How To Rank In ChatGPT:
A Guide For Accounting Firms

AI tools like ChatGPT are fundamentally shifting search behavior. Instead of traditional keyword searches on Google, users are increasingly having conversational interactions with AI platforms, asking complex questions like, “Who are the best accounting firms for e-commerce?” or “What tax deductions can small businesses claim in 2025?” If an accounting firm’s content is clear, helpful, and structured to answer these types of questions, it has a significant opportunity to be referenced by ChatGPT, which immediately builds trust with potential clients.

ChatGPT doesn’t always crawl the internet in real-time. Instead, it relies on a combination of factors: patterns identified in its vast training data (pre-2023 information including websites, books, and articles), real-time search engine data primarily from Bing, the presence of structured and well-formatted content, the authority score of a domain, and how frequently information is referenced across the web. This means that an effective AI SEO strategy requires a strong presence on Bing and Google, clear and helpful content, and a robust backlink profile.

To rank in ChatGPT, accounting firms should focus on creating structured, scannable content. This involves using clear headings (H2s) that ask and answer specific questions, incorporating bullet points and numbered lists, and providing concise definitions and summaries. This format makes content easier for AI to process and is also more likely to appear in featured snippets on traditional search engines like Bing and Google.

Traditional high-volume, short keywords are less effective in the conversational AI era. People now use more specific, longer phrases, often in the form of questions or conversational prompts (e.g., “I’m looking for a business accountant in my area that works with restaurants…”). ChatGPT favors content that directly answers this specific user intent. Therefore, firms should target long-tail keywords like “monthly bookkeeping services for restaurants in San Diego” instead of just “bookkeeping services” to increase their chances of being referenced.

Authority is extremely important. ChatGPT, like traditional search engines, trusts websites that the broader internet trusts. This is reflected in a domain’s authority score. To build authority, firms should publish in-depth, accurate, and trustworthy content, referencing real data, sources, and case studies, and including original insights. Regularly updating content also contributes to building this credibility over time.

Backlinks, which are links from other reputable websites to an accounting firm’s site, are a key indicator of trust for ChatGPT. The focus should be on quality over quantity – a few high-quality links from authoritative sources (like accounting associations, industry publications, or podcasts) are more valuable than many low-quality ones. Building a strong backlink profile not only improves SEO but also enhances the firm’s visibility across the platforms ChatGPT learns from.

Bing indexing is critical because ChatGPT-4 searches the web in real-time primarily using Bing. Therefore, an accounting firm must ensure their content is properly indexed by Bing. This involves submitting sitemaps to Bing Webmaster Tools, monitoring and fixing crawl errors, improving site speed and mobile-friendliness, using clean URLs and proper metadata, and ensuring that robots.txt files aren’t blocking important pages from being indexed.

Yes, forward-thinking firms can create custom GPTs trained on their own content or embed GPT-powered tools directly onto their websites. While this may not directly influence how ChatGPT responds to public users yet, it’s a smart way to provide instant answers to website visitors, create content that naturally aligns with GPT-style interactions, and future-proof their overall marketing strategy in an increasingly AI-driven landscape.