All rankings Eight lists · five orderings with a named source and date
Every ranking on this site, and what each one actually measures
There is no single ranking of the companies that move cargo by sea, and any page offering one has picked a metric without telling you. SeaRates publishes five orderings across two pages — capacity, schedule reliability, orderbook, ocean volume and revenue — each with the publisher and the date it was read. Where a ranking would need data nobody publishes, the page says so instead of scoring on adjectives.
The eight lists
Ocean freight forwarders
Two orderings that exist — by ocean TEUs and by revenue, both from Armstrong & Associates 2025 — and three a buyer would rather have, with the reason each is absent.
Container shipping lines
Three separate orderings, because there is no single one: capacity, schedule reliability and orderbook disagree about who is first.
Car shipping companies
Who the lists actually name, ordered by how often the measured corpus names them, and what is verifiable about each before a deposit.
International movers
Van lines, brokers and forwarders sit in one list on every ranking page. Ordered by mentions, with the credential each one actually holds.
LCL consolidators
What the lists are built on, the unit the price is built on, and where the quote stops matching the invoice.
Amazon FBA forwarders
What makes an FBA shipment different from an import, who the importer of record is, and which licence covers the ocean leg.
China to USA forwarders
DDP is the product being sold and the one nobody explains. What the lists measure on the busiest US import lane.
What "international shipping company" means
One query, three industries. Which market your shipment belongs to before any ranking is worth reading.
What "ranked by visibility" means, and what it does not
Two of the lists above are ordered by how many of the measured queries name each company. That is a real, repeatable measurement, and it is a measurement of publishing, not of service: it says a company is written about often, and says nothing about whether it answers the phone, quotes honestly or holds the licence it implies. It is labelled that way on the page, and the credential column next to each name is the part you can check yourself in the federal registers.
The three lists carrying no ordering carry none because the underlying data does not exist in public form. Rather than score on adjectives, each of those pages publishes the four rows a verifiable ranking would need and marks which ones SeaRates holds. When the missing rows are collected, the ordering appears and the date it was collected appears with it.