Updated
Updated What changed on
- Added a short summary of the findings at the top of the page.
- Added the published research the audit sits against, including the UK zero-click rate and the measured value of an AI Overview citation.
UK accountants in AI search: the data, the gaps, the silent crawler blocks.
The 30-second answer
I audited 56 UK accountancy firm websites in May 2026. More than a quarter silently block AI crawlers at the hosting layer, including two of the largest firms, so their pages cannot be read by the assistants their clients are asking. Almost none carry the structured data that would let an assistant identify what they do. This matters because 69.5% of UK Google searches now end without a click, the highest rate of the six countries measured, so being quoted inside the answer is increasingly the only visibility on offer.
I checked 56 UK accountancy firm websites - the Big 4, the top 25 mid-tier, and a sample of regional practices and small independents - against the structured data and AI crawler signals that determine whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Claude can actually find them.
The findings are worse than the same study I ran on UK law firms two weeks ago. The headline numbers:
The published research this audit sits against
of UK Google searches end without a click on anything, the highest rate of the six countries measured and above the United States at 68.0%.
How it was measured: Similarweb mobile and desktop clickstream panel, January to April 2026. Zero-click means no click to anywhere, including to Google's own properties and to paid results. Germany was lowest at 62.1%.
more organic clicks go to a brand cited inside an AI Overview than to one that is not cited on the same query.
How it was measured: 3,119 search terms across 42 client organisations, 25.1M organic and 1.1M paid impressions, June 2024 to September 2025. Informational and educational queries only, which are the ones most exposed to AI Overviews, so this is not a whole-market figure. In absolute terms it is 0.70% against 0.52%. Paid click-through was 91% higher when cited.
of pages cited in Google AI Overviews also rank in the top 10 for that query.
How it was measured: 863,000 keyword SERPs and 4 million AI Overview URLs. Ahrefs measures the top 10 as blocks, counting ads, featured snippets and video packs as separate blocks.
How this compares to UK law firms
I ran the same methodology on 73 UK law firm websites in May 2026. The accountancy results are sharper on almost every measure. Accountants are further behind on schema, far further behind on industry-specific markup, and three times more likely to be silently blocking AI bots at the hosting layer.
| Measure | UK law firms (73 firms) | UK accountants (56 firms) | Worse? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reachable for audit | 65 firms | 41 firms | comparable |
| No structured data at all | 22% | 22% | same |
| Industry-specific schema (LegalService / AccountingService) | 25% | 7% | 3.5x worse |
| Has FAQ schema | 3% | 2% | same (both terrible) |
| Silent AI bot block (hosting-layer 403) | 9% (6 of 65) | 27% (11 of 41) | 3x worse |
| Intentional robots.txt AI bot block | 1 firm | 0 firms | accountants chose nothing |
| Effectively invisible to AI search | 29% | 32% | slightly worse |
The pattern is the same in both sectors - professional services firms that sell expertise and credibility are quietly invisible to the AI surfaces their clients increasingly use to evaluate them. Accountants are further along the gap because AccountingService schema is barely used, and because more accountancy firms sit on hosting stacks that block AI bots without configuration.
The silent AI bot block - including the Big 4
The most striking finding is that 11 of 41 reachable firms - 27% - silently block at least one major AI crawler at the server layer. None of them chose to. Every single block is invisible to the firm because:
- The robots.txt file allows all AI bots (zero intentional disallow rules across the entire sample)
- The website loads normally in a browser - Chrome gets a 200 response
- The block only shows up when you make the request with a GPTBot, ClaudeBot or Google-Extended user agent header
- The hosting layer (Cloudflare, Akamai, similar WAF or bot-management product) intercepts the AI bot request and returns 403 before the firm's website ever sees it
Affected firms in this sample include PwC, BDO, Crowe UK, FRP Advisory and TaxAssist, all blocking GPTBot, ClaudeBot and Google-Extended simultaneously. Six additional firms block ClaudeBot specifically while leaving GPTBot through, which usually points to a Cloudflare bot management ruleset that classifies ClaudeBot more aggressively than the OpenAI crawler.
None of these firms have published a position on AI training data. None of them have a robots.txt rule expressing a stance. The block is happening at infrastructure they probably do not know is there, removing them from AI-generated answers their clients are increasingly using to evaluate firms.
The honest version
A firm can legitimately decide it does not want AI engines training on its content. That is a defensible commercial position. The problem is when the decision is made by default by a hosting provider's WAF ruleset, with the firm having no idea it has been made, and no measurement of what business it is costing them. Across this sample of 41 reachable accountancy firms, every single silent block looks accidental.
The schema gap - 93% have no AccountingService markup
Structured data is how an AI engine confirms that a website belongs to an accounting practice rather than, say, an accountancy training provider, a payroll software vendor, or a generic professional services firm. The relevant schema.org type is AccountingService, available since 2014.
Among the 41 reachable firms in this sample, only 3 (7%) carry AccountingService schema on the homepage. The breakdown:
- 27 firms (66%) have generic
OrganizationorCorporationschema - the website is identified as a business, but not as an accountancy practice specifically - 9 firms (22%) have no JSON-LD schema at all on the homepage
- 3 firms (7%) use AccountingService - the markup that actually says "this is an accounting firm"
- 1 firm (2%) has LocalBusiness schema
- 2 firms (5%) have Person schema for named partners
The gap matters most for AI Overviews and ChatGPT answers to queries like "best chartered accountants near me" or "how much does an accountant cost for a limited company". An AI engine evaluating sources for those answers prefers entities it can confidently classify. A site marked up as a generic Organization is not the cleanest source for an answer about accountants.
Almost nobody uses FAQ schema
Just one firm in 41 (2%) carries FAQPage schema on the homepage. Yet the queries AI Overviews now answer for prospective accountancy clients are almost all FAQ-shaped:
- "how much does an accountant cost UK"
- "do I need an accountant for a limited company"
- "what does a chartered accountant do"
- "can an accountant save me money on tax"
- "how do I switch accountants"
An accountancy site that publishes those questions as content, marks them up with FAQPage schema, and attributes the answers to a named GDC-equivalent (ICAEW, ACCA, AAT) chartered accountant, is the shape of source AI engines preferentially cite. None of the 56 firms in this sample is doing all three.
Method
Sample selection prioritised coverage across firm size tiers rather than statistical representativeness. From the Accountancy Age Top 50+50 ranking and the wider UK chartered accountant directory I selected: the Big 4 (4), top 10 mid-tier (6), top 25 mid-tier (10), top 50 mid-tier (15), regional and 50-100 tier (15), and a sample of independent and small-practice firms (10). Of the 56 firms in the sample, 41 returned HTTP 200 to a real-user Chrome request and form the denominator for all percentage findings.
Per-firm checks
- Reachability
- GET request with Chrome 126 User-Agent, follow up to 3 redirects, 12-second timeout. Status 200 = reachable.
- Schema parse
- Extract every
<script type="application/ld+json">block from the HTML body, JSON-parse each, walk the @graph or array, collect every @type value seen. - AI bot check
- Three additional GET requests using GPTBot/1.2, ClaudeBot/1.0 and Google-Extended user agents. Compare each status against the Chrome status from the same firm.
- Robots.txt parse
- Fetch /robots.txt, parse User-agent blocks for GPTBot, ClaudeBot and Google-Extended, check for "Disallow: /" rule under each.
- Silent block flag
- Firm flagged as silently blocking when Chrome status is 200, AI bot status is 403/429/503, AND robots.txt does not intentionally disallow that bot. Filters out cases where the block is a choice the firm made.
- Sample limit
- 15 firms did not respond at all (DNS, timeout or persistent 4xx/5xx) and were excluded from the percentage findings. They are listed in the raw data set, not in the headline numbers.
How to check your own firm in 10 minutes
Three checks. None of them need a paid tool. None of them need a developer.
- Schema - paste the firm homepage URL into Google's Rich Results Test (search.google.com/test/rich-results). Look at the JSON-LD section. If you do not see
AccountingServicein the @type list, the page is not telling Google or any AI engine that this is an accountancy practice. If there is no JSON-LD section at all, the firm is in the 22% with no schema. - AI bot access - open a terminal and run
curl -A "GPTBot/1.2" -I https://yourdomain.com. If the response code is 200, the firm is reachable by OpenAI. If it is 403, 429, 503 or 999, the firm is being silently blocked. Repeat the same command with"ClaudeBot/1.0"and"Google-Extended"as the user agent. Compare against a plain curl - if Chrome gets 200 and the bots get 403, the block is at the hosting layer. - AI answer test - open ChatGPT and ask "best chartered accountants in [your city]", then "how much does an accountant cost for a small limited company UK". Open Perplexity and ask the same questions. Check whether your firm is named in any of the answers and which sources are cited. If you never appear, but you know clients are choosing accountants this way, the upstream cause is one of the two checks above.
If a firm fails all three checks, fixing them in this order delivers the fastest result: AI bot access first (a one-day fix once the hosting provider is identified), schema second (a developer task that should take an afternoon for AccountingService and FAQPage markup), AI Overview content third (a longer-term project of building the cited content).
What this means for UK accountancy practices
The accountancy market is shifting in three ways at once. First, AI Overviews are now triggering for the high-intent queries that drive new-client research - cost queries, "do I need an accountant" queries, comparison queries. Second, ChatGPT and Perplexity are answering recommendation queries that used to go to Google. Third, the firms that get cited in those AI answers are the ones with clean structured data, named-clinician E-E-A-T signals and content built as direct answers rather than generic blog posts.
This study confirms that most UK accountancy firms - including the Big 4 - are not set up for any of that. The work to fix it is not large. AccountingService schema is a single JSON-LD block. FAQPage markup follows the existing FAQ content most firm sites already have. Resolving a silent AI bot block is a configuration change at the hosting layer or in Cloudflare. None of it needs a website rebuild. What it needs is somebody noticing the gap and fixing it before competitors do.
This is the work I do for UK accountancy practices. The full programme is documented at Accountant SEO Consultant. The shorter version: if you want me to run the three-check audit on your own firm and tell you which of the gaps applies, send the URL via the contact form. Free, no follow-up sequence, single-paragraph reply within one working day.
Raw data and replication
The raw per-firm data is captured in the project repository - status codes for each user agent, schema types found, silent-block flag, intentional-block flag. The crawl methodology is reproducible with about 50 lines of Node.js using the standard https module and the curl one-liners above.
If a press, trade publication or research outlet wants the per-firm data table or a tailored cut by tier (Big 4 vs mid-tier vs regional), request it through the contact form.
Run the three checks on your firm.
Send the firm URL via the contact form and I will run the schema check, the AI bot access check and the AI answer test. Single-paragraph reply within one working day with the specific gaps and the fastest fix. Free, no follow-up sequence.
Send the URL