How AI assistants recommend accountants
A business owner who asks an AI assistant for an accountant often hears the names of the largest firms first. Here is what the assistants answered in every city the AIGROW Index asked, and what a smaller firm can work on.
- Cities asked
- 88
- Names in the rankings
- 1,254
- Businesses named per city
- 43
- Names repeated on a rerun
- 43%
- Answers that name the leader
- 58%
The first two rows are counts; the rows under them are medians over the ranked pages. Every question was asked without a location or a chat history.
Asked for an accountant in 88 cities, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok named about 43 firms per city, and 57% of those names came up only once. Each assistant builds its list from what is published about a firm. What a firm controls is that public record: its services, its clients and its listings.
What a customer asked, and who came first
One place of the 88, as an example: New York. Every place was asked the same questions in its own language, and its page in the Index has the full ranking.
- Who is the best accountant in New York?
- I run a small business in New York. Which accounting firm would you recommend?
- I need someone to do my taxes in New York. Which CPA should I use?
- Which bookkeeping service in New York would you recommend for a small company?
- Marcum LLPnamed in 54% of the answers
- EisnerAmpernamed in 52% of the answers
- CBIZ Marks Panethnamed in 31% of the answers
The names that recur
61 different businesses came first across 88 rankings, and 83 names were listed in three places or more. These are the most frequent.
- BDO32 places
- Deloitte31 places
- KPMG28 places
- Grant Thornton18 places
- PwC17 places
- Baker Tilly16 places
Counted by spelling: two businesses with the same name in different places count as one.
What an owner can work on
No one can promise a place in an assistant’s answer. What an owner controls is what is published about the business, and these are the parts the questions above point to.
Name the work, not the profession
The questions ask for someone to do taxes, for bookkeeping and for a firm for a small company. A page for each service, saying who it is for, matches those questions better than a page about accounting in general.
Say who your clients are
The largest firms recur from city to city. A smaller firm stands apart by saying plainly which clients it serves, such as freelancers, shops or startups, on its site and in every listing.
Credentials where they can be checked
Your qualifications and memberships, listed the same way on your site and in the professional registers, are facts an assistant can repeat about you.
Every ranking for this trade
The AIGROW Index publishes the ranking of each place with every answer, and how it was measured.
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