About StudioRank

The problem with design directories

Every agency directory works the same way - studios pay to be listed, pay more to rank higher, and self-report whatever capabilities they think clients want to hear. The result is a sea of identical profiles where the biggest spender sits at the top and there is no way to tell who actually delivers.

This matters more now than ever. Clients searching for AI-native design studios are making high-stakes decisions based on claims that nobody verifies. A studio that dabbled with Midjourney once looks identical to one that has shipped production work with AI tools for years.

How StudioRank works

StudioRank takes a fundamentally different approach. We crawl studio websites, portfolios, and public case studies to build a picture of how each studio actually works. Our verification process looks at real evidence - the tools they mention in case studies, the AI workflows visible in their portfolio, the depth of their technical writing, and whether their claims hold up under scrutiny.

Every studio in the directory goes through a multi-step pipeline. First, we scrape and aggregate data from multiple public sources. Then an automated verification layer scores each studio against a set of AI-capability signals. Finally, an editorial review confirms the findings and assigns a quality score. Studios cannot pay to influence their ranking or verification status.

Why it exists

The design industry is going through its biggest shift in decades and clients deserve a way to find studios that are genuinely leading that shift - not just talking about it. StudioRank exists to make the difference visible, so the studios doing real work get found by the clients who need them.

Meet the team

Charlie Simpson - Founder and Creative Director. Charlie runs a design studio and advisory practice, and built StudioRank to solve a problem he kept running into from both sides of the table - studios struggling to stand out on merit, and clients struggling to find them.