The five criteria
- Commission publishedAn actual figure appears on the website: "35%", "30/25/20% on net". Phrases such as "revenue share", "commission-based", "we take a percentage" or "each contract is unique" do not count, because they do not tell a creator what she will pay.
- Verifiable legal entityA registered company name and/or a company number that can be looked up in a public registry (Companies House, a state business registry, an EU VAT register, and so on). A street address alone does not count: an address identifies a place, not the party a creator would be signing a contract with. A brand name alone does not count either.
- Terms before the callThe creator can read the actual terms on the website before speaking with a salesperson: commitment length, exit conditions, who owns the account, what is paid upfront. Advertising features of the contract ("month-to-month", "exit anytime") without showing the terms themselves does not count.
- Detailed service scopeThe website says specifically what is included: chat, traffic, content production, pricing, reporting, protection, and so on. A page that stays at "we scale your account" does not count. In practice most agencies meet this criterion; it is included so that the score reflects what a creator can actually learn from the site.
- Verifiable size signalsCreator counts, team size or years in operation that are backed by something checkable, for example a company registration date, published client names, or an external record. Figures an agency reports about itself with nothing behind them ("400+ creators", "10+ years", "$12M generated") are recorded in the table as self-reported, but do not earn the point.
How each data point is verified
For every agency in a ranking, a member of the editorial team opened the agency's public website on the verification date and read the pages a prospective creator would read: the home page, services, pricing or "how it works", FAQ, footer, terms and privacy pages. What each page says is recorded as-is. Quoted phrases in our tables and profiles are the agency's own words.
Where a fact does not appear anywhere on the site, the table says Not published. That label is itself a data point: it means a creator cannot learn that fact from the website. It does not mean the fact is false, and it does not mean the agency is hiding anything.
Where a website could not be reached on the verification date (domain not resolving, hosting error), the row is marked Not accessible with the verification date, and the agency is not scored. We keep the row because the site still appeared in search results at the time, which is relevant information for a creator comparing options.
Where a search result is not an agency at all (a media listicle, a software directory, a comparison site), it is listed as such and not scored.
Each ranking page shows its verification date at the top. The current rankings were verified between August 25 and August 26, 2026.
How the score becomes a rank
The rank is a count, not a judgment. A 2/5 agency is not "worse" than a 5/5 agency at managing creators; it publishes fewer of the five facts on its website. We say this plainly because a rank column invites a stronger reading than the data supports. What a creator can conclude from a low score is narrow and useful: she will have to ask for those facts on a call, and should.
We do not score quality, results, customer service, or "vibes". None of those can be verified from the outside, so none of them appears in the table.
What counts as a source
- Counts: the agency's own public website, in the language and country version a creator in that market would land on.
- Counts, with the label "as published by": a third-party source that we quote and name, such as a media listicle or a comparison site. Their figures are attributed to them, not adopted as ours.
- Does not count: reviews on third-party platforms, social media posts, screenshots sent to us, private messages, or anything said on a sales call.
Update policy
Agency websites change: a commission gets published, a company registers, a domain lapses. We re-visit every agency in every ranking at least once per quarter and update the tables, profiles and dates accordingly. Between scheduled reviews, we update a row sooner when an agency or a reader points us to a change we can verify on the agency's own site.
Changes are logged on the home page under "Latest updates", with the date.
Corrections policy
Any agency listed here, and any reader, can request a correction. Because every data point is meant to be checkable on the agency's own website, the fastest way to get a row changed is to send us the URL where the fact is published. We re-verify against that page and update the row, the score, and the rank if it changes. Corrections are noted on the page with the date.
We do not remove agencies from a ranking on request; the ranking would stop being a ranking. We do correct facts, add newly published information, and record when a website has become accessible again.
We do not accept payment, sponsorship, affiliate arrangements or any other consideration for placement, scores, or inclusion. See About & disclosure for who publishes this site and why that matters.
Limits of this methodology
Stated plainly: this methodology measures transparency on a website. It cannot tell a creator whether an agency will grow her income, treat her fairly, or answer her messages. It can tell her what the agency is willing to put in writing before she picks up the phone, which is a reasonable first filter and, in our reading of 46 agency websites in August 2026, a filter almost every agency fails.