How SEO for Accounting Firms has Changed with The Growth of AI
Quick Overview:
- Traditional SEO for accounting firms is still important for effective digital marketing, even as AI overviews top results in 40% of online searches.
- LLMs like ChatGPT and Gemini get their information from search engines like Bing and Google.
- Digital marketing agencies like ours must adapt to emerging trends while also staying true to established methods that still matter.
Have you noticed lately that when you ask Google a question, ChatGPT answers?
This is happening on about 40 percent of searches, currently. (I wrote more about this here.)
When a business owner types “best CPA near me” into Google, the AI doesn’t guess. It pulls from sites that are already optimized.
And if your firm isn’t visible, your competitor’s will be.
But even as we lean into AI optimization as a digital marketing agency, we’re not abandoning traditional search engine optimization (SEO) for our clients.
SEO is still alive and well and just as important as ever.
AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini don’t create information out of thin air. They pull directly from Google and Bing.
So, if your site isn’t optimized for search, you’re invisible to both AI and humans alike.
If you want to show up in any search results for “tax services” on those engines, you need to practice good SEO.
It’s one big circle, in the most redundant sense.
So really… SEO isn’t dead… it’s evolving.
Without foundational SEO, you won’t even be in the pool for AI to reference. With it, you gain twice the visibility:
Traditional search + Showing up in AI summaries.
As we learn and operate under the new GEO (generative engine optimization) rules, we gain access to all of the additional opportunities for increased visibility via AI overviews.
So it’s SEO PLUS, to say it simply.
Honestly, I’m just excited to have a couple new acronyms to add to my daily conversations.
I’m joking (kind of), but this is the name of the game in our world: Adapt or die.
So we adapt, because we take our role seriously as a trusted partner for our tax and accounting clients.
If you’re not a client yet, learn more about how we incorporate AI and all its corresponding trends into our clients’ digital marketing strategy.
Ad Astra,
