SearchScore Benchmark · UK Accountancy Series
We audited the AI search visibility of 150+ Greater London accountancy practices. Average GEO score: 52.8/100. Only four firms reached the Strong tier. The leaders, the laggards, and the credentials gap that separates them.
SearchScore audited 150+ Greater London accountancy firms across 250+ AI visibility signals in June 2026. The average GEO score was 52.8 out of 100. Only four firms scored above 70, placing them in the Strong tier for AI search visibility.
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 141. They were doing three specific things the rest weren't. The gaps are dramatic.
These 10 firms scored highest 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.
Compared to Birmingham and Manchester, London firms are markedly better at the foundational signals - About pages, organisation schema, LinkedIn presence, llms.txt deployment. But the credentials layer - the one AI engines need to verify expertise in regulated industries like accountancy - is just as missing.
Reading the table: London firms aren't behind on the basics. They're behind on the labelling that AI engines use to verify who is qualified to give financial advice. 128 firms name their partners. Only 5 have labelled those credentials so AI can read them. Zero firms in the dataset have Q&A schema deployed. The difference between Acumen Accountants at 79.2 and everyone else isn't size or budget. It's whether the technical foundations for AI search have been built.
Right now, somewhere in Greater London, an SME founder is asking ChatGPT for an accountant recommendation. It's about to name three firms. 141 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. Acumen Accountants, Golden Tree Accounting and FZCO Accountants lead the dataset. The other 141 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 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 151 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 at a founding discount, in exchange for becoming a published case study. Five spots only.