Sector Index, September 2026
We scanned 121 accountancy websites in Surrey. Here is what AI can see.
Every independent practice we could find across Surrey and the south west London border, checked the way an AI assistant reads a website. No firm is named. No individual score is published.
The headline
Most practices are half visible
Sixty is roughly the point at which an assistant stops answering questions about you from your own website and starts answering them from somewhere else. A directory listing, a review site, a competitor’s comparison page. Nearly two thirds of Surrey practices sit below it.
The spread
Where the 81 practices landed
The shape is the interesting part. There is no cluster of firms getting this right and a tail getting it wrong. There is one big middle, and being in it is what most practices should worry about. If an assistant can read thirty competitors about as well as it can read you, nothing on your website is helping it choose you.
Where they differ
The checks that separate one practice from another
These are the tests some practices pass and others fail. They are what actually moves a score, because everything further down this page is failed by almost everybody.
| Failing check | Practices | Worth |
|---|---|---|
| Referrer policy | 71 of 81 | 10 points |
| Author attribution | 71 of 81 | 10 points |
| Content map for AI | 66 of 81 | 20 points |
| Frame protection | 65 of 81 | 5 points |
| Primary page schema | 62 of 81 | 20 points |
| Strict transport security | 57 of 81 | 20 points |
| Content type protection | 55 of 81 | 5 points |
| Entity linking | 45 of 81 | 10 points |
Four of those eight are security headers. They are quick to add, they are not really about AI, and the fact that most accountancy websites are missing them is worth a separate conversation with whoever hosts your site. Firms holding client financial records tend to care once they know.
What to fix first
Three changes that would move most practices
Add a typed description in the page code saying this is an accountancy practice, in this town, offering these services. Sixty two of the eighty one practices have nothing of the kind, so an assistant has to infer it from the prose. Worth 20 points and the single biggest win on this list.
A short index of your key pages with one line each, written for machines rather than visitors. Sixty six practices do not have one. It takes an hour and it stops an assistant guessing which of your pages matters.
Strict transport security alone is worth 20 points, and fifty seven practices are missing it. This is a setting on your web server, not a redesign. Your host can usually do it in an afternoon.
None of these three requires a new website. All of them are changes to an existing one.
What comes next
Not one practice is ready for AI to act
Everything above is about reading. There is a second question arriving behind it, which is whether an assistant acting for a client can do anything on your website. Send an enquiry. Book a call. Start an onboarding.
- A machine readable version of each page
- Any action an assistant could take on a client’s behalf
- A published description of what those actions are
- Discovery tags saying any of it exists
We are not holding this against anybody. These are new standards and hardly any business in the country has adopted them yet. It is on this page because the assistants your prospective clients already use are moving from reading websites to using them, and a practice that gets there first will be noticeably easier to deal with than one that does not.
Method
How this was done
The list was built from public directories and local searches, covering independent practices in Surrey and the south west London border. National chains, franchises and practices that have been acquired into larger groups were excluded, because the marketing decisions for those sit elsewhere.
Each website was checked from the outside, exactly as an AI assistant or answer engine sees it. One anonymous request per public page, no JavaScript, no logins, nothing that is not already published. The same tests were applied to every site on the same day, 15 September 2026.
Of the 121 websites we tried, 81 returned a readable page and are in the figures above. The other 40 did not, mostly domains that no longer resolve, certificates that have expired, and servers that did not answer. Sites that served nothing were retried with a browser identity, to separate a site that is genuinely down from one that refuses anything that is not a browser. That distinction matters, because a site that only answers browsers is invisible to most AI crawlers by configuration rather than by content.
No practice is named here and no individual score is published. If your firm is in this index and you want your own result, ask and we will send it, whether or not you want anything else from us.
The honest part
What a score does not tell you
A low score does not mean a bad practice. Several of the lowest scoring firms here are long established businesses with full client lists who have never had a reason to think about any of this, and who get their work through referral rather than search. If that is you, this page is information rather than a problem.
These tests measure what a machine can read on one particular day. They do not measure whether an assistant actually recommends you when someone asks for an accountant in Woking, which depends on what is written about you elsewhere as much as on your own website. That is a different piece of work and a scan does not answer it.
We built the scanner, so we have an obvious interest in what it measures. The tests are public standards rather than our invention, and where one is for something new that almost nobody has adopted, we have said so on this page instead of quietly counting it against people.
See where your practice sits
The same scan used for this index is free on your own website. About a minute, the same tests, the same score, and a list of what to fix first.
In this index and want your own result? Email dev@shopstartup.co.uk with your domain and we will send it.