We audited the AI search visibility of 100 Birmingham accountancy practices. Average GEO score: 47/100. The leaders, the laggards, and the three signals that separate them.
Sorted by GEO Score – that is, how well each firm's site is set up to be cited by AI engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Overviews). Higher is better. The leaders are named; the bottom group is anonymised to spare embarrassment.
The top 10 firms weren't bigger, older, or spending more on marketing than the other 90. They were doing three specific things the rest weren't. The gaps are dramatic.
These 10 firms scored 60 or above on GEO. The top 5 are detailed below; ranks 6–10 are listed beneath. All 10 had what AI engines need to be confident recommending them – named partners, labelled credentials, and clean structured information.
Run the same audit on your own site. 60 seconds, free, no email required. You'll get GEO, SEO and CRO scores plus a list of what's actually broken.
Several Birmingham firms have spent years getting their Google rankings right – and they're still essentially invisible to ChatGPT and Perplexity. SEO and GEO measure different things. A high SEO score doesn't carry over.
Reading the table: six firms in our benchmark have strong Google rankings (SEO 60–74) but score under 27 on GEO. Their Google traffic is fine. But their sites don't tell AI who the partners are, what the firm specialises in, or how to extract that information cleanly. Thames Williams – same city, same available technology – scores high on both. The difference isn't size or budget. It's whether the technical foundations for AI search have been built.
Right now, somewhere in Birmingham, an SME owner is asking ChatGPT for an accountant recommendation. It's about to name three firms. Ninety of the firms in this benchmark won't be one of them.
Forty-seven percent of professional services queries on Google now return AI Overviews above the traditional search results.[2] The first thing prospects see is no longer a list of links – it's an AI's summary, naming a few firms it considers credible.
The firms with high GEO scores have what AI needs in order to recommend them – visible partners with proper credentials, the labels that tell AI who's who, and clear descriptions of their services. Thames Williams, Gondal Accountancy and Naseems lead the dataset. The other 90 firms are missing at least one of those – even the ones with strong Google rankings and decades of trading.
Word-of-mouth is also affected. A client who's been referred to a firm by a friend will often check with AI before calling. If AI can't find the firm or describe what it does, that referral converts less reliably than it used to. You'll never see this loss in Google Analytics. There's no dashboard for the calls that didn't come.
The good news: this is fixable, and quickly. The three signals separating leaders from laggards are technical website changes, not authority or reputation work. A well-resourced firm can close the gap in 4–6 weeks. Most firms don't know there's a gap to close.
Each of the 100 firms received the same audit, on the same day, with no manual intervention. The methodology is open – you can run the same audit on your own site for free.
Run the same audit we ran on every firm in this benchmark. 60 seconds, no email needed. You'll get all three scores – GEO, SEO, CRO – and a specific list of what's broken on your site.
Check your firm's score →If your scores need work and you'd rather we fix it for you: we have a small founding programme for accountancy practices – full audit at £2,500 instead of £4,500, in exchange for becoming a published case study. Five spots only.