Benchmark
How UK accountancy firms sound
Thirty-one firms, six pages each. Better than the reputation, and nothing lands.
Thirty-one UK accountancy firms, read by the same code on the same day, six pages each. The sector writes better than its reputation. It also cannot finish a sentence early, and twenty of the thirty-one share a favourite word.
What was measured
Six pages a firm, nobody named
Forty-two firms were listed, from the national networks down to the regional practices and two of the online services for sole traders. Nine of them, the largest, block automated readers and are not here; two more were unreachable on the day. That leaves thirty-one, which is the market below the Big Four rather than the whole of it, and it is said here so nobody has to work it out.
Each firm was read the way a Wordprint reads a customer: the homepage, then up to five of its own about, story and services pages, measured together as one body of prose. The median firm gave 3,400 words. Everything below comes from the published method, which scores four things (own words, rhythm, landing and evidence) and reports eighteen more. No firm is named, because the point is the sector, and no page text was kept, because none was needed.
Same code, same day, same answer next Tuesday.
The headline
A median of 72, and one firm at 100
The sector averages 72.3 out of 100 and the median firm scores 71.7. The bottom tenth sits at 61; the top tenth clears 86. Two firms are in the established band, at 93 and 100, and fifteen more sit in the seventies and eighties. Fourteen are in the middle band, where a voice exists and is buried, and not one firm falls below 40.
That is a good sector. Of the two measured so far it is the better one by fifteen points, and the firm at 100 is the first site in this whole exercise to clear every measure at once. Accountants are accused of writing like accountants, and on the evidence they write like people who have to be precise for a living, which turns out to be an asset. Sentences average eighteen words. Rhythm, the variance in sentence length, has a median of 8.8, comfortably inside the range real voices measured at, and no firm at all falls below the flat line of six.
Evidence is where the sector is strongest. The median firm puts 345 figures, dates, names or results into every ten thousand words, and not one of the thirty-one is short of them. A profession that counts for a living shows its working, and a buyer can feel the difference from a sector that asks to be trusted.
The failure
Nothing lands: twenty-two firms out of thirty-one
The commonest failure is not vocabulary. It is that nothing lands. Landing is the share of sentences at five words or fewer, the ones that carry the point after the long sentence has done the explaining. Real voices measured between 15% and 29%. The median accountancy firm manages 3.8%. Twenty-two of thirty-one are under 8%, and the bottom tenth is under 1%, which is a page with no short sentence on it anywhere.
It is the easiest fault on the list to fix and the hardest to notice from inside. Every sentence is a careful, qualified eighteen words, because that is how a letter to a client is written, and the website inherited the habit. The fix is not to write shorter. It is to let one sentence in six be short, and to put it where the argument turns. Fees are fixed. That is the whole point. Say so.
The sector explains beautifully and never stops to say the thing.
The shared phrasebook
The word twenty of thirty-one firms share
Borrowed vocabulary is the second failure, and a milder one than in most sectors: nine firms of thirty-one cross the line of sixty phrasebook terms per ten thousand words, and the median is 42. What the count does show is how much of the sector reaches for the same few words. These are the phrases used by a fifth or more of the firms measured, counted as firms rather than occurrences.
| Phrase | Firms using it |
|---|---|
| journey | 20 of 31 |
| excellence | 16 of 31 |
| seamless | 15 of 31 |
| landscape | 14 of 31 |
| empower | 13 of 31 |
| robust | 12 of 31 |
| unlock | 10 of 31 |
| pragmatic | 10 of 31 |
| trusted partner | 10 of 31 |
| at the heart of | 9 of 31 |
| streamline | 9 of 31 |
None of these is wrong on its own. All of them together are what a buyer reads on three shortlisted sites in one afternoon, and the buyer does not remember which firm said which. The firm at 100 uses almost none of them, and it is not because it found better adjectives. It describes what it does.
Who is speaking
The firm, on twenty-eight sites out of thirty-one
The median firm says "we" and "our" 513 times in every ten thousand words and "you" and "your" 226 times. On twenty-eight of the thirty-one sites the firm outnumbers the client. Seven sites let a person speak in the first person at all, and those are largely the smaller practices, where the partner's name is on the door and the writing knows it.
This is a measurement, not a rule. A firm that has decided to speak as a firm is entitled to. What the count tells you is that the decision has been made the same way almost everywhere, so a practice that let a partner write as "I" on its about page would be doing something twenty-four of its competitors are not.
Long dashes, which every AI writing tool reaches for by default, barely feature: sixteen firms use one somewhere, and the median rate is under one per ten thousand words. Whatever the sector is doing, it is mostly still typing its own pages.
What the top decile does
Three habits that separate 86 from 72
- It says what the firm does, not what it values. The top firms describe services, sectors and fees in plain nouns. The middle describes commitment, partnership and approach, which is the phrasebook by another route.
- It lands. The top tenth puts one sentence in seven at five words or fewer. The bottom tenth does it once in two hundred.
- It keeps the evidence and cuts the reassurance. Figures per ten thousand words run to 640 at the top decile against 136 at the bottom, and the top firms spend fewer words telling the reader they can be trusted, because the figures are doing it.
None of that needs a rebrand. It needs a page read aloud, a red pen for every sentence that could sit on a competitor's site unchanged, and permission for one sentence in six to stop early.
Limits
What this benchmark is not
It is not a ranking of firms, and no firm is named here or in the data behind it, which stores numbers only. It is not a quality judgement: the score cannot tell whether the advice on a page is right. It does not know or care whether a page was typed by a partner or drafted in ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot or Gemini, and neither does the reader. And the largest firms are absent by their own choice, so a measured sector is the sector that lets itself be read.
A higher score is not a bigger practice. What the number says is how hard it is for a buyer to tell one firm from the next by how it writes, and in accountancy the honest answer is: harder than the writing deserves, for want of a short sentence.
Measured 3 September 2026. Thirty-one firms, six pages each, numbers only.
Where does your firm sit?
Paste a page you have published into the free test and get the same four measures in about a minute, with the sector's phrasebook marked and the sentences that are genuinely yours quoted back. A Wordprint turns the result into rules the whole practice, and the tools it drafts in, can follow.
Written by Ian, with Claude assisting, and scored by the smarticulate method at 94.8 out of 100 before it went up. Ian spent twenty-odd years turning thinking, his own and other people's, into something a board would act on, and built smarticulate to put numbers on it. His practice is ConsultingPartner.io: enterprise experience, right-sized. Who is he? →
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