Agencies are the hardest thing for an AI to recommend

"Find me a Shopify agency in Manchester that has done subscription commerce." That is a real question people now ask assistants, and it is one of the hardest for a model to answer well, because almost every agency website says the same thing: full-service, results-driven, passionate team.

An assistant cannot distinguish between two hundred identical claims. It can distinguish between "we do X, for clients of size Y, in market Z" and everything else.

Say the boring specifics

• The service, narrowly. Not "digital marketing" — "technical SEO migrations for retail sites".
• The client size you actually serve. Ten-person startups and multinationals are different jobs.
• Where you work. City, country, timezone, language. Location questions are extremely common.
• Your price floor. "Projects from £8,000" filters out the wrong enquiries and puts you in the right shortlists.

Case studies are for humans, one sentence is for machines

A model will not read your twelve-slide case study. It will happily reuse a sentence that says "rebuilt checkout for a £4m/year homeware retailer, cut abandonment by a fifth". Write that sentence somewhere plain, and it can travel.

What is listed here

Each agency below has a listing page plus a markdown version linked from this article, the category feed and llms.txt, with a public per-listing count of AI-crawler fetches taken from server logs.