We Audited 19 Established Consulting Firms for AI Visibility. Here Is What We Found.

Why we audited consulting firms

Consulting runs on relationships. Partners are known to the people who hire them, work arrives by referral, and thought leadership does the introducing. That makes it easy to assume that a strong reputation is enough.

But the buyer is changing. A CEO or CFO with a stalled program, a deal to integrate or a board mandate increasingly describes the situation to an AI assistant before they know any firm's name. If the assistant answers with a shortlist, the firms on it get the first call. We wanted to know who is on that shortlist, and whether established firms are on it at all.

How the audit works

The tool reads each firm's homepage, classifies it in the words a buyer would use, writes five buyer-intent queries (one local-style, two category, one problem-first, one comparison) and runs each as a live, grounded AI search with the firm's own name left out. It is one run, five queries per firm, on one day. AI answers change between runs, so read every score as a snapshot. The full method is in our audit documentation, and all twelve industry audits are on our AI visibility research page.

A firm is either in the answer or it is not.

The distribution: nobody at zero, almost nobody at the top

Boston Consulting Group was the only firm named on all five queries. Four firms reached 80%: Guidehouse, NERA, Oliver Wyman and Simon-Kucher. Five more reached 60%, including Bain & Company and FTI Consulting.

The lower half is just as telling. Nine firms were named in two of five queries or fewer. Four firms, Ankura, Sia, Stout and West Monroe, were named once. These are established firms with real client work. Being well known among buyers did not make them the answer.

What kind of question loses the most

Comparison queries did best, naming a firm in 14 of 19 cases (73.7%). That fits what we saw in the answers: ranking and roundup pages tend to list the same recognizable names.

Problem-first queries did worst, at 8 of 19 (42.1%). This is the query that matters most in consulting, because the buyer starts from a trigger, not a firm type. The assistant gets a sentence like "we need help transforming our business operations, who should we hire" and answers with a roundup of generalist brands plus a couple of talent marketplaces.

Here is how the AI itself described one such result for ZS, a firm with real scale:

"ZS did not appear in any of these results."

The same firm was named on a narrower query, "management consulting firms specializing in digital transformation", where one listing described it as combining data, analytics and AI. Specific questions favor specific firms.

Who got named instead

McKinsey appeared in 37 of 95 answers, close to four in ten, despite being one of the four sites we could not scan. It does not need to be readable to our crawler to be the default answer. Deloitte appeared in 33 and Bain in 25.

Name variants split some counts. Deloitte Consulting was named in another 8, and BCG appeared under two other spellings, so the real share for these brands is higher than the single names above. The point holds either way: the answer defaults to the biggest brand in the category.

Compass Lexecon is the exception that proves the pattern. It was named in 9 answers, every one of them for an economic or litigation consulting firm, where the question itself narrows the field. In that corner of the market, the named alternatives were specialists, not generalists.

Where the answers came from

This is the odd part of the consulting results. The top sources are not analysts or trade bodies. Four of them, Management Consulted, CaseBasix, Hacking the Case Interview and IGotAnOffer, are consulting-careers and case-interview preparation sites. Together they supplied 94 of 760 citations, 12.4% of the total. They publish constant rankings of "top consulting firms" for candidates, and AI treats those rankings as answers to buyers.

That matters because those lists are written for job seekers. They reflect prestige and hiring, not the specialty a CFO needs. A firm that is excellent for a specific buyer problem and invisible in those lists is, to AI, a firm that is not there.

Other recurring sources were more useful to buyers: Consultancy.org rankings by area of expertise, Forbes lists of best management consulting firms, Vault, the Consultport marketplace and, for economic and litigation consulting, the Law.com expert directory.

Only seven of the 19 firms had a single own-site page cited at all: Analysis Group, Cornerstone Research, Charles River Associates, Guidehouse, NERA, Protiviti and Simon-Kucher. And in seven of those eight citations, the page was a specific practice, industry or service page, such as antitrust and competition, mergers and acquisitions, health, or digital transformation. Only one was a homepage.

So the pages that earned a citation were narrow and topical. A firm that describes itself once on a homepage gives AI very little to quote.

Is this better or worse than our earlier audit?

Our earlier combined audit, We ran a real AI visibility audit on 29 B2B companies, found management consulting averaging 17%. It covered six firms: APCO (40%), Charles River Associates (20%), ghSMART (20%), AlixPartners (20%), Cadmus (0%) and ZS (0%). This audit averages 52.6% on 19 firms. Read quickly, it looks as if consulting improved. We do not think that is what happened, for four reasons.

Different firms. Only Charles River Associates and ZS appear in both. This sample includes global brands, such as Boston Consulting Group (100%), Oliver Wyman (80%) and Bain & Company (60%). Those three averaged 80%. The other 16 averaged 47.5%. The earlier sample was narrower and more specialist, including public affairs, executive assessment and government technology.

Different sample size. An average of six is fragile. ZS alone moving from 0% to 40% would shift that earlier average by about seven points. Nineteen firms is steadier, but still small.

Run-to-run noise. The two firms in both audits changed. Charles River Associates went from 20% to 40%, and ZS from 0% to 40%. The tool writes new queries from each homepage on each run, and AI answers change from day to day. A firm's single score is a sample, not a fixed property. That includes the 0% we reported for ZS before.

Giants versus boutiques. The sample here leans toward large, well-known firms, which is the group AI tends to name. Excluding just BCG and Bain, the average is still 49.4%, so it is not two outliers, but this sample has no truly small boutiques either.

The honest reading is that both audits point the same way on the pattern that matters: when a firm is missing, the same few global brands fill the gap. We would not say consulting visibility has risen or fallen on this evidence, and we would treat both averages as snapshots.

The firms we could not scan

We tried 23 firms and scanned 19. Four could not be audited: Alvarez & Marsal, Berkeley Research Group, Kearney and McKinsey & Company. Our crawler was shown an error or a verification page instead of the homepage. Bot protection is reasonable for firms handling sensitive client data, but we cannot tell from outside whether it also stops the crawlers AI assistants use. If it does, the firm's own content is not being read at all.

What to do with this, if you run a consultancy

1. Be specific on every page. State your sector, client type and the problem you solve. "Operations consulting for PE-backed manufacturers" is easy to place. "Helping leaders navigate complexity" is not. The own-site pages that were cited were narrow practice pages.
2. Name and define your methods. A named framework with its own page is an entity AI can attach to your firm. Use the same name everywhere.
3. Publish research with a method. Original data, openly published and attributed, is the asset others cannot copy. State the source and the limits.
4. Make partner profiles real pages. Buyers hire people. Each partner should have a profile with their sector, work and published thinking, written consistently.
5. Check the third-party sources. Review how your firm is described on Consultancy.org, Forbes lists, Vault, expert directories and Wikipedia if you have an entry. Inconsistent or missing entries make you hard to place.
6. Answer the trigger questions. Write what a transformation consultant does, how to choose a strategy firm, and when a boutique beats a Big Four team. Be honest where a larger firm is the better fit.
7. Substantiate your case studies. Anonymize or get written permission, and only state results you can back up.
8. Check whether your site can be read. Test what your security layer shows a plain automated visitor.
9. Re-test regularly. AI answers change, so a single score tells you little.

If you want this done as a program, that is what our AEO, GEO and SEO service for consulting firms is built for. For the outbound side of a consultancy, our guide on running outbound as a consultant covers the relationship-first approach.

Every firm we audited

Not scanned (error or verification page): Alvarez & Marsal, Berkeley Research Group, Kearney, McKinsey & Company.

Check your own number

Every firm above was run through the same tool below. It takes about ninety seconds, and your firm's name is never in the query.

Do AI assistants recommend you?

Five buyer-style queries for your category, run through live AI search, show who gets named instead of you. Takes about ninety seconds.

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Free. The full report arrives by email so the tab can close.

Methodology and honest limitations

What we did. On October 3, 2026 we ran the live audit tool that powers our free checker against 23 established consulting firms: one run, five queries per firm, visibility measurement only. The step-by-step method is in our audit documentation. A firm that disputes its result can ask us to re-run it.

The sample. We chose real, identifiable management, strategy, risk, technology and economic consulting firms. It is a sample we picked, not a random one and not a census. It mixes global brands with mid-size specialists, includes four economic and litigation consulting firms and a valuation and transaction advisory firm, and has no small boutiques. That likely flatters the average for boutiques. A firm's score also depends on how our classifier read its homepage, and several firms were classified as generic management consulting, which pulls their queries toward generalist rankings.

What it does not cover. Only the homepage was read, so a firm with a thin homepage and strong inner pages may be undercounted. Five queries per firm is a small sample of real buyer language, and the two-query category count means some figures are out of 38 rather than 19. Results come from one run on one day, and AI answers change over time. We did not test whether any firm pays for ranking or directory placement. We counted citations by exact domain, so a firm using a separate domain for research or content would register as third party. We classified the four interview-preparation sites by their purpose, not by an external list.

On claims and confidentiality. Nothing here is legal advice. Advertising, client confidentiality and professional rules vary by country, field and engagement terms.

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Related reading

• AEO, GEO and SEO for consulting firms
• We ran a real AI visibility audit on 29 B2B companies
• How to run outbound as a consultant
• How to get cited in ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews
• What is answer engine optimization (AEO)? The complete guide
• AI visibility research: every audit in one place