Directive Review (2026): Services, Proof and Score

Directive is a B2B performance marketing agency founded in 2013 by Garrett Mehrguth, its CEO, and Tanner Shaffer, its Managing Partner. Mehrguth says he built it from an apartment in Azusa, California, with no outside funding. The company now describes itself as a 150-plus person agency with offices in Orange County, Austin, New York City, Mexico City, London, and Toronto. Clutch lists its headquarters in Irvine, and California records list Directive Consulting as an active corporation. It sells paid search, paid social, SEO and content, GEO, performance creative, PR, and revenue operations, and it reports serving more than 420 brands.

Directive's success stories name most clients and give numbers. Placemakr is credited with a 50% lift in paid search conversions from one page layout change. Data software firm dbt beat its growth goals by nearly 2x with its first paid media campaign. The best-dated example is AxisCare: 200% more scheduled demos and 70% more relevant organic traffic year over year across the first three quarters of 2024. Many other results carry no dates, and all are self-reported. Outside, Directive holds 56 Clutch reviews averaging 4.8. One from Xactly reports 178% organic traffic growth and 93% more organic leads.

Directive publishes its full team list. It names account directors for paid media, SEO, and client strategy, plus senior account strategists by channel. The homepage cites more than 100 marketing strategists. The site does not say how much hands-on work the founders or managing directors do on each account. Directive publishes no onboarding timeline and no prices. Clutch shows most reviewed projects in the $10,000 to $49,000 range. One older Clutch review from a client that left in 2018 says leadership became hard to reach, and Directive disputed that account in its reply.

Directive sells GEO, answer engine, and LLM search services with a five-step method: entity and topic mapping, content restructuring for AI summaries, structured data, indexing work, and tracking of AI citations. It publishes measured AI search results for named clients. AxisCare's share of referral traffic from AI tools rose from under 4% to 15%, and AI tools sent 24 net-new leads from March to August 2025. Case Status went from no presence in ChatGPT and Perplexity answers to what Directive calls a dominant position across more than 39 tracked prompts within nine months. Directive tracked that work with Scrunch, an AI visibility tool.

The main gaps are dated proof and access to senior staff. Most case studies lack dates, and the Case Status result is a description, not a score. Directive does not publish the list of prompts it tracks for clients. Before signing, ask who will run your account each day and how often a managing director joins calls. Ask for a sample AI visibility report with the prompts tracked and the starting baseline. Confirm the contract term, the notice period, and the monthly budget Directive expects.