Usually because your competitors have left a clearer trail online, not because they are better at the work. When ChatGPT recommends an accountant, it can only name firms it can find and describe. If a newer practice has pages, listings and reviews that match the question someone asked, it can be named ahead of an established firm whose website says very little.

A practitioner put this well in a recent r/Accounting thread. After 16 years of small business tax work, they tested ChatGPT about a dozen times, and firms far newer than theirs came up more often. Their question was simple: if it is not experience or reputation, what is the AI looking at?

What ChatGPT is doing when it answers

When someone asks for a local accountant, ChatGPT will often search the web before it replies. OpenAI's own help page on ChatGPT search explains three things that matter here.

It rewrites the question. ChatGPT turns what the person typed into one or more shorter search queries and sends them to its search partners.

It uses location. It can estimate a person's general location from their IP address and use it to find local results, so the question does not even need to name a town.

It ranks what it finds. OpenAI says it ranks results using multiple factors meant to surface relevant, reliable information, and that a site must let OpenAI's search crawler, OAI-SearchBot, reach it to be eligible at all.

None of those steps can see 16 years of good client work, only what is written down on the web.

Why the newer firm gets named

Going by what OpenAI describes, and the replies in that thread, a few things help a newer firm get named.

Pages that match the rewritten query. If the search becomes "small business accountant Bolton", a page that says it looks after small businesses in Bolton is an easy match. A one line list of accounts, tax and payroll is not.

Mentions beyond their own website. Directory listings, professional body profiles, client reviews and local articles all give the search something to find. One commenter in that thread checked their own firm and found it barely existed outside directory listings, while the firms being named had more mentions across the web.

Reviews and links. Google's guidance on how local results are ranked says prominence is partly based on how many websites link to a business and how many reviews it has. ChatGPT is a different product, but it draws on the same open web.

Details that agree. When a firm's name, address and phone number match on its website, its Google Business Profile and its listings, it is easier to be sure they all describe the same practice.

We cover each of these gaps in more depth in how to make your accounting firm show up on ChatGPT.

How to see why a rival was picked

1. Open a fresh chat in ChatGPT and ask for an accountant in your town the way a client would. 2. When an answer names a competitor, select Sources or the citations underneath it. These show the pages ChatGPT actually used. 3. Open those pages and compare them with yours. Look for a service page you do not have, a directory you are missing from, or reviews you have not asked for. 4. Check your website does not block OAI-SearchBot. 5. Repeat the test over a week, because answers change from one run to the next.

To see what Google Gemini says about your practice, run our free AI visibility checker.

Do not copy a competitor's pages and change the name. Write plainly about the clients and work you actually have. The practice sites on our work page show the kind of specific writing we mean, and our SEO service for accountants covers the pages, profiles and listings if you would rather hand it over.

Want us to look at your result?

Run the free checker, then get in touch and tell us which firms were named instead of you. We will look at what they have that you do not and tell you plainly what we would fix first.

Common questions

Does ChatGPT take experience or reputation into account?

Not directly. It works from what it can find written down. Years of good work help when they show up as reviews, mentions and clear pages.

Can I just ask ChatGPT why it did not recommend me?

You can, and the answer can give you ideas, but treat it as a guess. The cited sources are a more reliable guide to what it actually used.