How we test

• ChatGPT
• Claude
• Gemini
• Perplexity

We use current models with live web access, so the answers reflect what these tools can actually find about you today. We keep the settings the same every week so the results stay comparable.

Less than you would expect for this kind of question. When someone asks for the best accountant near them, the answer is driven by what the tool can find about you online. Your reviews, your listings and your directory presence matter far more than which version is asking. A well-reviewed, well-listed business gets named across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity alike. An invisible one gets missed by all of them.

That is the important part. Your score, and the fixes that raise it, hold up across tools and versions, so one improvement lifts your visibility everywhere at once. We will not claim two tools return identical wording, because they do not. But the finding that matters, whether you get recommended and who gets recommended instead, stays consistent. That is why we track the trend rather than any single answer.

For each industry we take 12 buying intents and phrase each one four ways. Some are short searches like “best accountant Austin”. Some are conversational, like “who should I use for taxes in Austin?”. Others compare options. Different wording produces different answers, so we mix them on purpose. That gives around 48 questions per run, anchored to your city and nearby postcodes.

We pull the list of businesses in your area from public map data, then read each AI answer and match the names it mentions back to real businesses, including loosely worded ones like “the Smith firm”. Anything we cannot match with confidence is flagged for review rather than quietly dropped.

Your AI Mention Score is how many of the 48 questions named you, across all four tools. We also work out share of voice, meaning who gets named and how often, and we track which sources the answers rely on. In Austin, only 11 of 241 accountants were ever named.

AI tools give slightly different answers from one session to the next, and that is normal. A single check is a snapshot. The trend over time is what matters, and it is the number we help you move. Because we store every answer behind every claim, you can always see the evidence for yourself.