Agencies sell judgement, which is the hardest thing to make machine-readable. It is also the category where an assistant is most likely to answer a shortlist question with a directory rather than with any individual firm.
Who is asking
The person asking is usually earlier than your pipeline assumes. They are still deciding whether to hire at all, whether the work is a project or a retainer, and roughly what it should cost — and they are asking those questions somewhere you cannot see.
Their shortlist question is also unusually broad. “Best agency for X” is a request an assistant can only answer well by leaning on a source that already lists agencies, which is why directories so often occupy the slot you wanted.
Questions buyers actually ask
Not keyword variants — whole questions, the way a person types them into an assistant. These are the shapes we build tracking around.
- best B2B content marketing agency for a SaaS company
- how much does an agency charge for a website redesign
- should we hire an agency or build the capability in-house
- which agencies specialise in this niche in our country
- what should be in an agency contract for ongoing work
- is this agency any good — what do people say about them
Which surfaces matter here
Shortlist questions land on chat surfaces, where the answer is prose and the sources are supporting material. Narrower questions — pricing ranges, contract terms, whether a service exists in a given city — are the ones that show up in Google's answer features.
Neither surface has a slot you can buy. What both have is a set of pages they can reach, and your visibility is decided mostly by how accurately those pages describe your firm.
Reference pages for these surfaces
Where these answers come from
The pages an assistant leans on in this category are rarely all yours. Each block below is a source family worth checking before you write another article.
Agency directories and marketplaces
Category directories publish the exact page a shortlist question attracts: a filtered list of firms with structured attributes attached. Your profile there is a page you can keep current without owning it.
Client reviews on third-party platforms
Independent reviews carry weight precisely because they are not on your site. That is also why the ones on your site are treated differently in search documentation.
Case studies and published work
The most quotable thing an agency owns. A case study naming the problem, the constraint and the measurable outcome answers a buyer's real question; a page of client logos does not.
Industry press, podcasts and conference listings
Third-party coverage is how a firm gets characterised in one line — and that line travels further than your positioning statement.
Your own service and pricing pages
The pages stating, in text, what you do, for whom, where, and roughly at what cost. Agencies are the category most likely to leave all four of those deliberately vague.
What the documentation says
Each line below is read from the linked document — a vendor's own guidance, a published standard, or a public register. Nothing in this section is our estimate.
Google's review snippet guidance excludes self-serving reviews — a review about a business, placed on that business's own site, is not eligible for a review rich result. Testimonials on your own site and reviews on a third-party platform are not the same asset.
Source: Google — Review snippet structured data (opens the source document in a new tab)schema.org defines ProfessionalService as a type for a professional services business, inheriting the properties of LocalBusiness — the vocabulary for stating what you do and where you do it.
Source: schema.org — ProfessionalService (opens the source document in a new tab)Google documents local business structured data for describing a business's address, telephone number and opening hours in machine-readable form.
Source: Google — Local business structured data (opens the source document in a new tab)Google states that there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimisations necessary. For a services firm that means the work is ordinary Search work, done properly.
Source: Google — AI features and your website (opens the source document in a new tab)
What is not documented
Open questions, not omissions. Anyone answering these with a precise number for your category is guessing.
- No vendor documents how a directory listing is weighted against an agency's own site, so nobody can tell you what a paid placement is worth to an assistant.
- Service quality is not machine-readable, and no assistant documents how it decides which firm is best. Treat any answer that ranks agencies as an artefact of the sources it happened to read.
- Local intent is opaque. An answer about agencies nearby may draw on data we cannot see, and the result varies with the searcher and the device.
- We cannot measure the questions your prospects actually asked. Tracking runs a question set you and we designed; it tells you about answers, not about demand.
What GetCited.me measures here
We run your category and locality questions on a schedule and record whether your firm was named, which competitors were named beside you, which URLs were cited, and how you were characterised.
For agencies the citation breakdown usually matters more than the mention rate: when a directory occupies the answer, the practical question becomes which directory, and whether your profile there says what you would have said.
The headline figure is the organic mention rate — questions that never name your firm — reported separately from questions that already do.
Launch (Free) tracks Gemini only, with a one-time grant of answer credits and weekly automatic tracking. ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews are on Growth and Scale. Plans are billed per website, which is how multi-client portfolios are handled today. Card payments are temporarily disabled while payment-provider onboarding completes, so every account currently runs on Launch — the pricing page lists what each plan includes.
What you can actually do
Concrete steps, each one checkable with a free tool or explained in the glossary.
Free tools for this industry
No account, no card — results in the browser.
Related terms
Keep reading
The reference sets behind this page.