Short answer: ChatGPT recommends accountants from two places. One is what it already learned about firms during training. The other is what it finds when it searches the web for the question in front of it. It cannot see the quality of your work, only what has been written about you, so the firms it names are the ones that are easiest to find and describe.

Practice owners keep asking what the AI is actually looking at. One small business accountant asked exactly that in an r/Accounting thread after newer firms kept being named ahead of theirs. This post explains how the choice gets made, so you know which parts you can influence.

Source one: what ChatGPT already knows

The models behind ChatGPT are trained on large amounts of text, much of it from the public web. OpenAI's page on its crawlers says its GPTBot crawler collects content that may be used to train its models.

For a large, well known firm, that training text includes plenty of articles, rankings and mentions. For a small practice there may be very little. That is one reason big names come up so often even when nobody searches. Ben Locker's study of 540 AI answers about UK accountancy firms found that firm size was much more closely linked to being mentioned than how clearly a homepage was written.

You can't change what a model has already learned. Over time, being mentioned in more places makes it more likely that future models will know about you.

Source two: what ChatGPT finds when it searches

For a question like "Can you recommend an accountant in Bolton?", ChatGPT will often search the web before it answers. OpenAI's help page on ChatGPT search describes three steps.

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

It works out where the person is. It can estimate a rough location from the person's IP address, so the question does not need to name a town to get local results.

It ranks what comes back. OpenAI says results are ranked on several factors meant to surface relevant, reliable information. It then writes an answer from the top sources and shows them as citations.

This is the part you can influence. If your website, your Google Business Profile, your directory listings and your reviews clearly say who you help and where, you are more likely to be among the sources it finds.

Why some firms can't be picked at all

There is one hard rule. OpenAI says sites that block its search crawler, OAI-SearchBot, will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers. Blocking GPTBot, the training crawler, is a separate setting and does not stop you appearing in search.

Some website builders and security plugins block AI crawlers by default. If yours does, ChatGPT can only describe your firm from what other websites say about you. Ask whoever runs your website to check your robots.txt file.

Naming a firm is not the same as recommending it

When ChatGPT lists firms, it is not always endorsing them. The Ben Locker study found some firms appeared in passages explaining why a buyer might not need them. It also found the assistants it tested gave very different shortlists. On an average question, only 17 per cent of the firms named by any assistant appeared on all three.

So one test tells you very little. Ask the same question several times over a week, and read what is said about each firm, not just who is named.

What this means for your practice

Most of what you can influence comes down to a few things:

1. Let OAI-SearchBot reach your website. 2. Have a clear page for each main service and each town you serve. 3. Keep your name, address and phone number the same everywhere they appear. 4. Get listed in directories and professional body registers where clients look. 5. Ask happy clients for reviews.

Our guide to showing up in AI search covers each of these in more detail. If you want to see why a particular competitor keeps getting named, our post on why ChatGPT recommends your competitors shows how to read the sources it cites.

Check what AI says about you

Run our free AI visibility checker to see what Google Gemini says about your practice in your town. If you would rather have someone fix the gaps, our SEO service for accountants covers your pages, profile and listings. Get in touch and we will tell you plainly what we would fix first.

Common questions

Does ChatGPT favour bigger firms?

In the one UK study we know of, larger firms were mentioned far more often. That fits with how much more is written about them online, both in training text and in search results.

Can I ask ChatGPT to recommend my firm?

You can ask it anything, but that will not change what it tells other people. Its answers come from its training and from what it finds online.