A Mushin benchmark · October 2026 · Full findings
How 4,687 Sydney accounting firms look to a new client online
Researched and published by Mushin
Websites, automation and AI for Australian accounting firms
Most new clients still come by referral or word of mouth. Many will look the firm up before they call.
Seven in 10 Australian small businesses found their current accountant through a referral or word of mouth (Intuit QuickBooks, SMB Navigator Report 2025).
We looked at the 4,687 Greater Sydney accounting practices on the Tax Practitioners Board register that meet our definition, read their websites and email settings, and looked up a random sample on Google Maps. No firm is named. The short version is the summary.
1 · On Google
78%
of rated firms have 4.5 stars or more. The review count is what tells them apart.
47%
of sampled firms we couldn't find on Google Maps under their registered name
Share of the 481 firms found with review data.
Share of the 481 firms found with review data.
Share of firms found on Google Maps
Number of Google reviews
2 · No working website
Share of practices, with the number of firms.
2,129 practices have a website we could tie to the firm through its address, tax agent number or name on the site. Some practices share one, so that is 2,041 distinct sites. If we couldn’t tie a site to a firm, we didn’t score it. Counting the firms with no website at all takes two estimates. In the random sample we looked up on Google Maps, where a listing’s website link catches sites our search missed, 40% have no working website. Working from the whole list gives 45%. Our search found no website for 37% of practices. A hand check showed it had missed a site for one in eight of those, which brings the 37% down to about 32%. Then add the 2% whose website is broken, and most of the 14% with a possible website, because about three in four of those turned out not to be the firm’s.
The 89 practices whose business name is a person’s name are in the study but weren’t searched, to keep personal names off search services. Some practices on the register are one-person companies that may not want new clients.
No website yet
3 · News, articles and search
4 in 10
firm websites have a news or articles page with posts on it
4 in 10
dated news pages have had no new post in the past year
“Check out the largest castles by country”
On 12 Sydney firms’ sites, posted September 2026
Some firms fill their news page from a content service, so the same posts appear on many firms’ sites.
This one is a single embedded video, an animated ranking of castles from a YouTube channel that makes country-by-country ranking videos. Nothing in it is about tax, accounting or the firm.
Google generally shows one copy of a page and leaves out the rest. Copies like this do little for any of these firms in search.
Some clients now ask ChatGPT as well as Google. In a Pew Research study of US users, Google searches that showed an AI summary led to a click on a result about half as often as searches that didn’t (2025). Of the firm sites whose settings file we could read, fewer than 1% tell ChatGPT’s or Perplexity’s search to stay away.
4 · First look on a phone
12%
still show a copyright year of 2022 or earlier
1 in 3
show something out of date, such as an old copyright year, a COVID notice or a stale news page
Typical first lines, in our words. Only the last names a type of client.
5 · Speed on a phone
For the median site, each kind of file's share of the download.
The median home page asks a phone to download 1.8 MB. The page’s own HTML, its words and structure, is 2% of that. The rest is images, code and fonts. Google’s own research on mobile sites, mostly shops and publishers in 2016 and 2017, found people leave sooner the longer a page takes to load.
7%
show their main content in under 2.5 seconds, Google's mark for a good page
17%
have pages that move about while loading, on Google's layout-shift measure
* A simulated mid-range phone on a slow 4G connection, the same for every site. Real visits on a new phone or good wifi are faster. See the notes.
6 · Getting in touch
Share of firm websites. Booking is an estimate (see section 12).
A call link works on every phone. A plain number written on the page works on an iPhone, which makes most numbers tappable on its own, but not on most Android phones.
We didn't send any enquiries or time any replies.
7 · Prices and documents
Estimates (see section 12).
8 · Email security
Share of 2,039 domains.
“Monitoring only” tells providers to deliver the mail anyway. It’s the right first step, and a third of these domains have stopped there. We read the setting on the domains of the 2,039 firm websites, which most firms also use for email. DMARC doesn’t cover a fake sent from a look-alike domain.
9 · By region
| Region | Practices | Website tied to firm | Within 4 s on a phone | Call link on first screen | DMARC enforced | Median Google reviews |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| City and CBD fringe | 796 | 55% | 19% | 19% | 26% | 1 |
| Inner west, east and south Sydney | 346 | 46% | 26% | 18% | 19% | 3 |
| North Shore, northern beaches and Ryde | 1,082 | 43% | 27% | 23% | 22% | 2 |
| Parramatta, the Hills and Blacktown | 1,114 | 45% | 22% | 26% | 19% | 3 |
| South-west, Bankstown and Canterbury | 701 | 42% | 24% | 23% | 16% | 3 |
| St George and Sutherland | 477 | 46% | 27% | 21% | 25% | 5 |
| Penrith and outer west | 171 | 41% | 26% | 24% | 20% | 4 |
Regions by postcode. Website tied to firm is a share of practices; the next three are shares of firm websites and their domains; median reviews are for the sampled firms found on Google Maps, from 17 firms in Penrith to 123 in Parramatta, so read small differences loosely.
10 · The checks
A firm’s scorecard has 8 checks, each counting the same, and 3 choices that are up to the firm and get no pass or fail.
| Checks | Share of | Pass | Margin | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 10 or more Google reviews | firms found on Google Maps (481) | 27% | ±4 |
| 2 | A Google review in the past 12 months (estimated) | firms found on Google Maps (481) | 28% | ±9 |
| 3 | The listing links to the firm's own website | firms found on Google Maps (481) | 79% | ±4 |
| 4 | Nothing out of date (old copyright year, dead links, COVID-era notices, stale news) | firm websites (1,950) | 65% | ±13 |
| 5 | Main content shows within 4 seconds on Google’s phone test | firm websites timed (1,986) | 24% | – |
| 6 | A phone number set up as a call link on the first screen | firm websites (1,950) | 22% | – |
| 7 | Links to a client portal or secure upload | firm websites (1,950) | 17% | ±8 |
| 8 | DMARC enforced on the firm’s website domain | website domains (2,039) | 21% | – |
| Choices (no pass or fail) | Share of | Pass | Margin | |
| 9 | First screen names a type of client or industry | firm websites (1,950) | 23% | ±8 |
| 10 | Shows prices or fees | firm websites (1,950) | 18% | ±7 |
| 11 | Book a time online | firm websites (1,950) | 12% | ±5 |
Margin: how far an estimate could be out, 19 times in 20. A dash means a count read from every site, with nothing estimated.
Scorecard
11 · What to do
73% of firms we found on Google Maps have fewer than 10 reviews.
78% of firm websites have no call link on the first screen.
79% of firm website domains don’t tell mail providers to reject or quarantine fakes.
About 4 in 10 dated news pages have had nothing new in a year.
We build and look after websites for accounting firms. A firm’s scorecard shows which of these to do first. Websites for accounting firms · Monthly website care
12 · Method
The list comes from the Tax Practitioners Board’s public register. We took every registered tax agent in Greater Sydney that is a company or trades under a business name, and merged registrations that belong to the same practice. Franchises, networks, the large national firms, BAS agents, people trading under their own name, and register entries that aren’t accounting practices are left out. That leaves 4,687 practices.
We read each firm's website the way a phone shows it, about ten pages per site, and looked up a random sample of firms on Google Maps. Speed is Google's PageSpeed test. Email security is read from the public settings on each firm's website domain.
Of the 4,687 practices, 2,129 have a website we could tie to the firm. They share 2,041 distinct sites: 2,039 had their email settings read, 1,986 were speed-tested and 1,950 could be read in full. On Google Maps we looked up 956 firms at random and found 502, 481 of them with review data.
Each website figure was checked against a second, slower reading of a fresh random sample of 65 sites, in which AI reviewers read each site in full and opened the live pages. We corrected the figures for the errors they found. They are estimates, and the table of checks gives each one’s margin. Simple counts, such as whether a site shows a phone number, weren’t corrected. Sites were read on 6 and 7 October 2026.
A news page here is any page reached from the menu or the home page that lists posts, whatever it’s called. We dated each from its newest post, using the site’s feed or the date published on the posts. Pages with no dates anywhere aren’t counted either way.
We sell websites, automation and AI to accounting firms, so we have an interest in these findings.
13 · Notes and sources