DNA&STONE
Brand Authority Audit — September 2026
Where DNA&STONE stands today
Domain Rating
46
+19 in 12 months · 24 points above competitor median of 22
Monthly organic traffic
31
August 2026 · 4% of competitor median
Target keywords in top 100
0 of 11
Both home markets
Technical health score
89 / 100
45 pages crawled · not the bottleneck
AI visibility, unbranded
8.5%
5th of 12 tracked brands
Map pack appearances
0 of 5
Seattle map packs · no agency in the set appears
Messaging needs work
| Question | Result | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Why beyond what (Sinek) | FAIL | H1 is "The full-service agency that leads with radical empathy" — it describes the agency's method, not a client outcome. No hero subhead carries a benefit or a cost of inaction. |
| Differentiation | PASS | "Radical empathy," "doesn't flinch," "brands that go there" is language no competing agency uses. The "full-service agency" wrapper is generic, but the modifier is not. |
| Customer at center (StoryBrand) | FAIL | Above the fold, straight after the H1, the page runs Adweek and AdAge award badges and agency press hits. The brand is the hero; no customer appears until the work carousel below. |
No segmentation
The nav is Work / Us / News / Email a founder. No industry, buyer-type or use-case pages exist anywhere on the site.
DNA&STONE ranks for zero of eleven tracked terms in the top 100
Sourced from ahrefs.
| Keyword | Volume | Difficulty | Local Pack | Current Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| advertising agency | 15,000 | 58 | Yes | Not in top 100 |
| creative agency | 10,000 | 48 | Yes | Not in top 100 |
| digital marketing agency seattle | 350 | 61 | Yes | Not in top 100 |
| independent advertising agencies | 150 | 3 | Yes | Not in top 100 |
| social media agency seattle | 150 | 57 | Yes | Not in top 100 |
| creative agency seattle | 100 | 59 | Yes | Not in top 100 |
| branding agency seattle | 90 | 55 | Yes | Not in top 100 |
| advertising agency seattle | 80 | 56 | Yes | Not in top 100 |
| full service marketing agency seattle | 80 | — | No | Not in top 100 |
| independent creative agencies | 60 | 5 | Yes | Not in top 100 |
| top advertising agencies in seattle | 40 | — | No | Not in top 100 |
The one cheap term in the set
"Independent advertising agencies" carries 150 monthly searches at a keyword difficulty of 3 — the lowest-difficulty term with real volume anywhere in this set, and DNA&STONE's entire identity is being an independent. Its first page is Adweek, The Drum, Reddit and a LinkedIn post. No agency owns it.
Two concepts that do not exist as searches
Every phrasing of "best advertising agency in Seattle" returns zero volume, as does every combination of "Seattle" and "independent" — "Seattle independent agencies", "independent agencies Seattle", "independent advertising agency Seattle" and "independent marketing agency Seattle" all measure nothing. The list uses "top advertising agencies in seattle" and the non-geo "independent creative agencies" as the closest viable substitutes.
Zero ranking keywords — 1 / 10
Those 31 visits come from brand navigation and press-driven long tail, not from any commercial term the agency is trying to win.
31 visits a month, thirteen months in
Monthly organic traffic, August 2025 through September 2026.
September 2026 is an incomplete month and should not be read as a new peak.
Traffic peaked at 53 in January 2026 and has since settled into the high 20s. Score 4 / 10 — growing, but from a near-zero base.
Above the median on authority, and now on traffic too
| Brand | Domain | DR | Keywords in top 100 | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DNA&STONEYOU | dnaandstone.com | 46 | 0 / 10 | — |
| Copacino Fujikado | copacino.com | 44 | 1 / 10 | #3 — advertising agency seattle |
| Hydrogen | hydrogenadvertising.com | 22 | 0 / 10 | — |
| Paper Crane Factory | papercranefactory.com | 22 | 0 / 10 | — |
| Herd of Shepherds | herdofshepherds.com | 8 | 0 / 10 | — |
Checked against all eleven tracked keywords rather than only the SERP-scoped four, so these are true top-100 rankings.
Authority is not the gap
Competitor median Domain Rating is 22. DNA&STONE at 46 sits twenty-four points above it. Copacino Fujikado is the only agency in this set with any ranking at all — position 3 on "advertising agency seattle" with its homepage. The other three have no top-100 presence on a single tracked term.
Copacino Fujikado
Seattle advertising agency founded 1998, AdAge Small Agency of the Year 2026. The only agency in this set with a real organic footprint, and the only one ranking on a tracked keyword. Clients include Visit Seattle, Premera Blue Cross, Sound Transit and Seattle Children's — direct overlap with DNA&STONE's healthcare and civic work.
Hydrogen
Full-service Seattle agency founded 2001, member of Worldwide Partners. Health, financial services and B2B focus. Clients include Kenworth, Optum, PCC Markets and Planned Parenthood.
Paper Crane Factory
Seattle brand studio founded 2018 by Cal McAllister of Wexley School for Girls. Works with startups on an equity-for-creative model. Small team, project-based.
Herd of Shepherds
Seattle creative agency launched 2024 by Matt Gilmore and Shawn Herron. Brand-action positioning, campaign work for Smartsheet. Newest and smallest domain in the set.
Technical site health: 89 / 100
Ahrefs Site Audit crawled 45 pages on 4 September 2026. The site returned 5 URLs with errors, 42 with warnings and 40 with notices.
Health score
89 / 100
Pages crawled
45
URLs with errors
5
Not the bottleneck
89 out of 100 is a healthy score, and technical debt is not what is holding this site back. But the metadata coverage is thin: 19 of 45 crawled pages ship with no meta description at all, and 32 have incomplete Open Graph tags. On a 45-page site that already has no service or segment pages, that is a lot of missing surface area for both search engines and AI retrieval.
Domain Rating vs. organic traffic
Each brand has two markers — a circle for August 2025 and a triangle for August 2026 — joined by a connector that shows the direction it travelled. Horizontal is Domain Rating; vertical is organic traffic on a log scale.
Hover any point for absolute DR & organic traffic in both years plus year-over-year change. A log axis cannot plot zero, so every zero sits on the axis floor and is labelled "0 visits". Paper Crane Factory's 2026 marker is labelled "no data" — Ahrefs holds no organic record for it after November 2025, so that point is missing data rather than a measured zero.
DNA&STONE is ahead of this set
Against these four Seattle independents, DNA&STONE has both the highest Domain Rating and near-median organic traffic. Copacino Fujikado is the only agency here with a substantial footprint, and its traffic fell 28.5% over the year while DNA&STONE's rose from zero. Hydrogen lost two thirds of its traffic and five points of Domain Rating. Paper Crane Factory and Herd of Shepherds have no measurable organic presence at all. Competitor median traffic in August 2026 was 40 visits a month; DNA&STONE recorded 31.
Two things to read carefully
Paper Crane Factory's traffic history ends in November 2025 — Ahrefs holds no organic record for it after that date, so its 2026 position is missing data rather than a measured zero. And Copacino Fujikado's Domain Rating is volatile: 31 in August 2025, peaking at 53 in January and again in June 2026, then falling back to 43 by August. The +12 year-over-year figure understates a link build that has since partly unwound.
Nobody in the category is in the map pack
Nine of the eleven tracked keywords trigger a local pack, and DNA&STONE has two physical offices. This brand is local. It is absent from the map pack on all five keywords that return a usable Seattle pack — and so is every competitor.
| Keyword | DNA&STONE | Copacino | Hydrogen | Paper Crane | Herd of Shepherds | Pack holders |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| digital marketing agency seattle | No | No | No | No | No | Jives Media, Odd Dog, Actuate Media |
| creative agency seattle | No | No | No | No | No | Hero Creative, COLOR Creative, Bullseye Creative |
| advertising agency seattle | No | No | No | No | No | Jives Media, Actuate Media, Add3 |
| branding agency seattle | No | No | No | No | No | Hero Creative, Odd Dog, Jives Media |
| social media agency seattle | No | No | No | No | No | Crown Social, Jives Media, Odd Dog |
Two of the eleven tracked terms — "independent advertising agencies" and "independent creative agencies" — carry a local pack, but the Ahrefs SERP endpoint auto-localized them to Atlanta and Dallas respectively, so no Seattle pack could be read for either. The remaining two new terms trigger no pack at all.
An unclaimed surface, not a competitive gap
Not one agency in the competitive set appears in any map pack — including Copacino Fujikado, which ranks third organically on "advertising agency seattle" while being absent from that same keyword's pack. Every pack is held by performance and digital shops: Jives Media in four of the five, Odd Dog in three. They actively manage their Google Business Profile and the brand agencies have collectively ignored it. Whether DNA&STONE has a verified profile at its Seattle headquarters is worth confirming — this is the cheapest visibility available in the category.
Fourth place in the conversations that matter
Eighteen prompts are live in Peec AI, tracking how AI assistants answer the buying questions DNA&STONE's ICPs actually ask — 14 ICP-framed and 4 ICP-agnostic. Across two tracking runs the prompts produced 495 individual AI conversations, with every prompt measured once. Eleven competitors are tracked alongside.
Competitive comparison
| Brand | Visibility | Avg Position |
|---|---|---|
| Wieden+Kennedy | 13.3% | 1.9 |
| Hydrogen Advertising | 12.9% | 3.6 |
| Copacino Fujikado | 10.9% | 1.9 |
| Belief Agency | 8.9% | 3.2 |
| DNA & StoneYOU | 8.5% | 3.0 |
| Ogilvy | 6.7% | 3.9 |
| VSA Partners | 1.2% | — |
| Watson Creative | 1.2% | 4.7 |
| The Motion Agency | 0% | — |
| Paper Crane Factory | 0% | — |
| Tom, Dick & Harry Creative | 0% | — |
| Herd of Shepherds | 0% | — |
Wieden+Kennedy and Ogilvy are national reference points rather than direct competitors — they compete for a different tier of account. They are included because AI assistants surface them in answers to the same buying questions.
Fifth of twelve, and boxed in from both sides
DNA&STONE sits fifth on visibility at 8.5%. Belief Agency is four tenths of a point ahead, Ogilvy under two points behind, and Copacino Fujikado and Hydrogen Advertising are both above it. Its average position of 3.0 is mid-pack — when a model names DNA&STONE it names it third or fourth in the list, where Copacino and Wieden+Kennedy both average 1.9 and get named first. The share of voice of 13.6% says it is discussed at reasonable length once it appears; the visibility figure says it appears too rarely.
Wieden+Kennedy is winning the independence question
Wieden+Kennedy tops the whole set at 13.3%, and it performs hardest exactly where DNA&STONE is trying to compete. It scores 21.5% on the three Seattle and independence prompts added this week, against 11.8% on the earlier sixteen. The questions about independent agencies and full-service Seattle partners are pulling in a national independent rather than a local one. That is the territory DNA&STONE's positioning claims, and it is currently occupied.
Prompt-level performance
| Prompt | Brand | Visibility | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| What are the top advertising agencies in Seattle? | DNA & Stone | 54.2% | 3.1 |
| What are the best full-service creative agencies in Seattle? | DNA & Stone | 40.0% | 1.6 |
| I am a Marketing Director at a Seattle company that needs one agency to handle strategy, creative, media planning and buying. What are the best full-service marketing agencies in Seattle? | DNA & Stone | 30.8% | 3.8 |
| I am a Marketing Director at a Seattle technology company. What are the best creative agencies in Seattle for brand platform work? | DNA & Stone | 30.8% | 3.6 |
| What are the best branding agencies in Seattle? | DNA & Stone | 8.7% | 2.5 |
Six of eighteen, and all six are Seattle
DNA&STONE registers on six prompts and returns nothing on twelve. Every prompt it appears in is a Seattle geography question. It is invisible on every vertical prompt except the children's hospital one — nothing on credit unions, nonprofits, consumer packaged goods, media, research or experiential, despite having reference clients in all of them. Its strongest result, 54.2% on "top advertising agencies in Seattle", comes from a prompt added this week.
Which domains AI actually reads
When an AI assistant answers one of these prompts, it retrieves pages first and writes from what it finds. Across 495 conversations, three domains dominate what gets pulled — and none of them belong to an agency. Every one is a third-party list.
| Domain | Type | % of chats | Retrievals | Citations | Citations per retrieval |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| clutch.co | Directory | 30.1% | 149 | 267 | 1.79 |
| linkedin.com | Social | 13.1% | 65 | 71 | 1.09 |
| builtinseattle.com | Editorial | 12.3% | 61 | 98 | 1.61 |
| adweek.com | Trade press | 4.2% | 21 | 83 | 3.95 |
| expertise.com | Directory | 9.7% | 48 | 79 | 1.65 |
| themanifest.com | Directory | 8.3% | 41 | 15 | 0.37 |
| reddit.com | Forum | 2.6% | 13 | 16 | 1.23 |
"Retrievals" counts distinct conversations in which at least one page from the domain was pulled. Clutch appears in nearly a third of every conversation these prompts generate.
Clutch — ranked category pages, sliced by city and service
Clutch is the single most influential source in this category. What gets retrieved is never the homepage — it is the ranked category page for a specific service in a specific city, refreshed monthly and titled "Top [service] in Seattle — Sep 2026 Rankings". Models read these as current, authoritative lists.
| Page | Retrievals |
|---|---|
| /agencies/seattle — Top Advertising Agencies in Seattle | 32 |
| /agencies/branding/seattle — Top Branding Agencies in Seattle | 28 |
| /agencies/creative/seattle — Top Creative Agencies in Seattle | 17 |
| /agencies/branding/nonprofit-industry — Top Branding Companies for Nonprofits | 16 |
| /agencies/digital-marketing/seattle — Top Digital Marketing Agencies in Seattle | 13 |
| /agencies/media-buying — Top Media Buying & Planning Agencies | 12 |
| /agencies/ppc/seattle — Top PPC Agencies in Seattle | 10 |
| /agencies/social-media-marketing/seattle — Top Seattle Social Media Companies | 7 |
The pattern is geography crossed with service, plus a second axis of industry slices — nonprofit and healthcare category pages both appear. Presence on these lists is a placement exercise, not a content exercise.
LinkedIn — individual posts, not company pages
LinkedIn's influence here comes almost entirely from personal posts classified as discussion, not from company profiles. Company pages register two retrievals each. Posts by named individuals commenting on agency rankings and the holding-company model register six to twelve.
| Page | Retrievals |
|---|---|
| John Kovacevich on Ad Age's 2026 Agency A-List | 12 |
| Vineet Mehra on rethinking the holding company model | 9 |
| Pace Communications on Ad Age's indie shops | 8 |
| Sean Halter — “Top Independent Ad Agencies in the US: ChatGPT Ranking” | 6 |
| Martha Bartlett Piland on banking relationship misconceptions | 6 |
| Andrew Oates on holding companies vs. client needs | 4 |
The Sean Halter post carries the highest citation rate on the domain at 3.67 citations per retrieval — a single individual's post about independent agency rankings is more heavily quoted than any company page. The commentary is about independence and holding companies, which is exactly DNA&STONE's positioning, and it is being written by other people.
Built In Seattle — editorial listicles
Built In Seattle is retrieved almost exclusively for its numbered editorial roundups. Its company directory pages pull a fraction of what the articles do.
| Page | Retrievals |
|---|---|
| “10 Top Branding & Creative Agencies In Seattle” | 35 |
| “23 Top Marketing Agencies and Companies in Seattle” | 23 |
| “11 Top Seattle Advertising Agencies” | 14 |
| Directory: Top Seattle Social Media Companies | 7 |
| Directory: Top Seattle AdTech Companies | 6 |
One article — the branding and creative roundup — accounts for more retrievals than any single Clutch page, and carries 57 citations on its own. Getting into three Built In articles would do more for AI visibility than any amount of work on dnaandstone.com.
Reddit ranks in Google here, but AI does not read it
Reddit appears in 6 of the 7 Google SERPs across this keyword set, yet it is retrieved in only 2.6% of AI conversations — 13 chats against Clutch's 149. No brand in the tracked set is mentioned alongside a Reddit citation even once. In this category Reddit is a Google ranking factor and not an AI authority factor. The two channels reward different things, and effort spent on Reddit will show up in organic search long before it shows up in an AI answer.
The implication
Not one agency's own website appears among the top-retrieved domains, and dnaandstone.com does not appear at all. AI answers in this category are assembled from third-party lists, and the fastest route into those answers is to be on the lists — a Clutch profile ranked on the Seattle advertising, branding and creative category pages, inclusion in Built In Seattle's roundups, and founders posting under their own names about independence and the holding-company question. Adweek is worth noting separately: it is retrieved in only 4.2% of chats but carries the highest citation rate of any major source at 3.95, meaning that when a model finds Adweek it quotes it heavily. DNA&STONE's existing Adweek and Ad Age coverage is already working harder per retrieval than anything else pointing at the brand.
Reddit ranks in 6 of 7 SERPs
Reddit ranked in 6 of the 7 keyword SERPs analysed across the revised keyword set — the single most consistent presence in this category, more so than any agency.
r/TheTopAgencies
"The Best Digital Marketing Agencies in Seattle"
1,478 monthly traffic
- #4 digital marketing agency seattle
- #6 advertising agency seattle
- #6 branding agency seattle
- #3 social media agency seattle
r/advertising
"What are some top independent media agencies?"
100 monthly traffic
- #3 independent advertising agencies
- #5 independent creative agencies
No advocacy, and no risk either
No brand-named DNA&STONE thread exists in any SERP analysed — no reputation risk, but no advocacy either. The Seattle thread outranks most genuine Seattle agencies on their own home terms, and the independent-agencies thread sits third on the cheapest term in the whole keyword set. DNA&STONE appears in neither.
No middle-of-funnel options
| Element | Status | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Lead capture vs. generic contact | WEAK | /contact offers a copy-paste email address and an unlabeled form. The nav CTA reads "Email a founder." No qualification, no routing, no brief intake. |
| Middle-of-funnel value-add CTAs | ABSENT | No assessment, calculator, guide, teardown or downloadable anywhere. The only non-contact conversion path is a newsletter popup. |
| Blog / news CTAs | ABSENT | News items link out to Adweek and AdAge rather than to owned pages — the section functions as a press-clip reel, not owned content with conversion paths. |
Greatest weakness: nothing in the middle
The total absence of middle-of-funnel CTAs. A prospect who reads a case study has exactly two options — email a founder cold, or leave. There is nothing between "just arrived" and "ready to talk to a founder," which is a wide gap for an agency selling six-figure integrated campaigns.
Four moves, in order
Build the service and segment pages that don't exist
Seventeen capabilities and three proven verticals currently have zero indexable pages. This is the single highest-leverage fix, and the reason DR 46 produces 31 visits.
Claim and optimize the Google Business Profile in both markets
Absent from all five Seattle map packs — as is every competitor. The packs are held by performance shops that actively manage their Google Business Profile, making this the cheapest unclaimed visibility in the category.
Add middle-of-funnel conversion paths
Anything between "read a case study" and "email a founder" — a capability assessment, a category teardown, a downloadable POV.
Get into the Reddit conversation
Two threads shape agency discovery in Seattle and in the independent-agency category, and DNA&STONE appears in neither.
Ready to fix it?
Let's give DNA&STONE's authority something to point at.
Book your free strategy sessionMethodology
Domain and page-level retrieval data from Peec AI across the 7 and 8 September 2026 runs, covering 495 conversations. Retrievals count distinct conversations in which at least one page from a domain was pulled; citation rate is citations divided by retrievals and can exceed 1.
Brand set expanded 8 September 2026 to include Wieden+Kennedy and Ogilvy as national reference points; Peec backfilled both against the previous run's conversations. Figures cover 495 conversations across the 7 and 8 September runs — the denominator fell from 525 as the deleted-prompt recalculation completed, so all percentages shifted slightly upward.
The prompt set stands at eighteen as of 8 September 2026. Brand-level percentages are calculated against 495 conversations, a figure that still includes chats from a prompt deleted later the same day and will fall on the next recalculation.