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DesignRush Agency Ranking Methodology:

How DesignRush Agencies Are Ranked To Optimize User-Agency Fit

Finding and hiring a professional agency that is a perfect fit for you is hard and takes time. But we simplified this process.

We list agencies that provide specific services in various categories and undergo a stringent review process before being listed. All this so you can hire the best agency for your needs.

Branding & Creative
Website & Interface
Marketing
Software & App
IT Services
Business Services

How Does DesignRush Establish Agency Rankings?

Our Agency Ranking Methodology is established on a Base Score consisting of many factors. The five factors below are the most important ones:

Organic Ranking Methodology ensures agencies have better control over how they rank and stand out against many competitors.
They do so by showcasing their unique capabilities and strengths to be visible to the most qualified leads.
All agencies listed on DesignRush are already carefully hand-picked to meet the high standards of potential clients.

These additional ranking criteria are there to further emphasize their level of expertise and relevancy for specific business needs.
This facilitates the users’ search for an agency that can provide a specific service at the best price within the required timeframe.

Reviews

Review points are the most crucial ranking factor because they are a transparent measure of the agency’s expertise, work quality, client satisfaction, and level of trust.

How We Source Reviews:

  • Businesses can submit detailed testimonials about the challenges, results, and overall feedback on working with an agency.
  • Agencies can submit client reviews to their profile, subject to verification.
  • DesignRush collates feedback from legitimate third-party review sites.

All these undergo a stringent verification process: evaluating the reviewer and fact-checking any claims made.

How We Verify Reviews:

  • We authorize each reviewer through their LinkedIn profile, which ensures authenticity and reliability, mitigating the possibility of spammy or questionable reviews.
  • Where necessary, we verify reviewers via email or call to complete our legitimacy check to provide helpful, credible reviews from real people and past clients.

How We Calculate the Average Star Rating:

  • To provide a fairer assessment of each agency’s performance, we consider the overall distribution of ratings for each agency using the Bayesian Statistical Method.
  • This method will prevent skewed or inflated agency scores by adding a 3.5-star rating to all profile reviews as a smoothing baseline factor.

    • For example:

    Agency with one 5-star rating
    •Old System: 5 stars
    •Bayesian Method: 4.3 stars
    Agency with twenty-nine 5-star ratings
    •Old System: 5 stars
    •Bayesian Method: 5 stars

    This user-centric update to our Agency Reviews methodology further strengthens users’ trust in DesignRush as the B2B Marketplace for finding the right agency for their project.

introducing top services

Portfolio

Portfolio points display the agency’s successfully completed projects for the specific services they offer, with links to actual samples and case studies. These offer a more tangible representation of the agency’s track record, showcasing their unique style, design approach, and overall output quality.

Awards/Press

Awards and press mentions contribute to the overall profile completeness and provide an additional level of trust in the agency through proof of their industry reputation, innovation and other things of note to clients.

Team bios

Team member biographies display the working force of each agency, further demonstrating and displaying their expertise.

Top Services

How Top Services help you find the perfect agency

DesignRush introduces the Top Services concept as an additional layer of our Organic Ranking Process. Top Services further streamlines the user experience by achieving a much higher relevance between client needs and agency capabilities. It allows us to better distill and establish any agency’s specific core competencies and achieve optimal agency-client fit.

Agencies are invited to pick and showcase their Top Services as a way to promote their core competencies and areas of expertise to potential clients.

  • BETTER RELEVANCE TO THE END-USER

    BETTER RELEVANCE TO THE END-USER

    By allowing to better distill and establish any agency’s specific core competencies, Top Services streamlines the user experience by achieving a much higher relevance between client needs and agency capabilities.

  • FASTER SEARCH FOR AN AGENCY AT THE BEST PRICE

    FASTER SEARCH FOR AN AGENCY AT THE BEST PRICE

    Top Services specifically highlights granular competencies of each agency, facilitating the users’ search for an agency that can provide a very specific service at the best price within the required timeframe.

  • EASIER CONNECTION VIA BETTER VISIBILITY

    EASIER CONNECTION VIA BETTER VISIBILITY

    Fairness in visibility, especially for smaller agencies that wish to reach potential clients, ensures clients can find and connect with these relevant agencies more easily.

Top Services also impacts the total organic score by going one step further with the Specialization matrix.

Specialization

DesignRush also implements a Specialization matrix to distinguish specialist and generalist agencies based on the number of focused services they offer.

  • The concept of the Specialization matrix ensures that the users' agency search intent accurately aligns with the agency they seek and services they require.
  • The Specialization matrix recognizes that big agencies may have expertise in multiple areas and encourages them to showcase their full capabilities to clients. If an agency performs well, receives positive reviews, and builds a comprehensive profile, those factors alone contribute to its good ranking, even without additional specialization perks.
  • Specialization matrix benefits smaller agencies by giving them a competitive edge in the specific categories they excel at, so potential clients can find them more easily.

MORE ON SPECIALIZATION

Our old ranking system used a Base Score for all agencies regardless of their vertical or service. However, DesignRush has introduced a new system that considers additional factors like Specialization and limits the number of top services.

Specialization encourages agencies to focus on their best services and expertise. This gives them a competitive advantage over others, but also provides a better search intent experience to potential clients. The number of top services an agency can choose has been reduced from 20 to 10, but this change is not a drawback. It encourages agencies to select the services they excel at and can confidently provide to most qualified prospects.

With Specialization, users can more easily find the qualified agencies that correspond to their requirements because said agencies rank higher in their selected Top Services.

The new organic ranking system has several major benefits

  • Promotes agency specialization
  • Allows agencies to stand out in their expertise
  • Enhances visibility to qualified prospects and potential clients
  • Improves the search experience for users
  • Increases the number of successful agency-client matches

Agency badges

To make your agency selection process more intuitive, we’ve added Badges to our Agency Directory profiles. Here are the badges you may encounter:

Verified badge

The Verified badge means our team manually reviewed and confirmed an agency's core business details, including contact information, service offerings, and portfolio ownership through our authentication process. It sets verified agencies apart from unclaimed or self-reported listings.

  • Complete & Professional Profile (company details, logo, services listed)
  • Established Presence (profile must be active for at least one month)
  • Valid Business Contact Information (must provide an active phone number)
  • Stable Representation (one-time rep change allowed for every 3 months)

AI Leader

The AI Leader badge recognizes agencies with demonstrated visibility across AI-powered search and answer engines.

Before awarding it, our team confirms the agency is cited meaningfully across platforms like Copilot and Bing, so the badge reflects a verified presence rather than a self-claim.

Award Winner

The Award Winner badge identifies agencies that have won a DesignRush Best Design Award for category-leading work. The badge is displayed for award recipients with an active DesignRush membership.

If you'd like to learn more about how our award process works, see here.

Thought Leader

The Thought Leadership badge features agencies that contribute genuine industry insight to DesignRush editorial or podcast content.

Our editorial team reviews each contribution for substance and originality before granting the badge. The badge is displayed for contributors with an active DesignRush membership.

Here’s how to improve your profile position in DesignRush rankings to generate more leads.

how to boost your profile

Agencies are invited to deliberately choose their Top Services to promote their core competencies and areas of expertise, even if they focus on a single industry.

This focused approach provides relevant visibility within a specific category, enhancing the chances of connecting with potential clients seeking an agency’s expertise.

the process

The higher an agency's Organic Score, the more relevant the agency is for potential clients.
This ultimately leads to higher conversion rates for agencies listed on DesignRush.
Top services
After logging in to your account, Go to the “Top Services” section
Explore our main categories and choose up to 10 services Drag and drop to re-order your Top Services
Top services
Areas of expertise
Next, go to the “Areas of Expertise” section and select your Areas of Expertise based on your Top Services.
Drag and drop to reorder your services in each of the selected expertise categories and click “Save Changes”.
Areas of expertise
INDUSTRIES
Click on “Industries” and select up to 10 industries your agency provides services to.
Drag and drop to reorder based on the priority or top industries you work in. Click “Save Changes”.
INDUSTRIES
Clients
Click on “Clients” and select the size of businesses you work with (Startups, Small, Medium and/or Enterprise).
Clients
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