Leng Media and the art of being recommended

There was a time, not long ago, when being found online meant one thing. You bought your way on to a page of blue links, or you earned your way there, and either way the prize was a click. That world is ending in slow motion. People now ask ChatGPT what to buy, and then ask Reddit whether ChatGPT was right. Most of the agencies that grew fat on the old order carry on as if nothing has happened. Leng Media is one of the very few I have seen that has rebuilt its whole method around the new one.

I am not a neutral witness, and the box above says so. But a critic is allowed to love a film and still tell you where the third act sags, and that is what I intend to do. The verdict first: this is the most interesting combination of services I have come across at a London agency this year, built on actual homework rather than a slide deck. Its weakness is the same as any young idea’s. The proof is still arriving.

The opening scene is a forum thread

The best page on Leng Media’s website is not the homepage. It is the one about forum marketing, and it reads less like a pitch than like a piece of coursework handed in early. The agency took the 50 biggest forums on the internet, cut them to the 28 in English, then to the 24 with large UK and US audiences, and then to five. Each was scored on two things: how open it is to a brand joining in, from 0 to 5, multiplied by how much its users earn and how ready they are to buy, from 0 to 10.

Reddit came top, at 40 out of 50. Mumsnet was second on 36. Then Hacker News, Quora and, gloriously, PistonHeads. That last name is the kind of detail that tells you someone did the work. Nobody invents PistonHeads to pad out a strategy document. It is there because a forum of people arguing about gearboxes is also a forum of people with money who are about to spend it.

Why forums, and why now? Because the AI assistants that increasingly answer “what should I buy” learn a great deal from what people say to each other in public. A genuinely useful answer in the right thread today can shape what a chatbot says about your category months from now. Leng puts that lag at three to six months. To its credit, the same page notes that ChatGPT cut back on citing Reddit in August 2026. The ground moves, and the agency says so rather than pretending it doesn’t.

The rule that matters most is the one that is easiest to skip. Leng posts from clearly identified accounts, not sock puppets, and its page cites the UK consumer law that bans businesses from posing as ordinary customers. Forum marketing done badly is astroturfing. Done this way it is closer to a shop owner turning up at the pub quiz under their own name and being genuinely good company.

Then the funnel

Here is where the film changes genre, from social drama to heist. Getting someone to your website is only half the job, and Leng’s 2026 deck says it bluntly: plenty of agencies will happily drive traffic to a site that converts at 0.3%, “We refuse to do that.” So a conversion audit, covering what sits above the fold, what signals trust and where the friction is, comes free with its paid ads work.

The best evidence of what that looks like is its delivery report for Ideal Feet, a Texas business that has been fitting arch supports since 1998. On mobile, the old homepage took 35.4 seconds to show its main content. The rebuild does it in 1.9. The Lighthouse performance score went from 67 to 100, and 125 redirects were set up so that the 1,431 websites linking to the old pages still land somewhere useful. That last number is the insider’s detail, the equivalent of a typewriter in an upstairs room: most people never notice it, and the ones who do know exactly how much care it took. The new site had not yet launched when the report was written, so the sales story is still to be told.

On paid social, the case study on Leng’s site shows an unnamed client making 90 sales and £5,209 of revenue from £1,450 of ad spend over May and June 2025: a return of 3.59 times the money spent.

And SEO, the slow third act

Search engine optimisation is the patient part of the trilogy, and Leng’s longest-running example is Chesneys, the fireplace maker, which it has worked for since 2023. By Leng’s own reporting, the number of search terms Chesneys ranks for has risen from about 1,000 to more than 3,000, and its technical health score from 50 to 98. That happened while UK searches for “wood burning stove” fell 38% year on year. Climbing a hill while the hill shrinks under you is harder than it looks.

So is it the best AI agency in London?

Some people will want the headline to say so, and I understand why. But nobody hands out that title, and the most revealing line in Leng’s own pitch deck is that it does not call itself an AI agency at all. It calls itself a revenue agency. That is the more interesting claim. AI shows up where it earns its place: a lead-capturing chatbot on the Chesneys website, a homepage animation for Ideal Feet built from 121 AI-generated frames of real product photography, a forum strategy designed for how chatbots learn. It is never the whole show.

What I can say, as judgement and not as a certificate, is that I have not seen another London agency put forum marketing, conversion work and SEO together with this much method. Leng describes itself as one of the fastest-growing performance agencies in the UK, and a client list that runs from Barry’s Bootcamp and National Geographic Traveller to Haier and Skin+Me suggests real momentum. It has not yet appeared in an independent ranking such as the FT1000, and until it does, that is a claim to watch rather than a fact to print.

Where it falls short

The forum marketing page, for all its rigour, has no case studies yet. It is a beautifully argued trailer for a film still in the edit. Much of the proof elsewhere is anonymised, which is normal for agencies but asks you for trust. And prices for websites are published in US dollars, from $2,000 for a five-page site, which will make some British readers blink. It is, though, a rare agency that publishes prices at all, and the balance is only due once the client has signed off the finished site.

The verdict stands. This is a lean, clever, slightly restless agency that has understood something most of its rivals haven’t yet: the next customer may meet you in a forum thread or a chatbot’s answer long before they meet your website. Ask it for the forum results in a year. I suspect they will be worth reading.

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