Original research · 28 firms audited
Your fundamentals are probably fine. We audited 28 accounting firm websites and the basics were in place on nearly all of them. The reason firms are not being cited is the entity layer, and almost nobody has one.
No email required. The scorecard runs the same eight checks in about ten seconds.
Built for practices that already rank and still are not cited
It is no longer one job. Ranking in a results page and being named by an AI assistant are separate problems, and accounting firms have largely solved the first one already.
SEO for accountants is the work of making a firm findable when someone searches for a CPA, and citable when someone asks an AI assistant to recommend one. For most firms the technical basics are already in place, so the work that moves the needle is the structured description of the practice itself.
The entity layer is the machine-readable description of your business embedded in your pages: that you are an accounting practice, where you are, what hours you keep, what services you offer, and the questions you answer. It is JSON-LD, it is invisible to visitors, and it is what a search engine or AI model reads when it decides whether you are a credible answer.
An AI assistant choosing which local accountant to name cannot infer from prose that a site belongs to a CPA firm in your city with your hours. It reads entities. A site that declares nothing but a generic Organization has told it almost nothing, which is why firms that rank perfectly well still go uncited.
Original research
In we fetched 28 independent US accounting and CPA firm homepages and recorded eight facts that are either present or absent in the served HTML. Not one site passed all eight. The interesting part is which half they failed.
This is the surprise. These are not broken websites, and their vendors handled the fundamentals.
Median load was 0.7 seconds. Telling this market to “get mobile-friendly and add HTTPS” is advice for a problem it has already solved.
86% of these sites carry structured data, but the common types are generic CMS boilerplate. Here is what they actually declare about the business.
Opening hours, coordinates and FAQ markup are exactly the facts a local pack and an AI answer want, and they are the rarest things on these sites.
These figures describe the 28 firms we audited, not accounting firms in general: five metros, homepages only, one moment in time. Treat them as directional. Run the same eight checks on your site.
The problem
Prospects increasingly ask an assistant who to hire before they ever look at a results page. A firm can hold page one locally and still never enter that conversation.
Plenty of firms hold page one locally and still never appear when someone asks an assistant for a recommendation. Ranking and being citable are now two different problems, and only one of them is solved by the site you already have.
Of the 28 firms we audited, only 18% declared an accounting-specific business type in their structured data. The rest publish boilerplate their CMS generated, which describes a website rather than a practice.
Opening hours appeared on 11% of the sites we measured and geographic coordinates on 14%. Those are precisely the facts a local pack and an AI answer want, and almost nobody supplies them in a form that can be read.
Guides tell accounting firms to add HTTPS, go mobile-friendly, and speed up the site. Every firm in our sample already had a mobile viewport, and the median homepage loaded in well under a second. That advice is aimed at a problem this market solved years ago.
One engagement covering the entity work, the technical fixes, and the content structure, delivered in your codebase by engineers.
Your practice declared once, properly: AccountingService or Accountant, address, service area, opening hours, the services you actually offer, and FAQ markup that mirrors the visible page. One coherent graph across the site rather than disconnected snippets.
The same eight checks we ran across the sample, run against your site, plus the deeper crawl: titles, meta descriptions, heading structure, canonicals, robots directives, redirects and sitemap health. Every defect fixed in your codebase, not handed back as a PDF.
Location pages and structured data that hold up when a firm has more than one office, wired so each location is a distinct entity rather than three near-identical pages competing with each other.
The questions your prospects actually ask, answered directly and self-containedly, in language an answer engine can lift without rewriting. This is what turns a page from a result into a citation.
Core Web Vitals measured and fixed at code level. We will also tell you when speed is not your problem, which for most accounting sites we have measured is the honest answer.
Search Console wired up properly, plus a snapshot at handoff of where you stand: rankings, traffic, and how AI assistants currently answer the questions that matter in your market.
Need the website itself rebuilt rather than corrected? See CPA website design. For the general offering across industries, see SEO, GEO & AEO services.
The proof
We came into this vertical through research rather than a client list, and pretending otherwise would be the exact failure this page is about. So here is what we can actually put in front of you: the measurement, a tool that runs it on your site, and this page, which is built to the standard we would build yours to.
View source on this page and compare it against any competitor’s. Our work across other industries is live and clickable in the portfolio, listed as what it is rather than dressed up as accounting experience.
From a free ten-second score to a fixed site, with honest answers the whole way.
Run the free scorecard, or let us run the full audit. Either way you start with the eight checks measured against the sample rather than against generic advice.
Your practice described properly in structured data: business type, locations, hours, services, and FAQs, as one graph rather than scattered fragments.
Titles, descriptions, heading structure, canonicals, redirects and Core Web Vitals, corrected in your actual stack by the engineers who found them.
Rich results tests, Search Console checks, and a clear before-and-after picture of where the site stands in search and in AI answers.
28
Firm sites audited
Our own research, sample and script committed
0
Passed all eight checks
Not one firm in the sample
18%
Declare what kind of business they are
The gap the whole vertical turns on
SEO for accountants is the work of making an accounting practice findable in search and citable by AI assistants. In 2026 that splits into two jobs: the traditional one of ranking in Google results, and the newer one of being described clearly enough in structured data that an AI answer engine will name you. Most firms have quietly solved the first and not started the second.
Almost certainly the entity layer. Across the 28 firm homepages we audited in August 2026, every single one had a mobile viewport and the median page loaded in 0.7 seconds, so speed and mobile were not the differentiator. What was missing was structured data describing the business: only 18% declared an accounting-specific business type, 11% published opening hours, and 14% published geographic coordinates.
We fetched 28 independent US accounting and CPA firm homepages once each, with a normal browser user agent, and recorded eight facts that are either present or absent in the served HTML. Nothing was scored subjectively. Directories, aggregators and the national multi-office firms were excluded. The sample list, the script and the raw results are published, and you can run the same eight checks against your own site with our free scorecard.
It is a sample, not a census, and we would rather say so than overstate it. It covers five metros, homepages only, and one moment in time, and it measures what is in the HTML rather than what Google ultimately renders. Treat the percentages as directional. The reason we publish the method and the raw data is so you can judge that for yourself, which is more than any of the advice articles ranking for this term offer.
Not a wall of them, and we are not going to invent one. We are an engineering team that has been doing technical SEO and site builds across other industries, and we moved into this vertical on the strength of research rather than a client list. What we can show you is the measurement, a tool that runs the same checks on your site in ten seconds, and this page, whose source you can read to see exactly the standard we build to.
Less than most people assume. We run search for a tax practice whose site is deliberately simple, and it gets found, because presentation was never the constraint that decided it. What decides it is whether the site is legible: whether the pages state clearly what the practice is, where it operates, and what it answers. A redesign that does not fix that changes how the site looks and not how it performs.
Structured data and technical fixes are typically recrawled and reflected within two to six weeks, and entity changes tend to surface faster than content changes because there is less for an engine to reassess. Ranking and citation gains from content and architecture work usually take three to six months to compound. Anyone promising overnight results is guessing.
It starts with the audit, which produces a ranked plan. From there most clients use pre-paid support hours: you buy a block and we work through the plan, so you pay for work delivered rather than a monthly retainer that renews whether or not anything shipped. Book a call and we will scope the audit on it.
The scorecard runs the same checks we ran across the sample, against your live site, in about ten seconds. No email, nothing stored. If you want the deeper audit and the fixes, book a call and we will scope it.