Most agencies that apply here don’t get listed
We list every kind of agency. What we’re strict about is where you appear: one category, the one you’re best at. Not one of twelve things you’ll take money for. Of the 15 firms we’ve looked at, 6 are on the site.
So before you fill anything in, run yourself through the rule below. It’s the same one we’ll use, it takes about ten seconds, and it doesn’t ask for your email.
What gets you in
One question: is this category what you mainly do? Three ways to answer it. You need one of them, not all three.
It’s 50% or more of your business
A majority, so nothing else you do can be bigger. We measure it against what you’ve published about yourself, not the number you put in the form. If the two disagree, we show the gap rather than quietly picking one.
Or it’s your biggest area of work by 2× or more
A firm at 45% here and 20% everywhere else is obviously a specialist, and a bare majority test would throw it out. A firm at 34/33/33 obviously isn’t, and “largest wins” would let it in and call it one. Twice your next-biggest service line separates those two cases — and it’s hard to fake, because you can’t claim a 2× lead over your own second service line without that being visibly untrue on your own website.
Or 2 of these 5 signals, each with a public URL
A flat percentage would throw out most of the firms worth listing. Almost every good AI SEO shop started as an SEO shop; almost every automation firm started in ops. A rule that excluded the ones that rebuilt their whole delivery model around a category would be tidy and useless. So the floor stays where it is and this is the other door — but each signal needs a link, because “we’re specialists” is a sentence anyone can type and none of these are.
- A published AI methodology we wrote
- A named, publicly documented methodology the firm authored for this category — not a blog post about someone else's.
- AI tooling we built and run ourselves
- Tooling the firm built and operates itself for this work, publicly demonstrable.
- single-offering
- The service menu itself is this category only — no separately sold service lines outside it.
- A named AI-visibility measurement stack
- A publicly named measurement stack for this category, i.e. they can show what they claim to move.
- dedicated-staff
- Named individuals whose stated roles are specific to this category, not generalists with a relevant title.
There’s a fourth way in that we apply ourselves: firms whose own product is the work, and firms that exist to serve one market specifically. Both are specialists in the way a buyer means it, and neither would survive a percentage test.
If another category is your main focus, we’ll tell you which one rather than just turning you down. Being listed in the wrong place is worse for you than not being listed.
Check yourself against it
This runs the real rule, on the most generous reading of whatever you type — it assumes we go and find that all of it holds up. Nothing is saved and nobody sees it.
Apply
One person reads every application — or mail getlisted@trustedfirms.us if you would rather just write to us. It’s free to be listed and free to be assessed, and paying us later won’t move you up the page — the code that orders the list can’t see whether you’ve paid at all.
What happens next
- We go and look. Your site, your case studies, the registries, whatever independent sources exist. We won’t ask you to prove things we can find ourselves.
- We run the rule on what we found, not on what you told us. If those disagree, what we found wins, and we publish the gap.
- You get an answer and the reasoning. If it’s a no, that includes which rule you missed and by how much.
- If we turn you down, we might say so publicly— your name, the figure we measured, the reason, and where we got it. Only ever what we measured, never what we think of you. Publishing who we turned away is the only thing that makes being listed here worth anything.
- Ask us to look again whenever you like. Firms change. A no is dated, not permanent.