TL;DR
The test: I asked Google, ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude to recommend a Cumbrian firm for an HMRC tax investigation. Dozens of accountancy practices in the county could do the job, but only three or four of the same local brands were ever named.
Why those firms? They have pages that clearly say what they do, who they provide that service for, and can prove it. Being the better accountant doesn’t come into it.
It’s not just what’s on your website: Search engines and AI build their picture of you from nine different threads, including reviews, listings, local press, digital media, backlinks and social media.
For a Cumbria based business – getting on with the daily grind – one of the more unpleasant sides of company finance is the HMRC letter saying they want to investigate your tax figures. It is sufficiently stressful that there are lots of searches in Google for help with that scenario. And, quite likely, an increasing number of searches in the AI search tools like Chat GPT, Claude or Google’s own Gemini. In Google, people still type short words or phrases, whereas in the AI tools the queries tend to be more conversational SEMrush blog April 2026 … more chatty with the chatbots in effect.
Will your practice show up in either “traditional Google” or the LLM generated answers and recommendations? As a test, I queried Google’s normal search for “tax investigation service Cumbria” and several of the LLMs: with a more conversational version of that intent. The videos below show what actually happened.
Searching For a Tax Specialist Accountant in Google and AI Search Tools
Google Search for "Tax Investigation Service Cumbria"
Conversational Query in Chat GPT and Gemini
This was the long form query I submitted to the language models to mirror the previous Google search’s intent: “I’ve had a letter from HMRC that they are going to be carrying out a tax investigation over last year’s VAT submission. Are there any good accounting firms in Cumbria who can help with that as my current accountant doesn’t feel confident about the figures?”
Attempting to Unpick Why AI Makes its Choices to Recommend Brands
I Queried Chat GPT and Gemini on the reasons they chose their first recommendation from their lists.
Chat GPT’s response to recommending Tattersall Bailey was explained as follows: direct quotes.
“The reason I put them first was quite narrow:
- They have a dedicated HMRC tax investigation service, rather than simply mentioning tax investigations as one item amongst many services. Their page specifically says they can help prepare for an investigation, advise on the issues, liaise with HMRC and submit information on the client’s behalf.
- They explicitly say “If HMRC states its intention to investigate you” to contact them, which maps quite closely to your situation.
- They have both Carlisle and Cockermouth offices, so they’re genuinely a Cumbria option rather than a national firm that happens to have a web page about investigations.
- Their published client base includes businesses in sectors such as agriculture, construction, engineering, leisure and tourism, alongside general business clients.
- Their investigation service also deals with the cost of representation, although there is an important catch: their fee-protection arrangement is something you subscribe to, and their normal accountancy fees don’t automatically cover investigation work.”
Gemini came up with…
Armstrong Watson was placed first because your situation involves two distinct, high-stakes problems that general regional practices are often poorly equipped to handle simultaneously: disputed accounting accuracy and an active HMRC investigation.
Four specific structural factors make them the standout choice in Cumbria:
- Dedicated Indirect Tax Specialists (Not General Accountants)
Most high-street accounting practices treat VAT as a routine bookkeeping compliance task. When HMRC initiates a formal enquiry into figures that the preparer cannot defend, you need people who understand the technicalities of the Value Added Tax Act 1994, partial exemption rules, and supply-chain classification. Armstrong Watson maintains a distinct VAT and Indirect Tax Advisory team rather than leaving VAT defence to general practice accountants.
- Ex-HMRC Investigators on Staff
Their Tax Dispute and HMRC Enquiry Resolution team includes former HMRC tax inspectors. This is critical when entering an enquiry with questionable figures:
- They know HMRC’s internal manuals, escalation triggers, and standard investigation playbooks.
- They understand how an inspecting officer decides whether an error qualifies as “reasonable care,” “careless,” or “deliberate.” Under Schedule 24 of the Finance Act 2007, this distinction can mean the difference between zero penalties and a penalty of 30% to 70% of the potential lost revenue.
- In-House Forensic Re-conciliation Capability
Because your current accountant “doesn’t feel confident about the figures,” the first job isn’t arguing with HMRC, it is rebuilding and auditing the transaction data before HMRC sees it. Armstrong Watson has dedicated forensic accounting and audit resources. They can take your primary source documents (sales invoices, purchase receipts, bank feeds) and perform a forensic reconciliation to establish the true liability before formulating a disclosure.
- Scale and Local Authority
While they are a Top-30 UK firm with national specialist infrastructure, their principal operational headquarters is located at Rosehill in Carlisle. You get national-tier technical dispute backing with a local Cumbrian team you can sit down with face-to-face.
So, did your accountancy practice show up? Does your website outline how you would deal with a client needing support under tax investigation, or is tax investigation simply listed alongside the other services your firm provides? Clarity about what you offer, who you offer it to and proof that you can do the work are essential on your website. In the case of Armstrong Watson we have a national scale accountancy practice with a dedicated marketing team well versed in engaging with local media and events to generate the kind of PR and good news stories that search engines and the LLMs love.
How is your third party game coming on? Are you publishing stories about your brand, getting local press to shout about you and encouraging other websites to link their visitors to you? The rest of this article looks at how relatively invisible brands can start competing with giants, particularly in a localised setting.
Online Visibility Used to Mean: Ranking on Google and Reactions on Social Media
Search technology has changed fundamentally in the past several years, though it’s important to be aware that Google is still the biggest Gorilla in the room, with its search engine, its own AI, Gemini and YouTube. In fact AI is becoming embedded in the search functions of every online and digital tool we use, whether we like it or not.
The old model for visibility hasn’t disappeared, it has been joined at the hip with a new model driven by AI. Both work hand in hand. Previous to the experiment above, I quizzed Gemini about how the two models work and it gave me one of the clearest descriptions I’ve seen. The three strands of its explanation are worth summarising here.
Google Traditional Works on Indexing and Retrieval
(as well as Bing and Duck Duck Go: probably)
This works like a library catalogue, with information scraping the first stage. The spiders crawl the web identifying and cataloguing the information they find creating an ever growing index. The algorithms then extract and map the entities within that information. So in the accountancy scenario above, some of the entities might be the brand name, services, locations, specialisms, staff to start with. Using other information such as backlinks, user engagement, geography (how close is the business to the searcher?), page speed and mentions it will attempt to rank the current page against similar ones, for multiple queries. When a searcher sends the keyword phrase, in our example “tax investigation service cumbria”, for an answer; the engine goes down its list and picks out the best matching set of results for its interpretation of the query. The searcher then has to go to that website to retrieve the answer.
Searching With LLMs (Gemini, Chat GPT, Claude, Perplexity etc.) Probabilistic Synthesis
The Large Language Model tools (LLMs) do things differently. They have scoured all the information that they have been fed in their training and learned the patterns of words and phrases that relate to each other. When a user asks it a question, such as the “I’ve had an HMRC compliance check letter regarding last year’s VAT claims. Do I need a specialist in tax disputes and is there a good firm in Cumbria?” example we looked at in the video; a completely different process kicks off.
The question is tokenised into chunks. This is a purely statistical process. A process known as embedding takes each token and converts it into vectors that are mapped into a mathematical space of semantic concepts or coordinates. It is this process that imbues tokens with meaning. What’s called an attention mechanism then draws up relationships between the parts of the question and can even connect ideas of HMRC compliance with embeddings representing tax expertise, accountancy practices, Cumbria, the seriousness of the HMRC and tax context… and a myriad other connections.
The LLM then indulges in a very sophisticated guessing game. It predicts the most likely next token and repeats that process until it arrives at a complete answer for the context it has assembled. That is presented directly to the user. No real list of blue links… and that is why search traffic to websites has plummeted for information-seeking searches. (As highlighted in July 2025 study from Athena Chapekis and Anna Lieb in July 2025.)
LLM Searches When the Models Double Check: RAG and Grounding (AI Overviews in Google Search, Gemini with live web search, Perplexity)
The training data each LLM relies on is finite and it’s fixed to a specific point in time when its training run ended. Because real-world facts are time-sensitive, subject to change, or require strict verification, an additional process kicks in: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Grounding.
In these scenarios, the system actively searches for fresh, authoritative information, or confirms what it already holds. That retrieved data is fed directly into the model, tokenised, and mapped into its semantic space alongside the user’s prompt. New connections form, facts are anchored to live sources, and the final response is assembled with up-to-date accuracy.
Brief, honest, respectful of the reader’s existing understanding. The old model wasn’t wrong. It’s just no longer the whole picture.
| Dimension | Traditional Search Engine | Conversational AI (Pure LLM) | RAG / Search-Grounded AI |
|---|---|---|---|
| Primary Job | Find pages and rank: direct the user to the best external source. | Reason and synthesise: formulate a direct answer using training data. | Retrieve and summarise: use training data, pull fresh facts and synthesise an answer. |
| Mechanism | Inverted web index plus PageRank / ranking algorithms. | Transformer neural networks + attention mechanisms. | Search API / vector search + LLM processing. |
| User Input Style | Shorthand keyword phrases (e.g. tax accountant cost). | Longer form, conversational queries. | Mixed (often starts as a question or prompt). |
| Strengths | Real-time accuracy, local geographic discovery, contact information. | Custom problem-solving, role play, drafting questions, weighing trade-offs. | Up-to-date facts, pricing verification, cited sources. |
| Weaknesses | Poor at handling multi-variable, personalised context. | Can hallucinate niche statutory rules or outdated tax rates without search. | Slower response times, dependent on the quality of web sources. |
In 2026, Being Found Means Being Found Everywhere
The section above doesn’t even delve into the amount of search being carried out on YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and a dozen other social channels. A far back as 2022, Google’s Prabhakar Raghavan noted that a lot of local recommendations for certain services have moved onto TikTok and Instagram.
The new AI tools are now giving users an even wider range of avenues with which to search for what they want. I pointed out at the start that Google is still dominant and likely to remain so for a very long time. But the search behaviour pf people is changing, splintering, diversifying.
For this reason it is becoming essential to cover all of your visibility bases. A website, by itself, is not going to get you in front of your customers. Social media by itself is not going to get you found. An occasional press piece in the News and Star is not going to guarantee you stay front of mind for long! AI driven search trusts information from strong brands. Does your brand stand out wherever your customers gather online or are you already on the back foot?
There are multiple touchpoints where you need to be seen in order for the AI tools to first of all find you, then understand you – and then trust you enough to recommend you. How much effort and investment do you put into all of these nine threads that are now part of your online visibility footprint?
- Website copy (standard pages: home, services, about, products, blog etc.)
- Google Business Profile (Accurate business information especially the NAP+W of Name, Address, Phone number plus Website URL, categories, description, products, services, attributes, photos, videos, posts)
- Other listing sites (With accurate information as above)
- Social media (the sites where your audience is likely to be and where AI models will search for validation of you as a business entity : Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X-Twitter, Bluesky, W and a dozen others that could be invoked)
- Local press coverage: (Local papers are unlikely to give you a backlink but the brand mention alone is now more valuable than it ever used to be Ahrefs 2025 Link: TikTok and Instagramhttps://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-overview-brand-correlation/)
- Review acquisition (very important for traditional ranking as well as developing the trust of AI models)
- Backlink attraction (hyperlinks are the very structure of the web and channel spiders and people to and from individual websites and they still act like a vote of confidence)
- Digital PR and multimedia coverage (spreading information about your business to even more online channels without descending into AI generated slop)
- More or improved copy on your website which actually answers users’ questions, sets out your expertise and experience clearly and builds trust
More than ever before a company’s marketing needs to attend to the whole range of digital presence. Otherwise your visibility simply fades away.
What Gives AI Search the Confidence to Recommend Your Business Ahead of Competitors?
What makes your accountancy practice preferable to another practice for the stressed out business owner who has suddenly felt the cold hand of the HMRC tax investigators? It boils down to that fairly longstanding acronym EEAT: Expertise, Experience, Authority and Trust.
Expertise: First of all you have to spell out very clearly what your expertise is, what do you do for your clients; in the copy on your website and the material you share in socials. It’s an ongoing battle to keep drawing that distinction. What are your examples?
Experience: Secondly you have to demonstrate your experience. How did you save this engineering business from a catastrophic tax miscalculation? How many times have you contested an investigation and shown that the investigation was unwarranted?
Case studies are the most obvious way to do this, but weaving the experience aspects into the main webpage copy is crucial too. Does your website copy answer relevant questions within its main body or within an FAQ section relevant to the service or product on that page?
Authority: This is the toughest, yet most important nut to crack. Authority does not rest only on what you say about yourself on your own pages. We can all sing our own praises. What is the rest of the web saying about you or endorsing?
Building up your reviews and engaging with them, wherever they are is vital, particularly in the local marketing and ecommerce realms. Have you and your brand been featured in local press and media. Westmoreland Gazette isn’t the Times but it is very relevant to the geographical “entities” of Penrith or Westmoreland and Furness. Does your business sponsor a local club, charity, event or social enterprise? And does the entity you sponsor give you a mention or a backlink?
Backlinks are another component of building authority. They are hyperlinks on someone else’s website that enable a user to jump from that other website onto yours. They are still misunderstood by many business owners, but are fundamental to boosting visibility in this AI driven era as much as in the wild west days of the web.
Good quality backlinks take a lot of work to create. To be really worthwhile they need to go on a website that already scores highly on the EEAT “matrix”. That usually takes outreach, negotiation and something worthwhile for the website owner hosting the link for you. If your website is low key then a high quality website owner is unlikely to consent to hosting a link that points their visitors to you. (We can shortcut the process a little as we work with a couple of agencies who do that kind of donkey work on our behalf. Link to backlinks page)
Digital PR with a strong enough story can also win backlinks from very high profile, high traffic websites, that are worth their weight in gold.
At the most basic level of generating a backlink profile, have you made the effort to get lots of listings and citations for your business? You’ve updated your details on your Google Profile, but have you added yourself to Bing, Apple Maps or the GPS networks? Every little mention or record of your existence adds to your authority as perceived by search engines and crucially, the AI search tools.
Trust: Finally we get to whether or not the AI tools will trust your brand enough to cite you or overtly recommend you. The reviews, the sentiment of those reviews, your presence on recognised trust platforms like TrustPilot, the sentiment of any PR or other third party content that you are mentioned in add to the overall picture that both search and AI build of your business entity. How many websites link to you to give their vote of trust?
Do you actually explain what you offer clearly and unambiguously? Have you shown the proof in your website and on the social media posts. What awards has your business won?
There's a Difference Between Being Found and Being Chosen.
By making sure your business is placed in, or is improving in all of the nine threads outlined above you increase the chances of AI tools finding you, so SEO is far from dead – for this reason alone – never mind all of its other strengths..
Being found will no longer single you out as the answer to a customer or client’s wants. Attention to all the nine threads to build up your digital “strength” across the whole spectrum of EEAT is the only thing that will help your business to show up on the list of brands that AI will recommend for any particular query.
The more competing businesses you have in your niche the harder it becomes. The more established and trusted those brands are, again the harder it is to become the recommended business, particularly if you are a newcomer.
What This Means For Online Visibility if You're a Professional Services Firm in Cumbria
How does that view of online visibility translate to businesses serious about improving their positioning in Cumbria? Remember the query at the start of this piece? I turned it towards accountancy, but it could have been any professional service. Two or three Cumbrian firms showed up and multiple companies from outside of the area were put forward as well. So, there is a high likelihood that that work will be taken outside of the Cumbrian economy.
There are literally dozens of Cumbrian companies who could handle that investigation but very few of those others were recommended by the search, the AI overview, or the AIs we Gemini and Chat GPT. That’s because the teams and marketers supporting David Allen, Armstrong Watson and to a degree, Brian Hall have done the unglamourous, hard work of ensuring their website copy answers the query both from a normal Google search and for the more conversational AI tools. They have built up their external footprint as well, from backlinks to citations and from PR to sponsorships.
When looking at Tattersall Bailey’s appearance in the results for Chat GPT, it was harder to see why they might have been chosen as they have nowhere near the third party mentions or detailed copy of some businesses.
It is important to understand, particularly at the local level, that AI-driven results are far less stable than traditional Google rankings ever were. They are more personalised and much more volatile, as demonstrated by Rand Fishkin on the SparkToro blog back in January 2026.
I repeated the experiment several times over the few days I spent writing this: after the videos were shot. I tried Google Gemini as well as Chat GPT and Claude. The layouts changed and the order shuffled, and one firm, Brian Hall, dropped out of the later results. But the same few names kept appearing: apart from one. Chat GPT, brought up Tattersall Bailey as its first recommendation – as noted above. That is the real lesson summarised by an Ahrefs article: you cannot control where you appear on any given day, but you can do the work that keeps you in the small group of businesses the AI keeps coming back to.
Where Does an “Invisible” Professional Services Company in Cumbria Start?
AI tools lean towards strong brands even more heavily than old-style search did. That sounds daunting, but in Cumbria “strong” is relative. The national firms that appear for a query like this one often have just one connection to the county: a well-formed local landing page. You have a real address, local clients, local reviews and local press. Only a few Cumbrian firms have done the digital groundwork so far, and that is a gap a well-run practice can close with the right advice.
Here are three places to start. Each begins with a question for you and your team.
1. Does every page demonstrate your expertise and experience?
Pick your three or four most valuable services and read each service page as a stranger would. Does it say what you do, for whom, and give proof you have done it? Or could the page belong to any firm in the country?
2. What does the rest of the web say about you?
Ask Google and an AI tool the questions your ideal clients would ask, then look for your firm’s name in the results. What comes back from beyond your own website? Do you appear on citation, listing and review sites, and are the mentions positive?
3. Who in your practice owns this?
Is it a partner, an in-house marketing manager or an outside agency? Visibility now depends on all nine threads, so someone has to be responsible for it. If nobody owns it, it will not happen.
Call Ray
If the answer to that last question is “nobody”, or “me, when I get a moment”, let’s talk.
I will take you through where your firm shows up today, where it doesn’t, and how my C.L.I.M.B. process turns that into a clear plan, from Clarifying your goals to Being accountable for the results.