What 3,917 Accounting Firm Websites Say, and What They Leave Out

Most accounting firm websites do not tell you the two things a prospective client wants to know: what the work costs and who will do it. Of 3,917 US accounting and bookkeeping firm websites we read in full, 6.4% publish any price for their own services, and CPA-led firms are the least likely to, at 3.4%. What the sites do say is which software they work in (QuickBooks, on 43% of them), which industries they want (56% name at least one), and that you can have a free consultation (28%). Nearly a fifth of the same firms have no Google review at all.

The short version: a firm’s website is a reliable guide to its specialties and its software, an unreliable guide to its price, and no guide at all to how good it is. The numbers below come from the whole set, not a sample, and the counts are in a downloadable file. The profession-wide context these sit against, from the BLS, the Census Bureau and the IRS, is collected on the accounting industry statistics page.

Where the numbers come from

The firms are the 4,874 US accounting and bookkeeping practices in our directory, which started as a Google Maps export of businesses in the bookkeeping and accounting categories (February 2025) and includes only firms that list a website. They sit in 47 states, with California (1,554 listings), Florida (714) and Texas (521) over-represented, so these are small-firm numbers with a Sun Belt tilt, not a census of the profession.

We fetched each firm’s own site in August and September 2026, keeping the text of up to four pages per site: the home page and up to three of the pages it links to about the firm and its services. Firms sharing one website (a practice with three offices) are counted once, which leaves 3,917 distinct sites after removing 15 parked or for-sale domains. Each feature below was counted by a pattern over the page text, and random samples of every pattern’s matches were checked by hand. The patterns were tightened until a sample of twenty had at most two false matches, and a few that could not be made reliable were dropped. Because the crawl sees text and not links, a booking tool hidden behind a plain “Contact us” button is not counted, so every “offers X” figure is a floor.

Google review counts, ratings and hours come from the Google Places API for the 4,201 listings it returned. Credentials come from matching each listing against the IRS directory of credentialed preparers, as described in how we verify.

Almost nobody publishes a price

“Publishes a price” means a dollar figure for the firm’s own services attached to an hour, a month or a return, or a “starting at” figure. “Pricing model” means flat-fee, fixed-monthly or no-hourly-billing language with no figure attached.

Half the firms want you to get in touch before anything is discussed, and fewer than one in ten will tell you what anything costs. Where a price is published it is usually a monthly package: 440 monthly figures across the priced sites, with a median of $350 and the middle half between $167 and $800. Hourly rates are rarer (95 figures, median $75, middle half $45 to $150), and a per-return price rarer still (17 figures, median $300). Of the 252 sites that publish a price, 142 have no match in the IRS preparer directory, which in this set mostly means bookkeepers.

Credential changes the picture more than anything else:

A CPA firm is less than half as likely as an unmatched firm, most of which are bookkeepers, to put a number on its site. Age of the firm makes no difference: of the 867 sites claiming twenty or more years in business, 6.5% publish a price, against 7.8% of the 64 claiming fewer than ten. If you have landed here wanting the number, what a CPA costs and what tax preparation costs give the published survey figures.

What the sites do tell you

Three things are stated plainly and often: the software, the industries, and the tax trouble the firm will take on.

Software. 1,720 sites, 43.9%, name at least one accounting or tax product. QuickBooks is on 1,683 of them (43.0% of all sites), and 450 (11.5%) say they are a QuickBooks ProAdvisor. Xero appears on 159 sites (4.1%). Nothing else comes close. If a firm’s site names a product, that is the product your books will live in, and it is worth checking against what your accountant will want to work in before you sign up for something else.

Industries. 2,185 sites, 55.8%, name at least one kind of client they specialize in, and 528 (13.5%) name three or more. The ranking says something about where small firms think the money is:

CPA-led sites name an industry most often (65.5%), which fits: a CPA firm with a nonprofit audit practice or a dental-practice niche has a reason to say so, and a general bookkeeper does not.

Tax trouble. 1,269 sites, 32.4%, advertise IRS representation, audit defense, offers in compromise, back taxes or unfiled returns. This is where enrolled agents separate from everyone else: 54.5% of EA-led sites offer it, against 41.3% of CPA sites and under a quarter of bookkeepers, which is consistent with what the credential actually permits. An EA’s whole license is federal tax, and the sites reflect it.

Beyond those three, 961 sites (24.5%) mention a client portal or secure document upload, 545 (13.9%) say they serve clients nationwide or run a fully virtual practice, and 250 (6.4%) say they work in Spanish. Only 10 sites, 0.3%, say the firm itself uses AI in its work. Plenty of vendors are selling AI to accountants; almost no small firm is yet telling clients it bought any.

How long they say they have been at it

1,239 sites, 31.6%, state a founding year or a number of years of experience. Among those, the median claim is 25 years, the middle half runs from 17 to 35, and 481 sites (39% of those making a claim) say thirty years or more. Longevity is the most common credential on an accounting website that is not a license, and it is the one that cannot be checked against any register.

The footer tells a smaller story. Only 565 sites print a copyright year our crawl could read, and of those 192 (34%) show 2024 or earlier, a rough proxy for how many sites nobody has opened in two years.

The website itself

We could identify the platform for 1,359 sites, a third of the total, from image hosts and footer credits. Among those, WordPress leads with 635, then Squarespace (187), Wix (176), GoDaddy (99), CountingWorks (86), Duda (54) and Webflow (29). The accounting-specific template vendors are a small presence in this set: CountingWorks is the largest, with CPA Site Solutions on 17 and CCH Site Builder on 16. The other two thirds of sites gave no clue, so none of these shares should be read as a market share.

Basic search hygiene is uneven. 2,818 sites (71.9%) have a meta description, 215 (5.5%) have no title tag at all, and 77 more carry a title of “Home” or “Welcome”. For a practice that wants local clients to find it, the title tag is the cheapest fix on this page.

What Google shows next to the same firms

The median firm has 7 reviews. Half of the rated firms show a perfect 5.0, and 44% of those perfect scores rest on fewer than five reviews, which is why a star rating is a poor way to choose an accountant: it mostly measures whether the firm has asked anyone. The mean rating across all rated firms is 4.64.

One oddity is worth knowing if you search Google Maps for an accountant: 3,470 of the 4,201 listings, 82.6%, carry “Consultant” as their primary Google category, and only 389 carry “Accounting”. Google’s category assignment in this trade is close to meaningless, so searching by category undercounts the firms near you.

What the IRS directory adds

Of the 4,874 listings, 2,711 (55.6%) match a record in the IRS directory of credentialed preparers, 1,803 (37.0%) do not, and 360 were still being checked when we counted. Among the matched listings, 1,194 (35.5%) are CPAs, 802 (23.8%) enrolled agents, 751 (22.3%) Annual Filing Season Program participants, 583 (17.3%) PTIN holders with no listed credential, and 38 attorneys.

1,727 sites use the words “CPA” or “certified public accountant”. We could match 1,101 of them (63.8%) to an IRS record, 537 (31.1%) we could not, and 89 were pending. The gap is mostly a matching problem rather than a false claim: the IRS directory lists individual preparers who hold a PTIN, not firms, so a CPA who does not sign tax returns is not in it. It does mean that a “CPA” on a website is a claim you have to check yourself, with the state board, and that one in three cannot be confirmed from the federal register alone.

What to do with this

If you are choosing a firm. Read the site for the industry list and the software, both of which are reliable. Ignore the star rating unless it rests on dozens of reviews. Expect to ask for the price, and treat a firm that publishes one as having done you a favor rather than as cheaper. Check the credential with the state board or the IRS directory, because the website will not do it for you. The directory here does the IRS check for you and says when it could not match a listing.

If you run a firm. You are competing against sites that are silent on price, thin on who does the work, and dependent on review counts in the single digits. A page that gives a starting price, names the person who will answer the phone, and asks ten existing clients for a review would put a practice ahead of most of this set. The firms publishing prices are the ones whose sites answer the question the visitor arrived with.

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