Be found when businesses look for help with tax and compliance.

Factual and educational content about your areas of practice is allowed; promotional claims are not. The two institutes set the limits differently.

Chartered accountants follow ICAI's website guidelines of 14 October 2020. (ICAI website guidelines, 2020) Items they bar include:

• Client names or logos, and testimonials with client names.
• Professional fees, or saying a service is free.
• Expressions such as "leading firm", "best firm" or "top firm", and other subjective claims.
• "Why choose us" sections, awards, gradings, media coverage and ISO certification.
• Videos other than educational videos.

Educational videos and professional updates are allowed.

Company secretaries follow the ICSI Guidelines for Advertisement by Company Secretaries, 2020, and ICSI's FAQ says websites fall within the definition of advertisement. (ICSI FAQ on advertisement guidelines, 2020) The same FAQ says there is no pre-approval by ICSI, so the responsibility sits with each member.

What fits both: a page per area of practice described factually, guides to deadlines and procedures, explanations of documents needed, and your location and contact details. These are also the pages businesses search for when a filing is due. Check new pages against your institute's current guidance before publishing.

In the weeks before filing deadlines and after major rule changes, because searches rise sharply and the firms that appear then win clients for the year. Income tax return season, GST return dates, TDS quarters, advance tax instalments and ROC annual filing dates each bring their own wave of searches.

The searches change with the calendar. Before an ITR deadline people search "income tax return filing help" and "itr for nri". After deadlines, "belated return" and notice-related searches rise. Around ROC dates, founders search "aoc 4 filing" and "mgt 7 filing for private company".

How to use weekly tracking well:

1. Publish or refresh the relevant guide well before the season, so it is indexed in time.
2. Track the season's searches weekly from a few weeks before the deadline.
3. Check whether Google's AI answer names a firm or only a filing platform.
4. Log enquiries by service and source, so next year you know which guides worked.

A common mistake is publishing a deadline guide in the last week, when it has no time to be found. Another is leaving last year's dates on the page, which hurts trust. Google Visibility shows your position for each search every week.

CA firms cannot show client names or logos, or testimonials naming clients, under ICAI's 2020 website guidelines. (ICAI website guidelines, 2020) The same guidelines bar mentioning awards, any grading given to the firm by an organisation, and media coverage. ICAI's advisory also refers to an earlier announcement that members should not share firm details for ranking purposes.

For company secretaries, ICSI's FAQ confirms websites count as advertisements under the 2020 guidelines, and members are responsible for compliance without ICSI pre-approval. (ICSI FAQ on advertisement guidelines, 2020) Read the full guidelines before adding any client references, and treat anything that looks like an endorsement with caution.

What builds trust instead, within the rules:

• The partners' names, qualifications and membership details, presented factually.
• Areas of practice and the kinds of entities you typically work with, described without naming them.
• Clear process pages: what happens in the first meeting, which documents to bring, how deadlines are managed.
• Educational articles that show expertise through the quality of the explanation.

Reviews that clients leave on third-party platforms are a grey area for both professions. Do not solicit them, do not quote them on your site, and ask your institute if unsure. Careful, factual pages are also what AI tools quote most reliably.

Mostly platforms and large firms, unless a smaller firm has clear pages about a specific service and place. Ask an AI tool "who can help with GST registration in Lucknow" and the answer often lists online filing services or directories, because they publish a lot of plain content and the AI has facts to quote.

There are many firms to choose from. ICAI had over 4 lakh members in February 2025. (ICAI, 2025) For an AI tool to name one, it needs pages stating what the firm does, for whom and where, without the promotional language the institutes bar anyway.

Pages that tend to help:

• One page per area of practice, such as statutory audit, GST, startup compliance or NRI taxation.
• Guides answering common questions in full, such as how a GST notice reply works.
• A plain location and contact page, consistent with your Google Business Profile.

Google says there are no special optimisations needed to appear in AI Overviews; pages simply need to be indexed and eligible for a snippet. (Google Search Central) The work is good, factual content, not tricks.

Because AI answers vary between runs, test the same questions repeatedly over weeks. Our article on why AI recommends your competitor explains the common causes.

Ask every new client how they found you, record the answer with the service they wanted, and compare it with the articles that rank for those searches. Website analytics alone will not tell you, because many people read a guide, leave, and call days later.

A workable routine for a small practice:

1. Add one question to your intake: "How did you first hear of us?"
2. Record the source, the service (for example GST notice reply or company incorporation) and the month.
3. When the engagement is confirmed, add the annual value.
4. Each month, set the list beside your tracked searches and see which guides match the services clients came for.

Patterns appear within a season. A firm might find that its "tds return filing services" page brings steady business clients, while a popular tax-saving article brings readers who never engage.

Two cautions. Keep client identities out of any marketing log; the service, source and value are enough. And do not use the results to publish client counts or success claims, which ICAI's guidelines would not allow on a CA firm's website. (ICAI website guidelines, 2020)

The enquiries and revenue report puts this next to your weekly Google and AI visibility.