Tax advisors and accountants
Crypto trades, a first rental, a letter from the tax office: clients ask an assistant for a firm by the situation they are in.
A client with a new business, a move abroad or three years of unfiled returns types all of it into ChatGPT, adds a town or the word remote, and asks who can help. The reply is a short list of firms. Whatever it says about yours, it had to find somewhere, and of all those places your own pages are the ones you write.
A tax firm is in the running for a client's question when its own pages state, in text, the services by their plain names, the situations it takes on, who does the work and under which designation, how fees are set, whether it is taking clients this season, and whether the work can be done remotely, all under one name, one address and one number.
How your customers ask
What clients type when they want a firm, not a tax answer
Nine facts, sorted by how often they go out of date
A client's question carries its own filters: the situation, a place or the word remote, the fee they expect and, for part of the year, the deadline. Each is answered by a fact about the firm, and each fact has a page it belongs on. Some change once in several years, some every January, some weekly in the busy season, so the table sorts them by how quickly each one dates.
| Fact | Changes | Where it belongs | Example line |
|---|---|---|---|
| Services, by plain name | Rarely | A services page, one heading per service | Monthly bookkeeping, payroll, personal and business returns, sales tax or VAT filings, replies to letters from the tax authority |
| Situations taken on | Rarely | A page for each situation | First year self-employed; a landlord with one rental; a year of crypto trades; a move to or from another country |
| Who does the work | When people join or leave | An about page, a section per person | [Name], [designation as the issuing body writes it], [body and jurisdiction], with a register link |
| How fees are set | Each year | The services page, and a fees page in text | A flat fee of [amount] for [return type]; bookkeeping at [amount] a month; letters at [rate] an hour |
| Where the work is done | Rarely | The contact page | Meetings at [address] by appointment, or fully remote in [jurisdictions], documents through the portal |
| Taking new clients | Weekly in season | The homepage and the contact page, dated | Taking new individual clients until [date]; business clients all year. Updated [date]. |
| The season's dates | Each year | A season notice on the contact page | Send documents by [date] for a return before the filing deadline; after that, [what the firm does instead] |
| What a new client brings | Each year | A checklist page in HTML, not only a PDF | Last year's return, this year's income documents, records of expenses, identification, and any letter from the tax authority |
| The firm itself | Rarely | Every footer, every listing, the markup | One firm name, one address and one main number, written the same way everywhere |
Every row describes the firm; none is tax advice, which starts once someone is a client. Where a fee turns on the file, say what it turns on: the number of income sources, the state of the books, the years behind. The client's side of each fact is in what clients ask an assistant before choosing a tax advisor.
Designations, written the way the issuing body writes them
A client who asks for a CPA, an enrolled agent or a chartered accountant is asking about a person. So the page names the person and gives each designation in full, the way the issuing body writes it, followed by the letters, the body and the jurisdiction. The same letters can mean different designations in different countries; the spelled-out form settles which one this is.
Where the body keeps a public register, link the person's entry, or the lookup page if entries have no address of their own, so anyone can check the designation against the body's record. State a license or registration the firm itself holds the same way. Which designations a piece of work requires is decided in each jurisdiction; ask your professional body or regulator, and let the page state what the firm holds.
AccountingService markup, and what the crawl found on tax firms' sites
On schema.org the type for an accounting or tax firm is AccountingService, described there as an accountancy business. It is a subtype of FinancialService, itself a subtype of LocalBusiness, so the fields Google's local business documentation lists apply to it. FinancialService adds feesAndCommissionsSpecification, a text or a link describing fees, which can point at the fees page.
Each person can be a Person node whose hasCertification holds a Certification naming the issuing body and the number its register uses. Leave ratings out: under Google's review snippet rules, a business that controls the reviews about itself is not eligible for review stars.
In our audit of 9,483 small business websites (40 trades and 90 metros in the US, Canada, Europe and the UAE, late August to early September 2026), 31.0% of the tax advisors' sites carried no schema.org markup at all. Across all 40 trades the rate was 17.8%, and only real estate agents and photographers had a higher one. That is the one figure the audit publishes for tax advisors.
Every other number here describes the whole sample, with no tax-only cut. A client's question had nothing to land on at 61.5% of the sites, which carried no question-and-answer content of any kind.
Identity was the other weak point: at 43.1% of sites the three main pages were inconsistent about who and where the business is, 36.9% gave more than one phone number, and 34.1% had no postal address a machine could parse. And 2.1% kept real content, a price list or a service menu, in a PDF, which is the form a fee schedule or a checklist takes when it is posted as a file.
Where to start, and the article that covers each step
- Take a reading of your AI visibility before changing anything: a fixed panel of client questions by situation and place. Being named for the client's situation sets it up.
- Check what an AI crawler receives with the crawler access check, and that the portal's login screen does not cover the public pages, as tax firms and ChatGPT explains.
- Settle the identity: the firm's name, address and main number written one way, on every page and every listing you control, so a machine finds one entity rather than three near-matches.
- Rewrite the services page in plain names with the fee basis beside each service, and put each person's designations on the about page with register links.
- Post the season notice and the document checklist as dated text, and change them the day the facts change.
- Give each situation you want more clients for a page of its own: one page per situation.
- Add AccountingService markup that repeats the pages, then run the same panel again a month later.
Go deeper
Four articles for tax and accounting firms
Local & Industries
What clients ask an assistant before choosing a tax advisor
Fundamentals
AI visibility for tax advisors: being named for the client's situation
AI Engines
Tax firms and ChatGPT: open the public pages, keep the portal shut
Strategy & Planning
One page per situation: making a tax firm's specialties visible
What partners and sole practitioners ask
We stop taking new clients in February. What should the site say after that?
Say so, with dates: "Not taking new individual clients this season; we reopen on [date]. Business clients: [yes or no]." A dated line lets an answer repeat the true state of things, spares your staff calls you cannot take, and tells the client when to come back. Change it the day the policy changes, everywhere it is repeated.
Our professional body limits what we may advertise. Can we still publish all this?
Nothing here asks for a claim. Services, situations, designations, the fee basis and the season are facts about the firm, and they are what a client's question asks about. How a line must be worded, and what it has to carry, is set where you practice; your professional body or regulator is the one to ask, and the pages follow its answer.
Which schema.org type should an accounting or tax firm use?
AccountingService, a subtype of FinancialService under LocalBusiness. schema.org has no separate type for tax preparation, and ProfessionalService, which once took in accounting firms, is deprecated. Give the firm node its name, address, telephone, opening hours and areaServed, point feesAndCommissionsSpecification at the fees page, and list the people as employees with their designations.
Should the document checklist be public, or only in the portal?
Both, with different contents. The general list belongs on a public page: last year's return, the year's income documents, records of expenses, identification, any letter from the tax authority. A prospective client can read it before signing on, and so can a fetcher. Each client's own list, with their names and figures, stays behind the portal's login with their documents.