AI visibility for a US professional services firm: the named specialism and the credential anyone can check

An accounting, consulting or advisory firm in the United States gets named by ChatGPT or Gemini when two things are true at once: a page on your own site answers one buying question for one named specialism, and the credential behind that page can be checked by a stranger in about two minutes. Size is not the filter. In our benchmark run on 15 October 2026 we put 102 buying questions to ChatGPT and 102 to Gemini in the United States, which is 204 US readings, and our own domain was cited zero times on either engine. Across the full run of 597 readings and 10,652 citations, 85.6 per cent went to a page on the vendor's or the firm's own website. A US advisory answer is assembled almost entirely out of self published pages, so the page you publish is the lever that moves first.

What that run measured, and what it did not

The numbers here come from one dated measurement: ChatGPT and Gemini, read on 15 October 2026 across the United States, the United Kingdom and India, 597 usable readings of 612 attempted. The questions were general buying questions asked market by market, not a separate study of each industry, so there is no accountancy figure and no consulting figure inside it. What the run gives you is the source mix every US answer was built from, and that holds whoever asks. The method and the full citation table sit in what AI assistants actually cite across 597 readings of ChatGPT and Gemini in three markets, and the American slice in the US cut of those 204 readings.

Hold onto one distinction while reading any visibility number, ours included. Our product watches five surfaces by name: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews. The run behind this page is two of those five, and the other three appear nowhere in it.

Where a citation went	Share of 10,652 citations
The vendor's or the firm's own website	85.6 per cent
Official platform documentation	9.7 per cent
News or a large publisher	2.5 per cent
Social or community	1.5 per cent
Review directories such as G2 and Capterra	0.8 per cent

The question a US buyer actually types

Nobody asks an assistant for a good accountant. They describe a situation, and it carries three constraints that decide who can be named.

• The entity and the event. A Delaware C corporation that just took a priced round, a single member LLC crossing into a second state, a family business moving ownership down a generation.
• The jurisdiction. State nexus, a city filing, a state board rule. An answer written for one state is wrong in another, and a national page with no state in it is right for neither.
• The scope. A review rather than an audit, one piece of advice rather than a retainer, a controller for two days a month rather than a finance team.

Each is a filter. A firm page that says trusted advisors to growing businesses passes none of them, so the assistant reaches for a page that does, usually a software company's resource library or a national directory. That is why these answers so often name somebody who cannot sign anything.

Specificity beats volume, and it costs less

Think of a page here as an entity a model can file and retrieve. Revenue recognition for a usage based software business is a thing. Business advisory is not. So write one page per specialism you genuinely practise, with the question as the title and the answer in the first two sentences, then make that specialism say the same words on the firm page, the partner profile, the listings and the professional body entry. One wording repeated builds one strong entity. Three wordings build three weak ones.

Four specialisms you can defend in a meeting carry further than twenty service tiles, and they are the four that produce referrals anyway, which pairs with the five routes consulting work actually arrives by.

The credential a reader can check in two minutes

This is the part most firms leave off, and in the United States it is unusually easy to supply, because the registers are public and free. Publish the licence, the state, the number, and a link to the register that confirms it.

• A CPA licence, verifiable through the state board of accountancy that issued it, and through CPAverify for the states that take part.
• Firm registration, where your state requires a firm permit as well as individual licences, and PCAOB registration if you audit issuers or broker dealers.
• An AICPA peer review report, a dated statement about the firm's accounting and auditing practice written by somebody other than the firm.
• Form ADV on the Investment Adviser Public Disclosure site for anyone giving investment advice, and FINRA BrokerCheck for a registered representative.

A number a reader can take to a register is a fact rather than an adjective, so it survives being quoted by a machine. 102 of the 102 build spec conversations in our run asked for a date and a last verified line on any claim, and a licence lookup gives you both.

Fees in dollars, and the advertising rules around proof

102 of 102 of those build specs also asked for pricing in the reader's own currency. For a firm that bills by engagement that does not mean a rate card. It means the structure: what you bill by, the band in dollars, what moves it, and the date you reviewed it. A page with a dollar figure and a date gets quoted for a price question, and a page saying contact us for a proposal hands that question to a competitor.

Proof needs the same care. Testimonials and comparative claims sit under the Federal Trade Commission's endorsement rules, which require a material connection between you and anybody endorsing you to be disclosed, and under your state board's advertising rules. Dated, factual case descriptions carrying the numbers you may publish satisfy both, and that is the form that earned citations in our run. Superlatives earned none.

How to read your own position in an afternoon

1. Write six questions in a client's words, naming your firm in none of them, with the entity type, the state and the event in each.
2. Ask each one twice in ChatGPT and twice in Gemini, with chat memory turned off so your own history has no say in it.
3. Record which firms were named, save every source shown, then sort those sources into own site, documentation, publisher and directory. The first bucket usually holds most of them, as it did across the run.
4. Take the two questions where a competitor was named and you were not, and write those two pages this month.

The temptation at step four is to go and collect directory listings. Review directories took 0.8 per cent of the 10,652 citations, counted one by one in our full count of every directory citation in the run. Claim yours in an hour, because clients do look, then put the week into the specialism pages.

Our interest in this is worth stating plainly. AI Knows Us is the product we sell, and for a firm the work is the specialism pages and getting the credential facts onto the surfaces an engine reads. 64 of the 102 build specs asked for that interest to appear on the page, and the same benchmark that produced the figures above records our own worst result: 3 citations in 597 readings, none in the United States.

Questions about AI visibility for an accounting, consulting or advisory firm

Does our firm size decide whether an assistant names us?

Specificity decides it far more than size. In the 15 October 2026 run the specialist domains the engines reached for were small companies with detailed public pages, cited dozens of times each. A narrow, dated, well sourced page is within reach of a two partner firm this quarter.

Are state level answers really different?

They are, because the rule being asked about is different. Nexus, filing dates and board requirements change at the state line, so a page naming the state answers a question the national page cannot. Write the states you practise in and no others.

Which matters more, the firm page or the partner profile?

The firm page states the specialism and the fee structure, and the partner profile carries the checkable credential. Answers about what to do lean on the first and answers about who to trust lean on the second, so both earn a place.

What should we publish when the fee depends on the client?

Publish what it depends on: the billing unit, the band in dollars, the four or five factors that move the number, and the review date. That is more useful than a flat figure and gives a price question something to quote.

What to look at tomorrow morning

Open the page a client lands on after somebody recommended you, and read it as an assistant would: take away the photography and the adjectives and see what facts are left. On most US firm sites what survives is a city, a row of service words and a phone number, which cannot be matched to a question about state nexus or a priced round. Put the specialism back in the client's words, add the licence number with the register behind it, state the fee structure in dollars with the date you checked it, and the brochure becomes quotable. That is an afternoon of work rather than a rebrand.