# Who Google's AI Recommends for Accountants in the GTA

Source: https://enginely.ai/reports/gta/accounting-ai-visibility/

> A citation study of Google AI Overviews across seven Greater Toronto Area sub-markets and three services, measuring which accounting firms AI-generated answers name and cite. 46 firms, 224 citations, 21 queries, captured July 31, 2026.

A citation study of Google AI Overviews across seven Greater Toronto Area sub-markets and three services, measuring which accounting firms AI-generated answers name and cite — and which are absent.

21 client-intent cost queries. 224 citations captured. 46 firms named. Crawled July 31, 2026, and reproducible by anyone willing to run the same queries.

## Headline finding

**5 accounting firms are cited in all seven GTA sub-markets we tested.** For AI answers, your postcode has almost stopped mattering — the same handful of firms answers for the entire metro.

| Figure | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Queries returning an AI Overview | 21/21 |
| Firms cited across the whole GTA | 46 |
| Cited in all seven sub-markets | 5 |
| Cited across all three services | 3 |

## What did this study measure?

We asked Google what an accountant charges for the three services people actually price-check — small-business tax, personal tax and monthly bookkeeping — across seven GTA sub-markets, and recorded every source cited by the AI Overview each one returned.

- **21 of 21 queries** returned an AI Overview — every cost question we asked
- **224 citations captured**, de-duplicated so a firm cited twice in one answer counts once
- **78% pointed at firm websites** rather than chains, software, government or forums
- **Only 46 distinct firms** — the smallest field of any vertical we have measured
- **5 firms reached all seven sub-markets**, and the top ten hold 56% of citations
- **Single point in time** — captured July 31, 2026, and generated answers vary between runs

_This measures Google AI Overviews only, across three cost questions. Audit, advisory, incorporation and cross-border work were not tested and may behave differently._

## Findings

### Location has stopped protecting local firms

27 of the 46 cited firms appear in more than one sub-market, and 5 appear in all seven. Every sub-market we tested returned between 17 and 21 distinct firms — and they are largely the same firms. A Scarborough business owner and a Vaughan business owner are being shown the same answer.

### Tax firms and bookkeeping firms are separate markets

Only 3 of 46 firms were cited across all three services. The bookkeeping leaderboard shares almost no names with the tax leaderboard. Winning one service does not carry into the next.

### Personal tax is where local firms lose

Firms take 91% of citations on small-business tax and 82% on bookkeeping, but only 64% on personal tax — where H&R Block, TurboTax and the CRA take the rest.

### One firm is running away with it

gondaliyacpa.ca was cited 17 times — in all seven sub-markets and all three services, accounting for 10% of every firm citation in this study on its own.

## Where Firms Win, and Where They Lose

The same firm can dominate one service and be entirely absent from another, because each question is answered from a different kind of page — and each has a different competitor taking the gap.

_Share of citations going to accounting firm websites_

| Topic | Citations | Local share | Most cited | Note |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Small-business tax | 70 | 91% | gondaliyacpa.ca (7), insightscpa.ca (7), bestax.ca (6) | The strongest position for firms in this study. Very little of this answer leaks to chains or software — it is contested between accounting firms themselves. |
| Bookkeeping | 62 | 82% | outsourcebookkeeping.ca (7), ontariotaxteam.ca (7), premiumbookkeeping.ca (6) | The sources taking citations here are not competitors. They are Indeed, ZipRecruiter, PayScale and SalaryExpert — salary aggregators. Google is answering “how much does a bookkeeper cost” partly with data about what a bookkeeper earns, because comparatively few firms have published what the service is priced at. |
| Personal tax | 92 | 64% | insightscpa.ca (7), ontariotaxaccounting.ca (6), gondaliyacpa.ca (6) | The highest-volume question and the one local firms are least present in. H&R Block, TurboTax and Liberty Tax are national operations with content teams. Competing on generic pages is difficult; competing on specifics — local pricing, complex returns, self-employed filings — is where citations are still available. |

_Share of AI Overview citations going to accounting firm websites. The remainder goes to chains, software, government, forums and salary sites. Based on 224 citations across 21 AI Overviews._

## The Bookkeeping Problem Is Not Who You Think

On bookkeeping queries, the sources taking citations from firms are not competitors. They are Indeed, ZipRecruiter, PayScale and SalaryExpert — salary aggregators.

Google is answering “how much does a bookkeeper cost” partly with data about what a bookkeeper _earns_, because comparatively few firms have published what the service is actually priced at. That is an unusually clean gap to close: the question has a straightforward answer, and almost nobody in this market has written it down.

Personal tax is the harder case. H&R Block, TurboTax and Liberty Tax are national operations with content teams, and it is the highest-volume question in the study. Competing there on generic pages is difficult; competing on specifics — local pricing, complex returns, self-employed filings — is where the citations are still available.

## Every Firm Cited, Ranked

All 46 accounting firms cited in GTA AI Overviews across the 21 queries analysed, ranked by how many generated answers cited the firm's own website. The “missing” column is the more useful one: it names the services each firm was absent from.

| # | Firm | Location | Citations | Sub-markets | Services won | Missing from |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | gondaliyacpa.ca | Vaughan | 17 | 7 | Bookkeeping, Personal tax, Small-business tax | None — all three |
| 2 | insightscpa.ca | Brampton | 15 | 7 | Bookkeeping, Personal tax, Small-business tax | None — all three |
| 3 | bestax.ca | Mississauga | 11 | 6 | Personal tax, Small-business tax | Bookkeeping |
| 4 | bomcas.ca | Markham | 10 | 7 | Personal tax, Small-business tax | Bookkeeping |
| 5 | maxprofinancials.ca | Brampton | 10 | 5 | Bookkeeping, Personal tax, Small-business tax | None — all three |
| 6 | ontariotaxaccounting.ca | Markham | 8 | 6 | Personal tax, Small-business tax | Bookkeeping |
| 7 | ontariotaxteam.ca | Mississauga | 7 | 7 | Bookkeeping | Personal tax, Small-business tax |
| 8 | outsourcebookkeeping.ca | Mississauga | 7 | 7 | Bookkeeping | Personal tax, Small-business tax |
| 9 | accountingtoronto.ca | Markham | 7 | 6 | Personal tax, Small-business tax | Bookkeeping |
| 10 | premiumbookkeeping.ca | Brampton | 6 | 6 | Bookkeeping | Personal tax, Small-business tax |
| 11 | bbatax.ca | Markham | 6 | 5 | Personal tax, Small-business tax | Bookkeeping |
| 12 | customcpa.ca | Mississauga | 5 | 5 | Bookkeeping | Personal tax, Small-business tax |
| 13 | theacctaxco.com | Brampton | 4 | 4 | Bookkeeping | Personal tax, Small-business tax |
| 14 | tohme-accounting.com | Markham | 4 | 4 | Personal tax, Small-business tax | Bookkeeping |
| 15 | accufile.ca | Brampton | 4 | 3 | Personal tax, Small-business tax | Bookkeeping |
| 16 | boobooaccounting.ca | North York | 4 | 3 | Personal tax, Small-business tax | Bookkeeping |
| 17 | enkel.ca | Mississauga | 3 | 3 | Bookkeeping | Personal tax, Small-business tax |
| 18 | fluentbook.ca | Markham | 3 | 3 | Bookkeeping | Personal tax, Small-business tax |
| 19 | gtaaccounting.ca | Mississauga | 3 | 3 | Small-business tax | Bookkeeping, Personal tax |
| 20 | m7group.ca | Mississauga | 3 | 3 | Small-business tax | Bookkeeping, Personal tax |
| 21 | taxprocanada.ca | Brampton | 3 | 3 | Personal tax, Small-business tax | Bookkeeping |
| 22 | accountingfirmmississauga.ca | Mississauga | 3 | 2 | Bookkeeping, Small-business tax | Personal tax |
| 23 | accountantpartners.com | Markham | 2 | 2 | Small-business tax | Bookkeeping, Personal tax |
| 24 | aissolutions.ca | Scarborough | 2 | 2 | Bookkeeping | Personal tax, Small-business tax |
| 25 | goraimpots.com | Brampton | 2 | 2 | Personal tax | Bookkeeping, Small-business tax |
| 26 | mybookly.co | Scarborough | 2 | 2 | Bookkeeping | Personal tax, Small-business tax |
| 27 | taxeveryday.com | Vaughan | 2 | 2 | Personal tax | Bookkeeping, Small-business tax |
| 28 | maktax.ca | Scarborough | 2 | 1 | Personal tax, Small-business tax | Bookkeeping |
| 29 | rgbaccounting.com | North York | 2 | 1 | Bookkeeping, Personal tax | Small-business tax |
| 30 | adilcpa.ca | Mississauga | 1 | 1 | Personal tax | Bookkeeping, Small-business tax |
| 31 | astacpa.com | Vaughan | 1 | 1 | Personal tax | Bookkeeping, Small-business tax |
| 32 | downtowntorontotaxreturnpreparation.com | North York | 1 | 1 | Personal tax | Bookkeeping, Small-business tax |
| 33 | flashcpa.ca | Markham | 1 | 1 | Bookkeeping | Personal tax, Small-business tax |
| 34 | friendlytaxservices.ca | Scarborough | 1 | 1 | Personal tax | Bookkeeping, Small-business tax |
| 35 | frostysquirrel.ca | Markham | 1 | 1 | Personal tax | Bookkeeping, Small-business tax |
| 36 | jjjcanada.com | Mississauga | 1 | 1 | Small-business tax | Bookkeeping, Personal tax |
| 37 | numeracyaccounting.com | Mississauga | 1 | 1 | Small-business tax | Bookkeeping, Personal tax |
| 38 | numinor.ca | Toronto (Downtown) | 1 | 1 | Bookkeeping | Personal tax, Small-business tax |
| 39 | oneaccounting.cpa | Scarborough | 1 | 1 | Personal tax | Bookkeeping, Small-business tax |
| 40 | pateltaxation.ca | Scarborough | 1 | 1 | Personal tax | Bookkeeping, Small-business tax |
| 41 | probusinesstax.com | Vaughan | 1 | 1 | Bookkeeping | Personal tax, Small-business tax |
| 42 | simplifiedaccounting.ca | Vaughan | 1 | 1 | Small-business tax | Bookkeeping, Personal tax |
| 43 | tax4less.ca | Vaughan | 1 | 1 | Personal tax | Bookkeeping, Small-business tax |
| 44 | taxxel.ca | Brampton | 1 | 1 | Personal tax | Bookkeeping, Small-business tax |
| 45 | ubmtax.com | Toronto (Downtown) | 1 | 1 | Personal tax | Bookkeeping, Small-business tax |
| 46 | zentax.ca | Markham | 1 | 1 | Small-business tax | Bookkeeping, Personal tax |

_Repeat citations of the same domain within a single answer are counted once. Firms are identified by domain, and where a group operates several sites each is listed separately. Outsourced bookkeeping providers are counted as firms, since they compete for the same work. Captured July 31, 2026._

## Cited in All Seven Sub-Markets

Note how specialised most of these are: several reach the entire metro on a single service. Breadth of geography and breadth of service are different achievements, and only two firms here have both.

| Firm domain | Citations | Services | Which services |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| gondaliyacpa.ca | 17 | 3 | Bookkeeping, Personal tax, Small-business tax |
| insightscpa.ca | 15 | 3 | Bookkeeping, Personal tax, Small-business tax |
| bomcas.ca | 10 | 2 | Personal tax, Small-business tax |
| ontariotaxteam.ca | 7 | 1 | Bookkeeping |
| outsourcebookkeeping.ca | 7 | 1 | Bookkeeping |

## Almost No Variation Across the GTA

Each sub-market surfaces a similar number of firms — and largely the same ones. That similarity is the finding: geography is doing very little work in these answers.

| Sub-market | Firm citations | Distinct firms |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Toronto (Downtown) | 24 | 20 |
| North York | 26 | 18 |
| Scarborough | 27 | 20 |
| Mississauga | 21 | 17 |
| Brampton | 25 | 19 |
| Markham | 25 | 19 |
| Vaughan | 26 | 21 |

## Chains, Software, the CRA and a Forum

Of 224 citations captured, 174 (78%) went to an accounting firm's own website. The remaining 50 are worth understanding, because each represents a different kind of gap.

| Source | Type | Citations |
| --- | --- | --- |
| reddit.com | Community forum | 9 |
| hrblock.ca | National tax-prep chain | 6 |
| turbotax.intuit.ca | Tax software | 4 |
| canada.ca | Government (CRA) | 4 |
| bark.com | Lead-gen marketplace | 4 |
| ca.indeed.com | Salary / job aggregator | 3 |
| facebook.com | Social platform | 3 |
| ziprecruiter.com | Salary / job aggregator | 2 |
| softrontax.com | National tax-prep chain | 2 |
| quora.com | Q&A forum | 2 |
| mississauga.ca | Municipal government | 1 |
| evzo.com | Directory | 1 |
| payscale.com | Salary aggregator | 1 |
| peelregion.ca | Municipal government | 1 |

_These 14 sources account for 43 of the 50 non-firm citations; the study did not itemise the remainder. Reddit is the single most-cited non-firm source — the same pattern we find in every professional services market we measure. Where practitioners decline to publish prices, prospective clients discuss what they actually paid, and Google cites the discussion. Lead-generation marketplaces such as Bark appear for the same reason._

## Method

1. Ran 21 client-intent cost queries through Google with city-level location targeting across seven GTA sub-markets: Toronto (Downtown), North York, Scarborough, Mississauga, Brampton, Markham and Vaughan.
2. Tested each sub-market with the same three services — small-business tax, personal tax and monthly bookkeeping.
3. Captured the complete search result page for each query, including the AI Overview block, its generated text, and every source it cited.
4. Crawled on July 31, 2026, without personalisation.
5. De-duplicated citations per answer, so a firm cited twice within a single AI Overview counts once.
6. Classified each cited domain by hand. Outsourced bookkeeping providers were counted as firms, since they compete for the same work.

## Limitations

This is a single-point-in-time snapshot. AI Overviews are generated fresh per query and vary between runs, so exact citation lists will differ if re-run; trends require repeated sampling. Firm identification is by website domain, and where a group operates several sites each is counted separately.

Only three services were tested. Audit, advisory, incorporation and cross-border work are researched differently and may behave nothing like these cost questions.

Every figure here comes from search results captured on the date stated and can be independently checked by running the same queries yourself. We publish the method so the numbers can be tested, not taken on trust.

## What This Report Does Not Show

It does not show your firm's position — whether you are cited at all, on which of the three services, and which firms are named in the answers your prospective clients see instead.

Two things in this data are unusual and worth acting on. Geography is no longer a moat: the firms winning are winning everywhere at once, so being the best-known practice in your own sub-market no longer protects you. And service specialisation is near-total — only 3 of 46 firms are cited across all three services, which means the fastest gain for most firms is not general visibility but one missing page on one specific service.

## Questions about this report

### Why are salary websites cited for bookkeeping costs?

Because comparatively few firms have published what the service is priced at. On bookkeeping queries the sources taking citations from firms are not competitors — they are Indeed, ZipRecruiter, PayScale and SalaryExpert. Google is answering “how much does a bookkeeper cost” partly with data about what a bookkeeper earns. That is an unusually clean gap to close: the question has a straightforward answer and almost nobody has written it down.

### Can a local firm realistically compete with H&R Block on personal tax?

On generic pages, difficult — they are national operations with content teams, and personal tax is the highest-volume question in this study. On specifics, yes: local pricing, complex returns, self-employed filings and situations a chain handles poorly are where citations are still available. Firms hold 64% of personal tax citations already, so this is a contested answer rather than a closed one.

### Does being cited in more sub-markets matter more than total citations?

They are different achievements and worth reading separately. Several of the five firms reaching all seven sub-markets do so on a single service — ontariotaxteam.ca and outsourcebookkeeping.ca are both metro-wide on bookkeeping alone. Only 3 firms are cited across all three services. Breadth of geography and breadth of service are not the same thing, and the leaderboard shows both.

### Our firm is not in the table. What does that mean?

It means the firm was not cited in any of the 21 answers measured, in any of the seven sub-markets. It does not mean the firm is invisible in Google generally, or that it performs badly in the map pack — those are different surfaces measured differently. It does mean that for these three cost questions, the answer a prospective client received named someone else.

### Why does this report only cover Google AI Overviews?

Because an AI Overview is rendered inside a public search results page, it can be retrieved directly, for a specific city, at a specific moment. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot do not publish their answers anywhere; those answers exist only when a user prompts the model, so measuring them requires running a fixed prompt set against each model repeatedly over time. That is a different instrument, and we report it separately rather than blending two methods into one number.

### Only three services were tested. What about audit and advisory?

Not measured, and we would not extrapolate to them. Audit, advisory, incorporation and cross-border work are researched differently and may behave nothing like the three cost questions here. This study covers what business owners and taxpayers price-check before choosing a firm, which is a narrower claim than “accounting in the GTA”.

### Can we be removed from the report?

Write to us and we will discuss it. The domains here appear because they were cited in publicly generated search results on the date stated, and the study would be less useful and less checkable without them — but we would rather have the conversation than not.

## Full report as PDF

The same study, packaged: [download the PDF](https://enginely.ai/reports/enginely-gta-accounting-ai-visibility-july-2026.pdf). Everything in it is on this page already.

## Legal note

This report is provided for information. Firm names and domains appear because they were cited in publicly generated search results on the date stated; inclusion or absence is not an assessment of professional competence or of any firm’s standing. Nothing here is tax, accounting or financial advice. Figures describe what Google’s systems returned on July 31, 2026 and may change.