Run a fixed set of questions your prospects actually ask, in the assistants those prospects use, on a regular schedule, and record whether your firm is named, what is said about it, and which pages are cited. Then check every factual statement about your services, fees, registration, and credentials against your own pages and the public record. Keep those observations separate from visits, inquiries, and new clients, which come from analytics and intake.
The general method is covered in measuring AI search: mentions, citations, visits, and leads. For financial, accounting and tax firms, two things change. The questions split sharply by firm type, and an assistant that names your firm can still describe it wrongly in ways that matter, such as calling a state-registered adviser SEC-registered or saying a bookkeeping firm handles IRS audits.
This is a measurement and content-planning question for firm owners and marketing leads. It is not compliance advice, and nothing here describes how any assistant chooses its sources beyond what the providers' own documentation states.
Build the question set from your own client conversations
Start with the questions that come up before a prospect hires you, sorted by service. A firm offering tax preparation and planning needs separate sets, because the person asking "Who can help me respond to an IRS audit letter in Tucson?" is not the person asking "Which flat-fee planners work with teachers near Tucson?" Include unbranded questions, comparison questions, and questions that name your firm.
Write questions the way prospects talk, including location and situation, and keep a separate set for each office if the firm has more than one. Mark which questions came from real conversations and which ones you drafted, since the first group should carry more weight when you decide what to fix.
Keep the set small enough to rerun every month without cutting corners. A useful question for the partners is, "Which five questions would we most want an assistant to answer correctly about us?" Those go in first, and the wording should stay fixed from one month to the next so the comparison holds.
Record what was said, not just whether you were named
For each answer, capture the full question, the date, the assistant and mode, any location setting, the full response, every business named, and every source linked. A tally of mentions without the text behind it cannot be checked later. Being named is not being described correctly, and for a financial firm the description can matter more than the mention.
| Field | Why it matters for a financial firm |
|---|---|
| Firm named (yes or no) | The basic visibility observation |
| How the firm is described | Firm type, services, and audience, compared with what you actually offer |
| Registration or credential statements | Any claim about SEC or state registration, CPA licensure, or enrolled agent status |
| Fee statements | Any description of how you charge |
| Sources cited | Which of your pages, if any, the answer links |
| Other firms named | Who appears for questions you want to be part of |
Save the raw answers, not just the spreadsheet row. A later run may not reproduce the same answer, so the saved text is the only record of what was said on a given date.
Check the facts an assistant states about you
Every statement about registration, credentials, fees, or services should be checked against your own pages and the public record. For advisers, Investor.gov describes the IAPD database as containing "registration documents filed by investment adviser firms." For tax professionals, the IRS says its directory "can help you find preparers in your area who currently hold professional credentials recognized by the IRS, or who hold an annual filing season program record of completion." CPA firms can compare against their state board's records. Fee statements need the same care: if an assistant says the firm charges a percentage of assets when it charges a flat fee, compare the answer with the fee page and, for advisers, the brochure.
When an answer is wrong, look first at what the firm controls. An outdated services page, a bio that disagrees with the brochure supplement, or an old directory listing are all possible explanations, though none can be proven from the answer alone. The correction comes from the firm's approved facts, and the writer should not have to invent how the firm describes its registration when compliance already holds approved language. The page on writing advisor bio pages covers keeping bios consistent with filings.
Connect answers to visits and inquiries
Answer logs show what assistants say, while analytics shows what visitors do. Google's Search Console has a generative AI performance report covering AI Overviews and AI Mode, where "Impressions are how many times links to your site were shown to a user in a generative AI feature on Google Search." Google notes the report may be missing when a site "hasn't received enough impressions in generative AI features on Google Search," and its AI features documentation says this traffic is included in the overall search traffic in Search Console.
In Google Analytics 4, the AI Assistant channel covers visitors who arrive "from sources like ChatGPT, Gemini, Deepseek, Copilot, or Grok," and it "excludes Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode," which fall under Organic Search. OpenAI says "ChatGPT automatically includes the UTM parameter utm_source=chatgpt.com in referral URLs." Add a "how did you hear about us" question to intake, and keep self-reported answers separate from analytics data.
Report it so the partners can act
A monthly report for a small firm can fit on one page. Show the question set and how many answers were checked, how many named the firm, how many described it accurately, and which errors appeared. Then show attributable visits and inquiries for the same period, each with its source and method, and list what the firm changed during the month.
Keep the categories apart. A rise in mentions with no change in inquiries is a different finding from a rise in inquiries with no change in mentions, and each points to different work. Note anything else that changed in the period, such as a new ad campaign or the start of tax season, so nobody credits one change for everything. The report exists to decide what to fix next, not to prove a result.
Fictional example: a CPA and advisory firm in Kansas
A fictional two-office firm in Kansas runs the same 25 questions each month in two assistants. In the first month it is named in a few answers about small business tax preparation, but one answer describes it as offering audits, which it stopped doing years ago.
The team traces the claim to an old services page still live at a forgotten URL and to a directory profile that lists audits. They retire the page, update the profile, and log both changes with dates. The next month's run shows whether the description changed; either way, the log records what was done and when, so the partners are not left guessing which change preceded which result. If the firm later wants to quote a favorable assistant answer in its own marketing, that quote becomes new marketing content and goes to compliance like anything else.
Where content turns out to be the fix, Hudson South's four steps apply in order. The Authority Asset gathers the firm's approved knowledge and evidence, including registration details and service descriptions. Hudson Twenty-One records how the firm communicates across 21 dimensions. Market Intelligence researches the questions prospects ask and the market around them, and AEO Creation turns those inputs into answer-first content. For a quick first look, try the AI visibility self-check, and for what the pages themselves need, see how financial firms get named in AI answers.
Start with what assistants say about you today
On a free 30-minute call, Hudson South walks through where your site and your competitors' sites differ in answering the questions your prospects ask.
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- Investment Adviser Public Disclosure (IAPD). Investor.gov, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Read 2026-10-15.
- Choosing a tax professional. Internal Revenue Service. Read 2026-10-15.
- Generative AI performance report (Search). Google Search Console Help. Read 2026-10-15.
- AI features and your website. Google Search Central. Read 2026-10-15.
- [GA4] Default channel group. Google Analytics Help. Read 2026-10-15.
- Publishers and Developers FAQ. OpenAI Help Center. Read 2026-10-15.