Most professionals never see the moment they lose a client. It happens before the phone rings. Someone hears your name at a networking breakfast or gets your details from a colleague, then spends ten minutes at home checking you out online. What they find either confirms the recommendation or quietly kills it. You never hear about the second outcome. The enquiry simply never arrives.
I run ESBO Ltd, a digital PR agency, so I spend my working week looking at how people research companies before they spend money with them. The pattern has been stable for years: recommendation first, verification second. What has changed recently is who, or rather what, now does part of the verifying.
The check used to be simple
Ten years ago, verification meant a Google search. A prospective client typed in your name, scanned your website, maybe glanced at a review or two and your LinkedIn profile. If the website looked like it was last touched in 2016, doubt crept in. If page one of Google showed nothing but a bare listing with a phone number, doubt crept in faster. The game was straightforward. Be findable, look alive, and the referral did the rest.
That version of the check still happens. It is just no longer the whole story.
The second researcher is not human
Last year I wrote an article for Entrepreneur called "People Google You Before They Buy." The title is already slightly out of date. People still Google you. Increasingly, they also ask an AI assistant about you. They type "who is a good employment solicitor in Manchester" or "is this accountancy firm reputable" into ChatGPT or whatever tool sits on their phone, and the assistant reads what is publicly available and returns a short answer, often naming two or three firms.
There is no page two of an AI answer. If the public material about you is thin or contradictory, you are not in the answer, and the client never learns you existed.
In another Entrepreneur piece this year, about how AI assistants pick products, I wrote that these systems "do not choose the loudest brands. They choose the clearest ones." The same rule applies to professional services, possibly more so. An accountant whose website states plainly who they act for, what they charge and how the first meeting works will beat a competitor whose homepage says "bespoke solutions" eleven times and never names a price. Clarity reads as trust, to humans and machines alike.
I have mixed feelings about this shift, honestly. It rewards firms that write about their work and it punishes quiet excellence, which feels unfair to some very good practitioners. But it is happening whether any of us approve or not.
A one hour audit you can run this week
You do not need an agency to find out where you stand. Open a private browser window and search your own name, then your firm's name. Read page one the way a stranger would, without the benefit of knowing how good you actually are. Then ask an AI assistant three questions a client might ask: recommend someone in your specialism in Manchester, describe what your firm does, and say whether your firm is trustworthy. Write down everything that comes back wrong, missing or out of date.
When we run this exercise with clients at ESBO Ltd, the same problems appear again and again. An office address that differs across three directories. A testimonials page last updated four years ago. A senior partner with twenty years of experience and not a single piece of public writing to show for it. An AI answer that confuses the firm with a similarly named practice in another city. None of these are hard to fix. Most take an afternoon. The damage they do compounds daily until someone bothers.
Picture a conveyancing solicitor in Sale with a full referral pipeline and a website that has not changed since the last stamp duty holiday. Her work is excellent. Her online presence says abandoned. Every month, some portion of her warm referrals go cold at the verification stage, and she reads the quiet spell as a slow market rather than a fixable problem.
Publish proof, not promises
The professionals who come through this vetting well share one habit. They put evidence in public rather than claims. That means anonymised case notes showing how a matter was actually handled, and articles that answer the questions clients genuinely type into a search box, like what a shareholder agreement should cover or what really happens at a first tribunal hearing. It means testimonials with full names and companies attached, because unattributed praise convinces nobody, human or otherwise.
It also means keeping your profiles complete and consistent on the platforms where clients and their assistants look, including directories like this one. A structured page listing your name, role, firm, specialisms and reviews is exactly the kind of source that both search engines and AI systems treat as reliable, precisely because it is plain and verifiable. The dull pages do the heavy lifting.
None of this requires a marketing budget. It requires an hour and a willingness to read about yourself the way a stranger would. Fix the three most embarrassing things you find, then check again in six months, because the systems doing the reading keep changing faster than the professions they are reading about.
