Business owners are no longer only searching Google for an accountant. They are asking ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity who to hire, then uploading proposals, websites, and LinkedIn profiles and asking the AI whether a firm is the right fit. Ross Simmonds, founder and CEO of the B2B content marketing agency Foundation and founder of Distribution.ai, joins Brannon Poe to explain what this shift means for CPA firm owners.
Ross is the author of the Amazon bestseller Create Once, Distribute Forever and has been ranked by BuzzSumo among the top content marketers in the world. In this episode, he explains generative engine optimization (GEO), the practice of shaping your content so AI platforms recommend your firm. Fewer than 5% of Americans pay for an AI subscription, but business adoption is far higher. That means the business owners your accounting practice serves are already using these tools to make buying decisions.
Traditional SEO still forms the foundation of a strong accounting firm website. GEO adds a new layer built on niche service pages, case studies, awards, community involvement, and content distributed across LinkedIn, YouTube, Reddit, and podcasts. Ross also explains why these same signals support recruiting, since job candidates now research potential employers through AI before they apply.
The Conversation Covers:
- How business owners use AI to discover, compare, and evaluate CPA firms
- Why a “Who We Serve” page with niche sub-pages helps AI match your firm to the right clients
- How generative engine optimization differs from SEO, and why your firm needs both
- Why employer branding shapes whether candidates find your accounting firm at all
- How to test your AI visibility accurately by logging out before you search
- Why AI-written content needs your own expertise before it goes live
Reputation has always driven growth in public accounting. AI platforms are now one of the places that reputation gets built, and firms that tell their story clearly across channels give both people and AI a reason to recommend them.
This Episode Is For: CPA firm owners curious about how AI search affects client acquisition, accounting firm leaders ready to strengthen their online visibility without hiring an agency, practice owners wondering how to stand out to candidates researching firms through AI, and anyone interested in what generative engine optimization means for the accounting profession.
How are clients finding CPA firms differently today? Ross Simmons, founder of Foundation and Distribution.ai, explains that clients are using AI platforms like Claude, ChatGPT, and Perplexity not just to discover accounting firms but to evaluate them. They upload proposals, screenshots, and firm websites and ask the AI directly who they should hire.
What is generative engine optimization and why does it matter for accounting firms? Generative engine optimization, or GEO, is the practice of optimizing your content and online presence for AI platforms rather than just Google search. Ross explains that the signals that influence AI recommendations, including YouTube videos, Reddit threads, reviews, and social content, are different from traditional SEO ranking factors.
What should a CPA firm’s website include to show up in AI search results? Ross recommends creating specific “Who We Serve” landing pages for each client type or industry your firm works with. AI platforms crawl these pages to match your firm to relevant search prompts, so specificity matters more than general descriptions.
How can a CPA firm build visibility without a full-time marketer? Ross suggests starting with an SEO audit using a tool like Ahrefs’ Let I Do, then using a content distribution platform to spread existing content across LinkedIn, Facebook, and other channels. The goal is to get your story out to more places so AI platforms have more signals to work with.
TIMESTAMPS
00:00 – Welcome and guest introduction: Ross Simmons, founder of Foundation and Distribution.ai
01:14 – How search is shifting from Google to AI and what that means for CPA firms
03:21 – How ChatGPT changed the search experience and why adoption is faster inside businesses than among consumers
07:03 – How the entire buyer’s journey has changed: discovery, consideration, and comparison in the AI era
08:57 – Why “Who We Serve” landing pages help LLMs match your firm to the right clients
10:54 – How AI platforms evaluate employer brand: values, culture, community involvement, and awards
15:33 – What GEO is and how it differs from traditional SEO
17:40 – Practical low-lift tools for CPA firms: Ahrefs, MCP connectors, and Distribution.ai
20:17 – Common content mistakes: checking your own AI ranking while logged in, and copy-paste AI content
23:07 – Ross’s story: a fantasy football blog, a borrowed suit, and a C-suite meeting in Miami
Book Recommendation
The Courage to Be Disliked by by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga
TRANSCRIPT
Brannon: I’m Brannon Poe, and this is The Accountant’s Flight Plan podcast, where you can enjoy engaging conversations about mergers and acquisitions and accounting practice management. Listen in on strategies to build a more fun and valuable accounting firm.
Welcome to The Accountant’s Flight Plan podcast. I’ve got a great guest today: Ross Simmonds, founder and CEO of Foundation, a B2B content marketing agency, and founder of Distribution.ai, a platform to help brands and creators scale content distribution. Ross is also an Amazon bestselling author of “Create Once, Distribute Forever” and has been ranked among the top content marketers in the world by BuzzSumo. He has worked with brands ranging from fast-growing startups to Fortune 500 companies and has built his career around a simple idea: hitting publish is the starting line, not the finish line.
Today we’re talking about AI, search, and content, and what any of this means for a CPA firm. The profession has always run on referrals and reputation, and that reputation is increasingly being built or missed online. Ross is going to walk us through what it takes to build real visibility and how generative engine optimization is changing the game as search shifts from Google to AI. Ross, welcome to the show.
Ross: Super excited to be here. Thanks for having me, fellow EO member.
Brannon: Yes, for those who don’t know, EO stands for Entrepreneurs Organization, a worldwide volunteer-run organization of entrepreneurs. Ross is in the Nova Scotia area in Canada, and I am a member here in Charleston, South Carolina. There’s a real bond when EO members connect anywhere in the world.
Let me jump right in. We monitor our Google reports closely every month, and we’ve watched our search traffic shift significantly. People seem to be going straight to ChatGPT or Claude rather than Google. Can you give us some context around how search is actually changing?
Ross: There’s definitely been a big shift. If you go back about two and a half years, Google internally put out a red alert, a fundamental alarm about their business model, triggered by the launch of ChatGPT. ChatGPT introduced a new way of searching: instead of typing words and getting ten blue links you had to go click through and read, it gave you the answer directly in the platform. At the time, it was genuinely groundbreaking. You didn’t need to read a blog post an accountant wrote about year-end filings. You could just ask the question and get the answer in a conversational experience. It felt like talking to a knowledgeable friend.
Fast forward and the adoption rates of ChatGPT, Perplexity, Grok, and all these platforms has been some of the fastest technological adoption since mobile phones and social media. The shift is real. However, two things can be true at the same time. Consumer behavior is actually slower than the market hype. The actual percentage of Americans paying for an AI subscription is still less than 5%. Most individuals are not paying for these tools. But inside organizations, adoption has been massive. The vast majority of businesses are paying for Gemini, Copilot, or some AI system built into their platforms. Unlike consumers who are just trying to live their lives, businesses are trying to be more profitable and generate more results.
For accounting firms thinking about their clients, don’t think of those clients as you think of yourself as a consumer. Think about how a business owner would use AI to make decisions about services they need. And a lot of the search traffic that used to go to Google has shifted into Claude, Perplexity, and all of these platforms. In the business space specifically, Anthropic platforms are actually over-indexing relative to ChatGPT. And the use cases go beyond discovery. People are uploading proposals, pulling in your website, your LinkedIn profile, screenshots of firm names from a group chat, uploading all of it to Claude, and saying: tell me if I should use this accountant.
So for your listeners, there is a simple reality: the way people buy has changed, and the way we do marketing needs to shift with it. A lot of firms are still doing the same things without realizing that showing up and influencing AI platforms requires a fundamentally different approach.
Brannon: That’s fascinating. I hadn’t fully put together that people are using these platforms not just to find options, but to evaluate them.
Ross: Exactly. Let’s use Charleston as an example. If I’m a small business owner and I want to find an accountant, my first prompt at the discovery stage might be to ask an LLM who the best accountant for a small business in Charleston is. I’ll see five different responses, five different accounting firms. But the LLM will probably ask me a follow-up: what size is your company? Then it will tailor results around information it has gathered online.
This is where accounting firms have a real opportunity. Most businesses have one page that says they’re a Charleston accounting firm. The best ones recognize they should also have a “Who We Serve” page with sub-pages for each niche: professional services, HVAC, small businesses, lawyers, agencies, tech companies, software companies. You want pages on your site that speak directly to each category, because the LLM is crawling your site looking to see if you contextually serve that individual user. If you and I both search for an accountant, we’re going to get very different results because the LLM has different context about each of us. It will find the accounting firm that is most relevant to your specific business type.
As you move from discovery into consideration, you have to start speaking to your awards, your successes, any case studies, any major accounts, your history in the community, sponsorships, scholarships. Once you get to the comparison stage, when people are deciding between you and another firm, the LLM is looking for those signals. If you don’t have them out there, you’re less likely to show up.
We also have to think about how we’re influencing LLMs through activities beyond the website: LinkedIn, YouTube, podcasts, even billboards. People will drive around, take a photo of a billboard, upload it to an LLM, and ask if this is the firm they should use. We live in that world now.
Brannon: A lot of CPA firm owners say one of their biggest growth obstacles isn’t finding clients, it’s finding talented people to come and work for them. The website speaks to candidates doing the same search. Is employer branding something you see as relevant here?
Ross: Employer branding has never been more important. If you don’t show up in the LLMs for a candidate doing research, you’re invisible. You’re not an option. Candidates are going to Reddit, TikTok, Perplexity, Gemini, asking questions like: should I actually apply to work at this firm? If you’re not one of the results, you simply don’t exist in their decision.
What I would recommend: start thinking about your values as an organization and whether your website speaks to them. What are the opportunities at your firm? What is your vision and mission? Can you create video content or stories about events you’re attending with your team? Take people behind the scenes to understand your culture. When you do that, you’re doing it for the people in front of you, which is great, but you’re also doing it for the robots, because the robots are crawling all of this content and learning the nuances about your business. They might say: this accounting firm created an entire scholarship program for CPAs in this category, so we’re going to recommend them because their values align with yours.
You also want to think about awards. There are local awards for businesses doing great things, whether it’s fastest growing, best culture, most community impact. As a firm owner, you have to play that authority marketing game. It matters to the algorithms.
Brannon: So let’s define the term we’ve been dancing around: generative engine optimization. Is that just what we’ve been describing?
Ross: Yes. It’s a shift from SEO, search engine optimization, to GEO. SEO was about optimizing for Google, getting into the top ten links, ranking number one, generating traffic. With the rise of LLMs, generative engine optimization is about optimizing for Claude, Perplexity, ChatGPT, and all of these platforms, including Google’s AI mode and AI overviews, which is now also an LLM. It’s a new, more holistic approach.
People often ask if they just do the same things they used to. The answer is no. The signals that influence AI overviews, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity are actually different from what used to determine your Google ranking. YouTube videos, Reddit threads, TikTok content, Instagram reviews, niche review sites: all of these matter differently. And every LLM is different too. GEO is the practice of distributing your story and ensuring you are articulating the right message at the right time against the right prompts.
Brannon: Is traditional SEO done then?
Ross: It’s the foundation. SEO still matters. Every good website needs good SEO, because LLMs are still looking for words the same way people used to type into Google. That foundational layer still needs to be in place. But then the next layer is a whole new strategic approach: platforms, review sites, YouTube, Reddit, Facebook groups. That’s a new factor most firms have never considered.
Brannon: Most CPA firm owners are not marketers and do not have time for this. What’s a practical, low-lift way to start building visibility without hiring an agency?
Ross: There are some great tools that can help. One is called Let I Do, built by Ahrefs, where you can essentially get search data and ask it to audit your website and recommend what needs fixing from an SEO lens. You can also use an MCP connector to pull data from Ahrefs or SEMrush directly into Claude and say: go look at my website and tell me what I need to do based on what we discussed in this episode. It will generate recommendations you can send to whoever manages your website.
For the distribution layer, Distribution.ai is a platform I built where you can plug in your blog content, articles, or anything you’ve written, and it will create a set of different stories that can go on different platforms: Facebook, LinkedIn, LinkedIn articles, carousels. It creates content variations you can spread across channels rather than leaving everything only on your website. If you do video or podcasting, it can also chop podcasts into clips and turn YouTube videos into blog posts.
Brannon: What are the biggest mistakes you see professional services firms make when they try to do their own content?
Ross: The first one is checking how they rank in an AI platform while logged into their own account. The LLM knows who you are and will flatter you. Log out before you test, because memory is real inside these platforms and they will show you what you want to see.
The second mistake is copy-pasting content directly from ChatGPT and publishing it without adding any human element. You have to review it with your own expertise and add your personal perspective. Google and the LLMs can detect when content is just copy-pasted, and they do not want it. Stale websites are also a real risk. Traffic has gone down across almost every Google Analytics account I look at over the last year and a half, even as impressions have gone up. People are not clicking on links to go to your website. Robots are crawling it more, but if they’re not getting the right materials, they will never serve you up.
Brannon: Do you have a memorable story to share?
Ross: I grew up obsessed with the internet. I ran a fantasy football blog in university, was making good money on affiliate sites, but my marks were tanking. My mom told me to stop writing about fantasy sports and start writing about what I was learning in school, which was marketing. So I quit my fantasy football career and started rosssimmonds.com. I wrote a piece called “Ten Things You Should Do to Target Generation Y.” Pressed publish. Got an email from someone in Miami who worked for one of the largest beverage companies on the planet. They wanted me to come talk to their C-suite about Gen Y marketing.
I borrowed a suit from my dad because I was still living in my parents’ basement drinking instant coffee. Got on a plane, flew to Miami, walked into the C-suite, and thought: okay, this marketing thing on the internet could actually work. It all started because my mom told me to write about something useful. My marketing career has never been the same since.
Brannon: All right, last question. Book recommendation?
Ross: “The Courage to Be Disliked” by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga. The dialogue is between someone more experienced in life and someone who hasn’t really lived yet, and the experienced person shares insight about what actually matters and why a lot of our excuses are connected to deeper things most of us aren’t willing to admit. It covers self-forgiveness, stoicism, self-care, mental clarity, and focusing on what matters. I listen to it twice a year. It’s available as an audiobook too.
Brannon: That’s a great one. Ross, what is the best way for people to find you online?
Ross: I have my own podcast, The Ross Simmonds Show, which they can subscribe to. My personal website is rosssimmonds.com, where I publish content regularly. And I’m on LinkedIn if folks want to connect there.
Brannon: We will put all of those links in the show notes. Thank you for coming on. This has been a very enlightening conversation.
Ross: Thanks so much for having me. This has been a blast.
