SearchScore Benchmark · UK Accountancy Series
We audited the AI search visibility of 100 Manchester accountancy practices. Average GEO score: 46.4/100. Only one firm scored above 70. The leaders, the laggards, and the signals that separate them.
SearchScore audited 100 Manchester accountancy firms across 250+ AI visibility signals in May 2026. The average GEO score was 46.4 out of 100. Only one firm scored above 70, and the author attribution gap was the widest of any UK city benchmarked.
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 firm wasn't bigger, older, or spending more on marketing than the other 99. It was doing three specific things the rest weren't. The gaps are dramatic.
These 10 firms scored 61 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 Manchester 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: 91 of 100 Manchester firms display YMYL credentials on their sites, but only 5 have the schema markup that tells AI what those credentials are. 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. Intertax - 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 Manchester, an SME owner is asking ChatGPT for an accountant recommendation. It's about to name three firms. Ninety-nine 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.
Only one Manchester firm - Intertax - has what AI needs in order to recommend it with confidence. The rest are missing at least one of the three signals: visible partners with proper credentials, the labels that tell AI who's who, and clear descriptions of services. Warr & Co, Accountancy Net and Clear Cut Accounting lead the chasing pack. But the gap between rank 1 and rank 2 is 7 points.
The pattern is the same in Birmingham, where the average GEO score is 47.4 - within one point of Manchester's 46.4. Five Birmingham firms cleared 70; only one Manchester firm did. AI search invisibility isn't a regional quirk. It's a UK accountancy industry pattern.
The good news: this is fixable, and quickly. The work is in the labelling, not the content. Most Manchester firms are much closer to AI visibility than they think - but the gap between "having content" and "having content AI can extract" is a structural one. 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 at a founding discount, in exchange for becoming a published case study. Five spots only.