Is AI search optimisation worth it for an accountancy firm?

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 highest-return signal 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.