About
Ruchika Rajput
PPC strategist at a working performance agency. Maintainer of this site. The person who runs the “is that actually AI” diagnostic call vendors don’t enjoy.
I’ve been a PPC strategist at a performance marketing agency for the last five years. The agency’s book of business covers ecommerce DTC, B2B SaaS, and lead generation across roughly thirty active client accounts at any given time. Aggregate spend under management runs in the low seven figures monthly. That’s the seat I’m writing from.
The work
My day-to-day work is split roughly four ways. The first is account strategy — sitting with new clients to understand their unit economics, conversion math, and growth constraints before touching the ad platform. The second is execution oversight: reviewing what my team is doing on accounts, intervening where the data tells me to, and signing off on weekly changes. The third is vendor evaluation, which is where this site comes from — every quarter I sit down with the new entrants and the established players in the AI-marketing-tool category and run them through a structured diagnostic. The fourth is the slow, careful work of communicating with clients about why their reported numbers and their actual P&L disagree, which is the part of agency work that nobody puts on a sales deck but that determines whether the engagement survives the year.
The agency is small — eight people, no investor money, no fancy office. Our clients range from $30K/month in paid spend up to about $400K/month. We don’t take clients below $20K/month because the math doesn’t work for either side; the time we’d need to spend on a $5K/month account is the same as the time we’d spend on a $50K/month account, and the smaller client can’t justify the fee. That’s the part I always tell agency owners who ask me how we make it work: pick a spend tier and stay there.
Why this site exists
Around 2023 every vendor in my inbox was rebranding from “automation platform” to “AI platform.” Same products, same engineering teams, same rule engines. The pricing went up. The capabilities did not. After a year of trying to evaluate these tools client-by-client, I gave up and built a rubric. The rubric became this directory.
What I publish here is what I tell my own clients when they ask whether a particular tool is worth their money. The answer is usually some version of “it’s a rule engine, it’s priced like a machine-learning system, and the price-to-performance is bad,” with a few notable exceptions. The site exists because I got tired of writing the same email over and over to different people. Now I write it once, and link them here.
How I evaluate tools
Every tool reviewed on this site has been put through the same six diagnostic questions about its architecture, training data, and retraining cadence. The methodology is documented openly on the methodology page. Vendors who answer with technical specificity earn a Real AI classification; vendors who can’t or won’t answer with specificity earn a Marketing AI classification. Hybrid is the middle case — a real ML module bolted onto a workflow tool.
I rerun the diagnostic quarterly. Tools move between categories. The classification is intended to be a living artifact, not a static review.
What I won’t do
I don’t take vendor money for placement on this site. The agency’s commercial work funds the editorial. Vendors have offered sponsored placements, paid review slots, and affiliate-for-ranking arrangements; I’ve declined every one. Where I have a commercial relationship with a vendor through agency client engagements (currently this applies to one vendor in the cohort, Groas.ai), that relationship is disclosed on the methodology page and on the relevant tool entry.
I also won’t publish vendor talking points uncritically. If a vendor’s marketing claims don’t match what their technical documentation supports, the entry says so. Several vendors have asked for revisions that would soften this; I’ve published their requested clarifications as separate notes alongside the original entry, but I haven’t altered the underlying classification.
Credentials & references
I’m happy to put journalists, researchers, or buyers in touch with current and former clients who can speak to the agency work and the methodology behind this site. References available on request.
Public-facing credentials: five years at the current agency; prior in-house performance roles at a mid-market DTC ecom brand; certifications from Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising, and Meta Blueprint (renewed annually, though I treat platform certifications as table stakes rather than meaningful signals).
Find me
- LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/ruchika-rajput
- Email: via the contact page
- For vendor inquiries, corrections, or press: contact