Last updated: October 25, 2026
In a December 2025 survey of 3,664 B2B decision-makers across 13 countries, published in May 2026 by a global management consultancy, generative AI tools ranked among the top five channels buyers use to find and evaluate suppliers. Those same buyers named inconsistent information across a supplier's teams as their top reason for switching suppliers, followed by not being able to reach a knowledgeable rep.
So if you sell to other businesses, the agency you hire now has two jobs. It has to keep your story consistent across every channel a buyer touches, and it has to get your product named when that buyer asks an AI assistant for a shortlist.
This review looks at a B2B agency that pitches itself as doing both under one roof, alongside paid social, PR and revenue operations. We read its services pages, its 2026 case studies, blog posts and announcements, and its Clutch profile on 20 Oct 2026, and searched X for posts about it from the past year. Every claim below that comes from the agency itself is attributed to it. We've never worked with it, so read what follows as an outside view built from public evidence.
Our verdict
Directive is worth a call if you want one firm to run paid media, content, SEO, GEO and now PR and social against a single pipeline target, and you can fund several channels at once. Its writing on AI search from the past year is specific, and its two 2026 search case studies report demos and revenue alongside traffic.
It's a weak fit if you only need organic search and AI visibility, if you want a fixed monthly price, or if you need recent third-party reviews before you sign. Its newest Clutch review is dated Jan 2, 2025.
Directive in 60 seconds
Type of firm: B2B marketing agency, founded in 2013, per Directive
Leadership: founder-led, with Garrett Mehrguth as CEO, per its September 2026 press release
Teams: across the US, Canada and the UK, per the same release
Markets: SaaS and technology, industrial and manufacturing, and professional services
Core idea: a method it calls Customer Generation, which plans marketing around qualified pipeline rather than lead volume
Software: an in-house AI platform called Stratos and a framework called DiscoverabilityOS
Published retainer rates: none
Third-party reviews: the newest Clutch review is dated Jan 2, 2025, so it has no Clutch reviews from the past 12 months
What changed at Directive in 2026
For most of its history, Directive sold performance marketing: paid media, content, creative and RevOps for technology companies. In 2026 it widened that a lot.
It now presents itself as three divisions: Performance, Communications and Commerce. On Sep 9, 2026, it announced an expanded Communications division that brings PR, organic social, influencer marketing and paid social into one team, and said that division has been expanding since spring 2026. Paid social had previously run under a sister brand called Abe, which is now folded into Communications.
The press release adds a few claims worth knowing, all from Directive:
The Communications portfolio includes EasyPost, Bitwarden and Anrok.
The agency says it is growing about 8% a month and remains founder-led.
Its client count differs across its own materials. The release, the homepage and the case studies page each give a different number, so we haven't repeated one.
The Directive you'd hire today is broader than the one most of its public reviews describe, and its newest service lines are only months old.
The three divisions, explained
Performance is still the core. It covers content and SEO, paid media, performance creative, programmatic advertising, revenue operations and a startup program. This is where most software companies would sit.
Commerce handles marketplace ads, shopping campaigns and product feed management for B2B companies that sell catalogs online. Its blog posts from October 2026 deal with feed governance and channel conflict between a brand's paid media and its own distributors, which tells you who it's built for. A typical SaaS company won't need it.
Communications runs PR, thought leadership, executive and founder brand building, influencer partnerships, community programs and paid and organic social. Directive says it ties this work to share of voice, ICP reach and pipeline influence.
The pitch is one team planning across all three. Its homepage says it organizes around customers and goals instead of splitting work by channel. If you're juggling separate vendors who rarely talk to each other, that's the real reason to look at Directive.
The search and AI visibility practice
The survey in the opening is McKinsey's 2026 Global B2B Pulse, fielded in December 2025 and published on May 28, 2026. Its exhibits give the sample as 3,664 respondents, while the report text rounds it to nearly 4,000. It asked about supplier channels in general, not agencies, so read it as context for why AI search sits next to paid and organic in any B2B plan today.
Directive's content and SEO page now leads with AI search. It says B2B buyers move through classic results, AI Overviews and chatbot recommendations before reaching your site, and that its content is built for all three. The practice lists:
SEO built on technical performance, site architecture, keyword research and content
GEO, described as brand signals and content meant to earn citations in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini
Bottom-of-funnel content aimed at high-intent searches
Thought leadership built on first-party data, such as surveys and toolkits
Content structured for AI answers, including Google AI Overviews
Amplification through social, email, digital PR and link building
Dashboards in Stratos linking content to pipeline and closed revenue
It also says every content brief now includes an AI Overview analysis of who gets cited and which formats win, and that it targets product-led content that can earn a place in listicles and LLM summaries.
Directive's recent writing fills in how it thinks about this work:
A November 2025 guide to GEO and traditional SEO argues the two share fundamentals, with GEO rewarding clear definitions, chunked structure, consistent entity naming and current, well-sourced facts.
A June 2026 guide on LLMs says AI Overviews are absorbing top-of-funnel traffic, which shifts value toward comparison, category and best-of pages. It recommends owning bottom-of-funnel listicles and review profiles and running citation gap analysis.
An August 2026 post on original research treats studies and PR coverage as a way to earn AI citations, with an emphasis on defensible methods.
A September 2026 post on AI brand mentions argues that a name in a list, a cited source and an explicit recommendation carry very different commercial value, and that attribution from AI visibility should stay directional.
We think that's a coherent point of view. What you need to find out is whether the team on your account works that way, and a sample brief plus a sample monthly report will show you.
How Directive says it measures AI search
AI search results are hard to measure, so it helps to know what Directive has published on the subject. In a January 2026 webinar recap, it laid out four metrics it tracks in LLM visibility tools: presence across tracked prompts, citations, position within the answer, and sentiment. It named two ways to connect that work to revenue: GA4 tracking of LLM referrals tied to key events, and multi-touch attribution software.
Its June 2026 guide adds a point worth checking in your own analytics. Buyers who first see a brand in an AI answer often come back later by typing the URL, so the visit lands as direct traffic and AI-sourced pipeline gets undercounted.
None of this proves results. It does mean you can hold Directive to its own published standard: ask to see presence, citation and sentiment data for your brand at kickoff and every month after.
The software layer: Stratos and DiscoverabilityOS
Stratos is Directive's own AI platform. The homepage says it pulls together CRM, paid media, SEO and operations data, and the DiscoverabilityOS page describes it as the layer for forecasting, scenario planning and budget allocation. Two short videos Directive published in March and April 2026 show Stratos turning keyword research into an SEO plan and building reports automatically.
DiscoverabilityOS is the framework behind the newer work. Directive says it aligns brand and demand so buyers find you across AI answers, organic search, reviews, comparisons and paid channels.
We couldn't test either one. Treat them as part of the service rather than a product you're buying, and ask for a live walkthrough of the dashboard you'd actually get.
What Directive costs
Directive doesn't publish retainer prices. What is public:
Its site sells a do-it-yourself Customer Generation course with templates for $399. It's training, not agency work.
Its Clutch listing shows the minimum project size and hourly rate as undisclosed.
The most common project size among its Clutch reviews is $10,000 to $49,999, but those reviews are all from January 2025 or earlier, so treat the band as a historical guide only.
Because the agency combines several channels, your quote will depend on how many you buy. Ask for a proposal that prices each channel separately, so you can see what you'd drop if budgets tighten.
Recent proof, attributed to Directive
Case Status
A case study Directive published in June 2026 covers Case Status, a client engagement platform for law firms. Directive says the brand had no presence in ChatGPT or Perplexity answers when the work began in early 2025. The tactics it describes are specific:
A plain-text information page written for AI crawlers, linked from the site footer
Content rewritten into question-and-answer formats, with FAQ sections and schema
Focused work on two client portal topics to cut cannibalization
Wider internal linking to build topical clusters
Tracking of presence and citations in a third-party LLM visibility tool
Within nine months, Directive reports, organic sessions grew 19% quarter over quarter, demo completions hit 54 against a quarterly goal of 45, and unassigned "book a demo" conversions rose 135% quarter over quarter, which it links partly to LLM referrals.
Directive's own search program
A March 2026 case study covers Directive itself. It says the agency had lost more than half its page-one rankings since June 2023, then launched a publishing push called Content 150 in Q4 2025, built around comparison pages and listicles for agency searches. Directive reports that page-one rankings rose 190%, organic traffic grew 162% and its presence across tracked LLM prompts rose 56% since June 2025. It also puts a dollar value in the millions on the program, but the case study and a related video give different figures for different measures (revenue in one, pipeline in the other), so we haven't repeated either.
One related detail is worth knowing. Directive's blog now carries many agency roundups, including lists of SEO, paid search and AI PR agencies published in 2026. If you found Directive through one of those lists, you were reading its own marketing.
As with any agency's case studies, none of these numbers are independently audited.
Directive's own research
Directive publishes benchmark content too, such as a March 2026 guide to B2B marketing ROI by channel that draws on third-party reports and its own client data. We haven't used any of it as evidence here. A vendor's research shows you what it wants buyers to believe, which is context, not proof.
Third-party reviews: older than they look
Directive's newest Clutch review is dated Jan 2, 2025. When we checked on 20 Oct 2026, nothing newer had been posted, so there are no Clutch reviews from the past 21 months.
The profile still shows 4.8 out of 5 from 56 reviews, but every one of those reviews was written in January 2025 or earlier. The same goes for Clutch's summary themes, which praise communication, project management and B2B know-how and flag some disruption when account teams changed. Read all of it as a picture of the agency before its 2026 restructuring, not as feedback on the Communications division, the Commerce division or the current AI search offer.
On X, posts from the past year that mention the agency are mostly job listings and automated rankings. We found nothing from a named practitioner describing their work with Directive, so we haven't quoted anything from X.
What we couldn't confirm
Contract length, notice period and any minimum term
Typical monthly fees by channel
Who leads the AI search practice and how big that team is
How Stratos reporting compares with what you'd build in your own BI tool
How the 2026 reorganization changed account staffing
None of these are red flags on their own. They're the questions to settle before you sign.
Strengths
One team across SEO, GEO, paid media, creative, PR and RevOps
A published, specific view of AI search tactics and measurement, dated within the past year
Recent case studies that report demos, pipeline and revenue
Proof that it can run the playbook on its own site
A cheap self-serve course if you want to learn the method first
Weaknesses
No published retainer prices
No third-party reviews since January 2025, a period that covers its whole 2026 expansion
The Communications and Commerce divisions are new, so they have little track record
Breadth can be a poor fit if you only need organic search and AI visibility
Proprietary tools you can't evaluate independently
Fit check
Your situation | Directive fit |
|---|---|
You want paid, organic, PR and RevOps run by one partner | Strong |
You sell software with a long, multi-stakeholder sales cycle | Strong |
You need GEO and SEO only, at a fixed monthly price | Weak |
You want recent third-party reviews of the exact service you're buying | Weak |
You're an early startup testing one channel | Mixed; there's a startup program, but the model is built for scale |
If you land mostly in the weak rows, our list of Directive alternatives covers specialists by budget and situation.
Questions worth asking in your first meeting
Which of my channels would sit in one team, and who owns the overall plan?
Can you price SEO and GEO separately from paid media, creative and RevOps?
Who on my account has run AI search work, and for which clients?
Can I see a recent brief with the AI Overview analysis, and a monthly report with presence, citation and sentiment data?
How did the 2026 reorganization change account teams, and how do you handle a change of lead?
What's the minimum term, and how much notice do I need to give to leave?
Can I speak with two clients that started after January 2025?
FAQ
How much does Directive charge?
It doesn't publish retainer fees. The only listed price on its site is a $399 self-serve course, and the project sizes on Clutch come from reviews that are nearly two years old.
Does Directive offer GEO?
Yes. GEO sits inside its content practice, with AI Overview analysis in briefs and AI visibility tracking in Stratos. For background, see what GEO is and how to measure AI search visibility. If you're comparing approaches, our explainer on AEO vs SEO is a short read.
Is Directive only for SaaS?
No. It also serves industrial and manufacturing brands and professional services firms, and its commerce division covers marketplace and shopping channels. Most of its recent search case studies are software companies, though.
What is Directive's Clutch rating?
The profile shows 4.8 from 56 reviews, but the newest review is dated Jan 2, 2025. None of the reviews cover its work from the past 12 months.
Is Directive a good fit for a small budget?
Probably not for a full program, since the model is built around several channels at once. The $399 course is the low-cost way to try its method.
What are the best alternatives to Directive?
That depends on whether you want another full-service partner or a specialist. We compare 11 options in our guide to Directive alternatives, and our roundup of B2B SaaS SEO agencies covers the wider market.