By Dave Maney
The retiring CEO of the world’s largest marketing agency group says AI is “totally disrupting” advertising. But that’s understating the impact: AI is inserting itself between prospects and the expertise they seek, becoming the arbiter of what and who gets surfaced.
Businesses can create all the ad copy and thought leadership they want, but if they don’t move AI’s authority needle, that AI curation will make them disappear. For accounting marketers, that’s damaging. Not being seen means not being discovered, and not being discovered means not making the shortlist.
Fixing this will require structural shifts in what content gets created, where it’s published, how it’s presented, and how each piece contributes to an overall authority portfolio.
AI Inserts Itself
For the past quarter century, accounting firms have marketed by trying to capture the attention of prospective clients. Sponsorships, local business media, referrals, and community involvement were their foundational tools — later supplemented by SEO, thought leadership, blogs and webinars.
The underlying assumption: if a prospect needed a tax advisor, valuation expert or transaction specialist, they would search, browse, investigate, read and compare as part of their journey of discovery. The firm’s job was to grab a prospect’s attention at the right moment in time with snapshots of its expertise, wisdom and trustworthiness and close the prospect in person.
But that process is under attack by the creeping omnipresence of AI, which has fundamentally changed where buyers direct their attention. Buyers now find answers and content within the AI layer itself, either through direct interaction with an LLM or through AI-generated search summaries.
The battleground for accounting marketers is shifting from attention capture to the harder job of earning their way into the answers generated by AI.
That’s a monumental shift.
What Accounting Thought Leadership Used to Do
Accounting thought leadership traditionally served three purposes:
- Build trust by demonstrating the intellectual breadth and grounded judgment of a firm’s partners.
- Support business development by helping to show an existing client or prospect that the firm had insight in their area of need.
- Drive discovery and visibility by supporting SEO, media placements and trade show speaking slots.
This led to a great deal of evergreen thought leadership, such as “LLC vs S-corp vs C-corp for Growing Owner-Managed Businesses,” and pieces that performed significant SEO keyword duty, such as “What Makes Private Equity Fund Accounting Different?”
How AI Gatekeeps and Therefore Drives Discovery
AI is changing prospect search inputs and behavior. Instead of entering a short abstraction of the subject area of interest, such as “accounting treatment U.S.-Canada cross-border acquisition,” the more likely input now is much more specific and pointed: “How do we account for and report a U.S.–Canada cross-border stock acquisition where a U.S. public company acquires a Canadian operating subsidiary plus several foreign disregarded entities?”
That kind of in-depth question will generate an in-depth answer. Grok’s reply to that particular prompt, for instance, included 74 citations of material from accounting firms, law firms and publications.
But discovery of individual service providers often comes via a secondary question following the first reply: “What accounting firms are expert at this?” And the answer to that question was illustrative of both the threat and opportunity AI poses to discovery.
Grok did the most obvious, and possibly least helpful, thing. It recommended the Big 4 as well as firms five through eight in most size rankings. That’s not great news for every other firm that could capably compete for the work, because they were ghosted in the answer.
But Grok also noted there were “niche cross-border groups,” citing a much smaller firm whose website does in fact reveal specialized content on cross-border U.S.–Canadian transactions.
The takeaway: dominant firms with extensive content libraries and high-profile public citations and authority signals dominate AI answers today. In the absence of hard work by accounting firm marketers, that will continue to happen, creating a kind of slouch into AI invisibility.
But the results here show that smaller, highly focused firms displaying targeted expertise can create entirely new opportunities for themselves alongside the giants.
The Work Thought Leadership Now Needs to Do
Accounting firm thought leadership’s new job is to be the engine of a firm’s third-party authority stack. That means thought leadership needs to land somewhere other than the website you control — peer-reviewed professional journals or editorially gated, actual news, business and industry trade publications.
That means it has to be sharper, more current, more relevant and more tightly constructed because, if it isn’t, nobody besides the firm itself is going to publish it.
A firm also has to work much harder to redistribute content that achieves publication. AI wants reassurance that work is genuinely authoritative, pushing it higher when it sees that multiple people are citing it and commenting on it.
Thought leadership will need to be focused narrowly, grounded in citations and data, and must avoid becoming chin-stroking “sage advice.” It should be built with easy-access structural hooks that facilitate pickup by LLMs and be linked to changes occurring in the business environment and the industry served.
Ironically, AI authority frameworks don’t seem to like AI slop, so while AI can help you research and frame, this can’t be an automated effort.
Finally, bylined published thought leadership from a firm’s partners is not the only source of authority signals. Anything that represents someone else’s seal of approval on your firm and its experts, including citations of your firm’s data or research, interviews, conference speaking appearances and even social media recommendations, can also bring that authority.
Nobody said this was going to be easy. But the alternatives are not promising.
The Stakes Are Higher Than Ever
AI-mediated discovery and visibility are still being shaped. Models are still evolving and training, and marketers are only beginning to understand the opportunity and threat that this new dynamic creates in the professional services market is in its early stages.
But thought leadership is the apex product in an accounting firm’s authority portfolio, and firms with genuine expertise but weak authority signals may become effectively invisible over time. The risk that an extremely capable firm being left out of AI answers entirely is real.
Countering that risk means firms need to move up the LLM authority framework learning curve quickly. Like it or not, they’ll need to feed the beast. As the WPP CEO noted, this is a moment of wild disruption, with marvelous upside and enormous risk.
About the Author
Dave Maney is the CEO of The Expert Press, which helps create and nationally publish high-authority thought-leadership output.
