted
The tracked set is 100 questions, and that is the denominator under every number on this page. The questions are the ones a buyer in this sector actually types, and not one of them names the company. That rule is the whole measurement. A question that names the business gets a polite answer about the business, so it tells you about your prompt rather than about your position.
Each question was asked on 5 assistants, because they answer the same question differently on the same day from different sources. "Named" means the company appears anywhere in the answer. "In the first five" means it appears among the first five products the answer lists, which is the number that matters, because an assistant that names three or four options has no sixth place to give you.
Baseline reading: 5 July 2026. Current reading: 24 September 2026. Pages published in between: 160.
The four things we recorded for every question
- Whether the company was named at all, anywhere in the answer, including in a list rather than as a recommendation.
- Whether it was in the first five products named, and in what position.
- Every source the answer cited, by domain, tagged as official, the company's own site, a competitor's own site, a directory or listing, news, or a community thread.
- Whether the assistant actually ran a live search, asked directly and recorded as a count, because an answer given from memory and an answer given from a live search are two different measurements and averaging them produces a number that means nothing.
What this is, and what it is not
These runs were operated by hand, before this product existed, using the same method the product now runs on a schedule. They are our own results on our own clients, so read them as a vendor reporting its own work. The prompt sets are being prepared for publication so that anyone can repeat the run and check us.
They are also not a controlled experiment. Nobody ran a matched group that published nothing, so we cannot separate our work from everything else that happened in those months, including the assistants changing what they do. What the numbers show is that companies which did this work moved, not that nothing else could have moved them.