For a long time, the path to finding an accountant or financial adviser looked pretty much the same. Someone got a referral from a friend, typed a firm’s name into Google, and picked up the phone. Word of mouth did the heavy lifting, and Google filled in the gaps.
That’s shifting. Not dramatically overnight, but steadily enough that firms relying purely on referrals and a basic Google presence are starting to feel it. The rise of AI-powered search is changing how prospective clients discover financial professionals, and most accounting and bookkeeping practices haven’t caught up yet. It’s something the team at Search Studio, an SEO agency for accountants and other professional services firms, is seeing play out across client work right now.
Here’s what’s actually changing, and what it means for your practice.
What AI Search Actually Is (And Why It’s Different)When most people think about finding a service provider online, they picture a Google results page with a list of blue links. That model still exists, but it’s no longer the whole picture.
Google now generates AI-powered summaries at the top of many search results, called AI Overviews. These pull information from multiple sources and present a synthesised answer directly on the page, often before the user scrolls to any individual website. Tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot are doing something similar: when someone asks “who’s a good accountant for small businesses in Brisbane?” these tools generate a direct recommendation or summary rather than pointing to a list of search results.
The practical upshot: prospective clients may now be getting an answer about who to call before they’ve visited a single firm’s website.
Why This Matters More for Financial Services Than Most Industries
Accounting and financial advisory are trust-heavy services. A prospective client isn’t just searching for the cheapest option or the closest location. They’re looking for signals that a firm understands their situation, whether that’s a small business owner needing BAS support, a tradie wanting help with end-of-year tax, or an investor looking for an SMSF specialist.
AI search tools are trying to answer that question on the user’s behalf. They draw on what’s published online about your firm, your specialisations, the problems you’ve written about, and how other sources reference you. In other words, they’re forming a picture of your expertise from your digital footprint, and then presenting that picture to potential clients.
If your digital footprint is thin, generic, or inconsistent, AI tools have very little to work with. A firm with a one-page website and no published content is essentially invisible in this environment, even if it has a strong reputation offline.
What AI Tools Are Actually Looking For
The signals that help a financial services firm show up in AI-generated results aren’t entirely new. They build on what good SEO has always valued: genuine expertise, clear and specific content, and credible references from other sources.
A few things that matter more than ever:
Specificity over generality
AI tools favour sources that answer specific questions clearly. A page that explains exactly how your firm helps medical professionals structure their finances will outperform a generic “we help businesses with tax” page every time. The more precisely you describe who you help and how, the more useful you are as a source.
Published content that reflects real expertise
Blog posts, guides, and articles that address the kinds of questions your ideal clients are actually asking give AI tools something to draw on. This doesn’t need to be high volume. A handful of genuinely useful, well-written pieces will do more work than a library of thin content churned out for its own sake.
Third-party mentions and citations
AI tools don’t just look at your own website. They look at what others say about you, including directory listings, media mentions, guest articles, and professional association profiles. A firm that’s mentioned consistently across credible sources carries more weight than one that only talks about itself on its own site.
Consistent, accurate business information
Name, address, phone number, areas of specialisation. If this information is inconsistent across your website, Google Business Profile, and other listings, AI tools struggle to build an accurate picture of your firm.
The Referral Question
None of this means referrals are dead. For most established accounting and bookkeeping practices, referrals will remain a primary source of new clients for years to come. But here’s the thing: referred prospects still search online before they make contact. They’re checking your website, looking for reviews, and increasingly, asking AI tools to validate the recommendation they’ve just received.
If an AI-generated summary of your firm sounds vague, outdated, or simply returns nothing useful, that can introduce doubt into what was otherwise a warm lead. Your online presence now plays a role even in referral-driven pipelines.
A Practical Starting Point
For accountants and bookkeepers who haven’t thought much about AI search visibility, the starting point doesn’t need to be complicated.
Start with your Google Business Profile. Make sure it’s claimed, accurate, and reflects the specific services you offer and the types of clients you work with. This is one of the most referenced data points in local AI search results.
Then look at your website. Does it clearly explain who you help and with what? Does it answer the questions your ideal clients are actually typing into search? If your site reads like a brochure rather than a useful resource, it’s doing limited work in an AI search environment.
From there, think about where your firm is mentioned online beyond your own site. Professional directories, industry associations, and any published articles or media mentions all contribute to how AI tools perceive your credibility and relevance.
None of these steps require a large budget or a marketing team. They require clarity about who you serve and the willingness to put that in writing, consistently, in places where search tools can find it.
The Bigger Picture
AI search isn’t replacing the fundamentals of building a reputable practice. Trust, expertise, and genuine client relationships still matter more than any algorithm. But the channel through which prospective clients discover and evaluate that trust is changing.
Firms that understand this shift and take practical steps to be visible and credible in AI-driven search will have an advantage. Not because they’ve cracked some technical secret, but because they’ve done the work of clearly communicating what they do and who they do it for, online, in a way that both humans and AI tools can understand.
That’s good marketing, whatever search looks like.
The content has been authored in collaboration with our guest contributor, Paige Terry.
