Accountants, exit planning advisors and boutique law firms: how to get recommended when owners ask AI who to hire.

The short answer.

AI assistants recommend the advisers they can describe with confidence: firms whose own pages state a clear specialism, who they act for, how they charge and who does the work, and whose facts are repeated on the directories and profiles engines read. Small firms are usually missing not because they are worse, but because their website says “we offer a full range of services” and nothing an engine can quote.

The fix is not a new technology. It is a handful of plain pages and consistent profiles: one page per specialism, a page that explains your fee approach, a proper bio for every partner or adviser, and up-to-date listings. That is the core of our AI search visibility work for professional firms, and you can do most of it yourself with the checks in this guide.

How owners now look for an adviser.

Referrals still matter, but AI assistants have become a normal place to ask for a recommendation, and the people asking check what they are told. Both facts change what your website has to do.

BrightLocal’s Local Consumer Review Survey, published in February 2026 from a panel of 1,002 US adults, found the share of consumers using AI tools to get business recommendations rose from 6% the previous year to 45%. AI tools are now the third most popular source of recommendations, behind Google at 71% (down from 83%).

BrightLocal’s follow-up on AI trust adds the detail that matters for advisers. Among consumers who use AI, 31% had used ChatGPT and 23% Google’s AI Mode for business recommendations in the past year; 63% trust the recommendations, and 88% fact-check the sources. Use is far higher among 30 to 44-year-olds (64%) than among over-60s (24%), which is worth remembering: the next generation of owners and finance directors is the one asking.

On the business side the picture is similar. Gartner surveyed 1,535 B2B technology buyers in mid-2024 and found 45% had used generative AI to support their purchase decisions, with 27% calling it the most valuable way to gather information. Pew Research reported in June 2025 that 34% of US adults have used ChatGPT, and 28% of employed adults now use it for work. We look at the software side in our guide to how buyers shortlist business intelligence software.

Referrals have not gone away; they have gained a second check

The common reply from partners is “all our work comes from referrals”. That can be true and still miss the point. A 2025 survey of 3,000 US legal consumers, run by the legal marketing firm Scorpion and reported by Localogy, found 74% research a law firm online after receiving a personal recommendation, and 57% named online reviews as the top deciding factor. The referral gets you on the list; what the owner reads afterwards, increasingly in an AI answer, decides whether you stay there.

What owners actually ask.

Owners ask AI the question they would ask a well-connected friend: specific, situational and usually including size, sector and place. The more specific the question, the less a generic firm page can answer it.

Search data shows the same intent in shorter form. In Google search data via DataForSEO for November 2026, “how to choose an accountant” draws about 50 searches a month in the US and 50 in the UK, “exit planning advisor” about 210 in the US, and “how to find a financial advisor” about 2,400 in the US. Those are small numbers for a typed search, and that is the point: the real volume of these questions is now spoken to an assistant in full sentences, and none of it shows up in a keyword tool.

Each question contains a filter: size, sector, place or cost. When an engine cannot find the filter answered on your pages, it answers with firms whose pages do.

Why small firms go missing.

Small firms go missing for a few predictable reasons, and almost all of them are on the firm’s own website. Engines cannot recommend what they cannot read, match or check.

Google’s guidance on its AI features is clear that there is no secret entry route: there are “no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode”, and a page must be “indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet”. Google also says these features may use “query fan-out”, “issuing multiple related searches across subtopics and data sources”. OpenAI says its OAI-SearchBot crawler “is used to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT’s search features.” So the starting point is ordinary: be crawlable, be indexed, and have pages that answer the sub-questions the engine searches for. Our explainer on how ChatGPT chooses companies to recommend covers the mechanics.

Larger firms also appear in more of the sources engines read. A boutique cannot match that volume, but it can be more specific, and specific wins when the question is specific.

Specialism pages.

A specialism page is one page for one kind of work you want to win, written so an owner, or an engine reading for them, can tell in ten seconds whether you fit. It is the single most useful page a small professional firm can publish.

The test is simple: could this page only have been written by your firm? “We provide tax advice to businesses of all sizes” fails. “We advise owner-managed manufacturing businesses with 20 to 200 staff on R&D tax relief claims and HMRC enquiries” passes, because it names the work, the client and the scale.

What each specialism page should contain

• A one-sentence answer at the top: what you do, for whom, and where.
• Who it is for and who it is not for. Saying “we do not handle personal tax” helps the engine and saves you poor-fit enquiries.
• The questions owners ask at this stage, answered in short paragraphs: timing, what you need from them, what happens first.
• How the work runs, step by step, with typical durations if you can state them honestly.
• Who leads it, linked to that person’s bio.
• Anonymised examples of the situations you handle, only with client permission and without invented figures.
• How fees work for this service, linked to your fee-approach page.

For M&A and exit-planning advisers, split by the moment rather than by your internal service lines: preparing a business for sale, valuation, finding buyers, management buy-outs, selling to employees. Owners ask by moment. For accountants, split by client type and problem. For law firms, split by the dispute or transaction the owner is facing. Our guide to the page patterns AI engines quote shows how to structure the sections so a passage can be lifted cleanly.

Fee-approach pages.

You do not need to publish a rate card, but you do need to explain how you charge. Owners ask AI what an adviser costs before they ever call, and a firm that answers the question gets described; a firm that says “fees on request” gets skipped.

A fee-approach page explains the model (fixed fee, hourly, monthly retainer, success fee or a mix), what makes the cost go up or down, what is included and what the first step costs, even if that first step is a free conversation. Our short play on publishing your pricing approach gives a template.

For solicitors in England and Wales this is partly a regulatory matter already. The SRA Transparency Rules require firms that publish the availability of certain listed services to “publish on its website cost information” for them, and to publish details of the complaints procedure. The listed services include some business work, such as employment tribunal defence and debt recovery. If your firm is in scope, your fee page is already required; making it clear and specific turns a compliance task into something an engine can quote.

Partner and adviser bios.

In professional services the buyer is hiring a person, so the person has to be findable and checkable. A bio should let an owner, and an engine, answer “has this person done work like mine?”

Most firm bios list a law school, a hobby and “John advises a wide range of clients”. That gives an engine nothing to match. A useful bio states the practice focus in one line, the kinds of clients and situations the person handles, qualifications with the issuing body, admissions or memberships with dates, and links to what they have written or said publicly. Our play on showing credentials AI can verify covers the linking.

A bio checklist

• A first line that says what this person does and for whom, in plain words.
• Professional qualifications and memberships, each with the body that issued it.
• Typical matters or engagements, anonymised and permitted by the client.
• Sectors and client sizes they know well.
• Location and the regions or jurisdictions they cover.
• Articles, talks and directory entries, linked.
• The same name, title and focus as on LinkedIn and every directory profile.

The last point matters: one adviser described three different ways across the web gives an engine three stories to reconcile.

Directories and profiles.

Engines compare what you say about yourself with what other sites say about you. For professional firms those other sites are mostly directories, professional-body listings, review platforms, Google Business Profile and LinkedIn, and they need to say the same thing your website does.

Start with the profiles you already have: check each one against a single fact sheet. Then complete the directories an engine cites when you ask about your specialism and place. Our guide to the off-site sources AI trusts explains how to find them.

Google Business Profile rules for practitioners

Google’s guidelines name lawyers and financial planners as “individual practitioners”, and say a practitioner “shouldn’t have multiple Business Profiles to cover all of their specializations.” One accurate profile for the firm, and one per practitioner where the guidelines allow it, is the safe pattern. Do not add specialisms or taglines to the business name. Fill in the services and description fields instead, using the same words as your specialism pages. Clinics face the same profile questions, which we cover in our guide to local SEO for clinics.

The exit-planning gap.

Exit planning is where the gap between owner need and adviser visibility is widest. Most owners close to selling have not prepared, and many do not know which kind of adviser to call first, so they ask.

The Exit Planning Institute’s generational State of Owner Readiness research, published in August 2025, found that more than half of baby boomer owners plan to exit within five years. Yet only 27% have had a formal valuation, 9% have an estate plan and 5% have a dedicated exit-planning team.

UK research points the same way. A Charles Stanley survey of more than 500 business owners, reported in September 2023, found 48% had no exit strategy in place and 37% had no succession plan.

Who owners trust to start the conversation

The EPI’s 2023 national report found owners named financial advisers as their most trusted adviser, replacing accountants, who held that place in 2013. The firm that explains the first steps of exit planning clearly, in public, becomes the one an engine describes when an owner asks where to start. A page titled “Selling your business in the next three years: what to do first” is worth more to an exit planner than another general services page.

What you are allowed to say.

Professional firms work under advertising rules, and those rules happen to suit AI visibility: accurate, specific and checkable claims are both compliant and quotable. Vague superlatives are neither.

The SRA Code of Conduct for solicitors requires that “any publicity in relation to your practice is accurate and not misleading, including that relating to your charges”. In the US, ABA Model Rule 7.1, adopted in some form by most states, says a lawyer “shall not make a false or misleading communication about the lawyer or the lawyer’s services.” Accountancy bodies have similar rules. We cover what is different for UK firms in AI search separately. Check your own regulator’s current wording before you publish.

• Say: the work you do, who you act for, qualifications with issuing bodies, how you charge, and dated facts you can evidence.
• Do not say: “the best”, “leading” or a predicted outcome; past results without the context your regulator requires; client names without written permission.
• Reviews: ask real clients, consistently, and never write or buy them. Engines and regulators both read them.

If an engine already describes you wrongly, our guide on fixing how AI describes your company covers what to change.

The adviser self-check.

Tick each statement that is true of your firm’s website and profiles today. You get a score out of 100 and the gaps to work on first. Nothing you tick is sent anywhere.

The weights put specialism pages, client fit, fees and bios first: the facts owners ask about, which only your own site can state.

A 90-day order of work.

Work in the order that makes each step useful to the next: test first, then fix the pages only you can write, then bring the profiles into line, then re-test against the same questions.

For the baseline, our guide on how to check your AI search visibility explains how to choose the questions and record the results so later runs can be compared fairly.

One partner writing one specialism page a fortnight is enough to finish the core pages in a quarter. Our answer engine optimisation services are for firms that want help with this work. We have written a similar guide for wealth managers and financial advisers.

Questions advisers ask.

Do owners really ask ChatGPT to recommend an accountant or lawyer?

Yes, and the share is growing. BrightLocal’s 2026 survey of US consumers found 45% had used AI tools for business recommendations, up from 6% a year earlier, and 31% of AI users had used ChatGPT for this. Most also check the sources, so your website still has to back up what the answer says.

Our work comes from referrals. Why does this matter?

Because referred clients check you before they call. A 2025 survey of 3,000 US legal consumers found 74% researched a firm online after a personal recommendation. If an AI answer to “who handles X in Y” names three other firms, the referral loses force.

Do we have to publish our prices?

Not a rate card, unless a rule such as the SRA Transparency Rules applies to the service. But publish how you charge and what drives the cost. Owners ask AI about cost, and a firm that explains its fee approach gives the engine something accurate to say.

Is there special markup or a file that gets us into AI answers?

No. Google says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode beyond being indexed and eligible for a snippet. Clear pages, consistent profiles and crawler access matter far more than any special file.

How long before an engine starts naming us?

No one can promise a date, and answers vary between runs. Pages need to be crawled and indexed first, and profile corrections take time to be picked up. Re-test the same questions after about three months and compare how often you are named.

Sources: BrightLocal 2026; BrightLocal AI trust; Gartner via techpartner.news; Pew Research; Localogy; DataForSEO; Google AI features; OpenAI crawlers; SRA Transparency Rules; SRA Code; ABA Rule 7.1; Google Business Profile guidelines; EPI 2025; EPI 2023; Charles Stanley via IFA Magazine. Accessed 10 November 2026.