How AI assistants could send potential accounting clients to another firm

Something has shifted in how people go looking for the right accountant or tax preparer. Most firms have not noticed because it’s not something that can really be seen from the inside.

Processing Content

Think about the scenarios. Someone out there is in need of help with a multistate filing, or an S corp election; they used to search, scroll and click on a few results. But things have changed. More and more, potential clients are asking ChatGPT or Google’s AI instead of using traditional search engines. 

Increasingly, there may be no long list of ranked search results for a prospect to scan — just a short AI-generated answer naming only a few options. When an AI assistant responds, it typically comes back with two or three firms, with a short line about each. There’s no scrolling, no page two of results to review. The answer that AI provides is largely put together from what it can read on a firm’s own website. 

I run a web hosting company and spend a lot of time looking at small business websites from the server side. A surprising number of them have been broken for months. Not down — broken. A contact form that stopped delivering somewhere along the way. A page that times out under load. A team page still listing a partner who left in 2023.

On most sites that is an annoyance. For an accounting or tax prep firm, it’s expensive, and the expensive part is that you never find out. Nobody is calling you to say their message didn’t go through. They just call someone else. Maybe your competition!

Be specific about what you actually do

Plenty of firms’ websites describe the services they provide in language that could belong to any practice in the country. Things like tax preparation, bookkeeping, advisory and business consulting. All true, but none of it is useful to an AI tool trying to work out whether you are the right fit for someone with a rental property in two states and a small S corp, for example.

Vague service descriptions get summarized into even more vague recommendations, which, in the end, will lose out to specific ones. Think about what makes your firm stand out. If you do a lot of work with restaurants, dental practices or expat filings, say so plainly and give it its own page on the website. If there are things you deliberately do not take on, that is worth saying too. Being clear about who you are not for is a good way of being found by the people you are for.

Credentials go stale faster than you think

This one matters more in accounting than in most fields because so much of what makes a firm credible is verifiable. Licenses, state registrations, EA status, specialist certifications, professional memberships — these are exactly the details an AI tool will look for when deciding which firms to name. They’re also the exact kinds of details that tend to age out on a website nobody has edited in three years.

Test it for yourself. Go and read your own team page as a stranger would. Are the bios current? Is everyone listed still there? Does anyone who joined in the last two years actually appear? A firm whose website says less about itself than the firm down the road will look like the smaller, less established option, whether or not that is true.

Test the way people are told to reach you

If an AI assistant recommends your firm, it will point the user to the best way to reach out, whether a contact form, phone number or scheduling link. Whatever it points to for contacting you needs to work.

Fill in your own contact form and see whether the message arrives. Do the same with phone contact information. Click the scheduling link too. Make sure the phone number on the site is the one you actually answer, and that it matches what is on your Google listing and your directory profiles. Where those don’t match, AI is still going to pick one, and it may be wrong.

This takes about 10 minutes and is the single most useful thing on this list. I have lost count of the sites I have seen where the form had been failing for weeks, apparently unknown to anyone, likely causing the firm to lose business too.

A slow site can leave you out entirely

When AI assistants gather information, they visit a lot of sites fast. If a firm’s site is slow to respond, times out or is unreachable at that moment, there is no second attempt and no note made. You are simply not going to be included in the answer, and the firm whose site did respond will be.

To stay on point here, you do not need to become an expert in any of this. Ask whoever maintains your site two questions. First, how fast does it load on a phone, and, second, has it had any downtime in the last few months? If nobody can answer, that itself is the answer.

The timing works in your favor

Here’s the really awkward part. Your website is doing its hardest work between January and April, which is precisely when you have no time to look at it. By the time filing season is over, whatever was wrong has been wrong for months and the leads it cost you are long gone.

Which makes right now, in the quiet stretch of the year, the sensible time to spend an afternoon on it. Read your own pages. Send yourself a message through your own form. Check who is still listed on the team page. None of this is technical work and none of it takes long.

This is not about having the flashiest website in your market. It’s more about removing the small failures that can make your firm harder to find, harder to understand, or harder to contact at the exact moment a prospect is ready to choose.