Is AI search optimisation worth it for an accountancy firm?
Two firms in our sweep were named almost equally often. One converted 63% of those mentions into a recommendation. The other converted 20%. Nothing about the questions changed, and most firms currently have no way to see which one they are.
Steen Stones · Reviewed
The honest answer is: it depends whether you can currently see the number that matters, and almost no firm can. In our own sweep, Crunch converted 63% of its AI mentions into a specific recommendation. The Accountancy Partnership, named almost as often, converted 20%. Both firms show up on a mentions dashboard looking similarly "visible". Only one of them is actually converting that visibility into a client recommendation, and the difference is invisible to any tool that only counts citations.
What the spend actually buys
Ordinary SEO work, the £500 to £3,500 a month UK accountancy firms already pay for rankings, buys citation, not conversion. It gets a firm into the pool of names an engine might mention. Whether a mention becomes a recommendation depends on something SEO spend doesn't touch directly: whether the engine has a specific, checkable reason to put that firm forward over the others in the pool. UK Property Accountants won a property-developer question because its whole practice is property tax, stated plainly and backed by review volume, not because it outranked a rival on a keyword.
That reframes the ROI question. It isn't "does AI search work bring traffic", ordinary SEO already does that. It's "does the firm convert the mentions it's already getting", and that is a measurable, trackable number most firms have never looked at because most visibility tools don't report it.
Where the return compounds
Across Avouch's wider research, 6,517 AI answers judged, every verdict stored and independently re-checked, comparison and ranking channels come out ahead of every other channel by a wide margin whichever way the analysis is read. For an accountancy firm specifically, our own sweep points at a narrower, more actionable version of that same finding: third-party review volume, not a directory listing, was the single most-cited source in the whole sweep. Building and maintaining a real Trustpilot presence is not a marketing nice-to-have here; it's the highest-leverage lever our own data has found for this sector, and it's usually the one a firm's existing SEO retainer never touches.
There's a ceiling worth naming honestly too. Even in the market where a firm's own site was cited often, that site was never once the sole source behind a recommendation in Avouch's wider 1,828-case research. A firm that spends everything on its own website content, expecting AI recommendations to follow, is optimising the one channel our research says cannot deliver the outcome on its own.
There's a difference between showing up and being recommended. AI cannot recommend what it doesn't know.
The three questions worth asking before you spend anything
- Do we know our own mention-to-recommendation rate, per engine? If the honest answer is no, that's the first thing to fix, everything else is a guess until this exists.
- Do we have a real, current, actively-managed Trustpilot presence? This was the single biggest factor in our own sweep and it's rarely inside an existing SEO retainer.
- Does our content name a specific practice-area capability an engine could cite as the reason, or does it read like every other firm's page? Generic reputation copy doesn't convert; specific, checkable claims do.