About

Why it exists

Search for an agency and you get sponsored lists, affiliate rankings, and profiles the agencies wrote about themselves. Every firm on a general directory does twelve things, so you can’t tell who is actually good at any one of them. The specialist and the everything-shop sit in the same list, and the specialist disappears.

The fix isn’t better filtering. It’s a stricter bar for getting in at all. Of the 15 firms we have examined, 6 are listed.

How it works

• We write the profiles. From public record, before anyone asks us to. A firm can claim its profile and reply in its own words. It can’t edit what we found.
• 20 checks per firm. Ten every firm faces, ten written for its category. Each result is one of five outcomes, and “a source blocked us” never shows up as the firm failing.
• The score is research completeness, not a quality rating. A good firm can score low because we haven’t got to it yet.
• Ranking is never for sale. The code that orders the list can’t see billing at all, and the site stops deploying if that ever changes.

Read the full method →

How it makes money

Listing is free and so is being assessed. Firms can pay for a claimed profile, introductions, analytics, or a sponsored slot. All of those are presentation or access. None of them move a firm up a list, and sponsored placement is capped, labelled on every card, and excluded from the structured data an AI assistant reads.

We say this plainly because it is the obvious thing to be sceptical about. Every directory claims editorial independence; ours is a test that blocks the deploy.

Who writes it

There are 10 of us. We work remotely, spread across several countries, and between us we work in 5 languages — which is the only reason a directory this small can research firms in four markets and read a source in the language it was published in.

Every profile is written by a person from public sources. AI drafts prose and nothing else: never a check result, a score, a verification status, a price, or a client name. Those are all computed in code from what a researcher recorded, which is what makes a score reproducible months later.

We also publish research on the market itself, held to the same standard: every figure attributed and dated, and where sources disagree we explain the disagreement instead of quietly picking the convenient one.

Who runs it

TrustedFirms is operated by IMPROV MEDIA - FZCO.

We publish this because a directory that asks agencies to be checkable, while being hard to check itself, has not earned the thing it is selling.

Common questions

Can a firm pay to rank higher?

No, and it is enforced rather than promised. The code that orders a list reads a database view that physically cannot see whether a firm pays us, and a test asserts every score is byte-identical across every billing state. If that test fails, the site does not deploy. Firms can buy a sponsored slot, which sits above the list, is capped, is labelled on every card, and is excluded from the structured data an AI assistant reads.

Who decides whether a firm gets listed?

A person, against a published rule, and we turn most away — of the 15 firms we have examined, 6 are listed. The category a firm appears under has to be what it is primarily focused on, not one of twelve things it will take money for. Shoulder services are fine and we publish them. A generalist that does a bit of everything does not get listed under any of it.

What does the TF Score actually measure?

How completely we have researched a firm and how much of what it claims we could confirm independently. It is not a quality rating. A genuinely excellent firm can score low simply because we have not finished checking it, which is why the score always appears next to the count of checks still pending.

Do you take money from the firms you list?

Being listed and being assessed are free. Firms can pay for a claimed profile, introductions, analytics or a sponsored slot. All of those are presentation or access. None of them change a check result, a score, or a position in a list.

My firm is listed and I never asked to be. Why?

We research and publish from public record before anyone asks us to, because a directory that only contains firms who opted in is a list of firms who wanted to be on a list. You can claim the profile and reply in your own words, and you can correct anything factually wrong for free. You cannot edit a finding you would rather we had not published.

Do you use AI to write this?

For prose, yes. For anything load-bearing, no. A model never sets a check result, a score, a verification status, a price, an interview fact or a client name — those are recorded by a researcher and computed in code, which is what lets us reproduce any score from its stored inputs months after the fact.

How big is the team?

There are 10 of us, working remotely across several countries and in 5 languages. TrustedFirms is operated by IMPROV MEDIA - FZCO, registered at IFZA Business Park, DDP, Premises No. 26365-001, Dubai Silicon Oasis, Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

When we get it wrong

We will. Correcting a factual error is free and open to anyone, claimed profile or not, paying or not. Tell us and we’ll fix it and date the change.