DNA&STONE
Brand Authority Audit — September 2026
Where DNA&STONE stands today
Domain Rating
46
+19 in 12 months · above competitor median of 41
Monthly organic traffic
31
August 2026 · 4% of competitor median
Target keywords in top 100
0 of 10
Both home markets
Technical health score
89 / 100
45 pages crawled · not the bottleneck
AI visibility, unbranded
3.8%
3rd of 6 tracked brands
Map pack appearances
0 of 7
Seattle and Chicago local packs
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.
Zero of ten 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 |
| advertising agency chicago | 350 | 6 | Yes | Not in top 100 |
| digital marketing agency seattle | 350 | 61 | Yes | Not in top 100 |
| creative agency chicago | 200 | 58 | Yes | Not in top 100 |
| branding agency chicago | 200 | 44 | 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 |
DNA&STONE ranks outside the top 100 for every tracked commercial term, in both of its own markets. Every one of these keywords triggers a local map pack.
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.
Score 1 / 10
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, last on results
| Brand | Domain | DR | Keywords in Top 10 |
|---|---|---|---|
| DNA&STONEYOU | dnaandstone.com | 46 | 0 / 4 |
| The Motion Agency | themotionagency.com | 41 | 2 / 4 |
| VSA Partners | vsapartners.com | 56 | 1 / 4 |
| Watson Creative | watsoncreative.com | 55 | 1 / 4 |
| Belief Agency | beliefagency.com | 33 | 1 / 4 |
| Tom, Dick & Harry Creative | tdhcreative.com | 25 | 2 / 4 |
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. DNA&STONE had 0 organic visits in August 2025; a log axis cannot plot zero, so that marker sits at the bottom edge and is labelled.
Authority bought, traffic unearned
DNA&STONE's vector runs almost straight sideways — DR 27 to 46 in twelve months with traffic effectively flat at the floor. It has bought authority faster than any competitor and converted none of it into traffic. Tom, Dick & Harry has DR 25, twenty-one points lower, and pulls 426 monthly visits — nearly 14x more.
Read the 2025 point with care
DNA&STONE's August 2025 traffic was exactly zero, which a log axis cannot plot. The marker sits at the bottom edge and is labelled "0 visits" rather than dropped — that near-horizontal vector is the single most important thing on this chart.
Absent from seven of seven map packs — 1 / 10
All ten tracked keywords trigger a local pack, and DNA&STONE has two physical offices. It is absent from the map pack on all seven local keywords tested.
| Keyword | Map Pack | DNA&STONE Present | Pack Holders |
|---|---|---|---|
| advertising agency chicago | Yes | No | 222 Digital, Comrade, VisualFizz |
| digital marketing agency seattle | Yes | No | Jives Media, Odd Dog, Actuate Media |
| creative agency chicago | Yes | No | C2 Creative Studio, Flamingo, Comrade |
| creative agency seattle | Yes | No | Hero Creative, COLOR Creative, Bullseye Creative |
| advertising agency seattle | Yes | No | Jives Media, Actuate Media, Add3 |
| branding agency seattle | Yes | No | Hero Creative, Odd Dog, Jives Media |
| social media agency seattle | Yes | No | Crown Social, Jives Media, Odd Dog |
Third place in the conversations that matter
Twenty prompts are live in Peec AI, tracking how AI assistants answer the buying questions DNA&STONE's ICPs actually ask — 14 ICP-framed, 5 ICP-agnostic and 1 brand perception prompt. The first run produced 554 individual AI conversations across every major model. Five competitors are tracked alongside.
Prompt-level performance
| Prompt | Brand | Visibility | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| I'm looking to buy full-service creative, brand platform, and integrated campaign services. Tell me about DNA&STONE. Are they well-reviewed? How do they stack up against competitors? What are they best at? Who do they typically sell to?BRANDED | DNA & Stone | 100% | 1.0 |
| What are the best full-service creative agencies in Seattle? | DNA & Stone | 40.0% | 1.6 |
| I am a Marketing Director at a Seattle technology company. What are the best creative agencies in Seattle for brand platform work? | DNA & Stone | 29.2% | 3.9 |
| What are the best branding agencies in Seattle? | DNA & Stone | 8.7% | 2.5 |
| I am a Communications Director at a children's hospital. What are the best agencies for public service campaigns on difficult subjects like gun safety, suicide prevention, or opioid awareness? | DNA & Stone | 3.6% | 5.0 |
Reddit ranks in 6 of 7 SERPs
Reddit ranked in 6 of the 7 keyword SERPs analyzed — the single most consistent presence across this keyword set, 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
"Chicago Ad Agencies Doing Best Work?"
1,128 monthly traffic
- #4 advertising agency chicago
- #6 creative agency chicago
No advocacy, and no risk either
No brand-named DNA&STONE thread exists in any SERP analyzed — no reputation risk, but also no advocacy. On the two threads that shape agency discovery in both of its markets, DNA&STONE is not part of the conversation. The Seattle thread outranks every genuine Seattle agency except Belief and Copacino on their own home terms.
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 | LIKELY 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 seven of seven local packs in cities where the agency has physical offices.
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 Chicago, 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
Data sources: Ahrefs (keywords, SERP, traffic history, domain rating), Peec AI (AI search visibility). Analysis date: September 2026. Traffic and DR comparisons anchored on August 2025 vs August 2026 to avoid partial-month distortion. Organic traffic figures are global — Ahrefs country filtering was unavailable on the metrics history endpoint. Competitor identification used city-modified SERP queries; national head terms were excluded because the Ahrefs SERP endpoint auto-localized them to an unrelated market. Blog CTA presence was inferred from site structure — news pages were not directly fetchable. Technical health from Ahrefs Site Audit, crawl dated 4 September 2026, 45 pages. AI visibility from Peec AI, first tracking run dated 7 September 2026, 554 AI conversations across all tracked models — a single day of data, so treat it as a baseline snapshot rather than a trend. Unbranded figures exclude the brand perception prompt, which names DNA&STONE inside the question and would otherwise inflate share of voice.