If your firm's best thinking mostly reaches people who already know you, it's probably missing from AI search too. Here's why that matters, and how to find out where you stand.
For most professional services firms, thought leadership has always had a reach problem. A lot of good thinking goes out and comes back to the same familiar audience of existing clients and alumni who already follow the firm.
That used to be a missed opportunity. As AI tools become a bigger part of how people research a problem, it's becoming a visibility problem as well.
We call the distance between what your firm knows and what the market actually sees the expertise gap. It's the subject of our new guide, and AI search is making that gap more important
AI search changes what it means to be visible
SEO still matters. But appearing in search results is no longer the whole job.
When someone asks an AI tool about an issue your firm knows well, the question isn’t only whether your website ranks. It’s whether your expertise is useful and relevant enough to be surfaced as part of the answer.
That means being easy to find is only part of it. AI tools also need to understand what your firm knows, associate you with the right areas of expertise and find credible evidence to support that association.
Some of that evidence can come from your own content. Some comes from elsewhere: media coverage, citations, expert commentary and other credible sources that reinforce what your firm is known for.
For professional services firms, that should play to a real strength. The expertise is usually already there. The problem is how much of it ever becomes visible beyond the firm and the audiences that already know it.
That’s the Expertise Gap. And as AI becomes another way people discover and assess expertise, closing it matters even more.
If AI visibility is the part you want to explore further, our GEO playbook looks at how it works, how to measure it and what firms can do to improve it.
Thought leadership reach now does two jobs
Reaching new audiences has always been one way thought leadership builds a firm's reputation with people who might one day become clients. Now there’s another reason to think about how far that expertise travels: the information available about your firm can also influence how it is represented in AI-generated answers.
That doesn’t mean changing what you publish to please an algorithm. Google’s own guidance on generative AI search still puts the emphasis on creating content people find unique and genuinely useful. For professional services firms, that should play to a real strength. The expertise is usually already there. The question is whether enough of the right people are seeing it.
And that’s why we think reach deserves to be measured as carefully as anything else in your marketing reporting.
Most firms can't yet measure how far their thinking travels
In our experience, most marketing leaders in professional services can tell you how many pieces the firm published and how many downloads they got. Far fewer can say how many of those readers were new to the firm.
That's understandable. Output is easy to count, and reach beyond existing relationships tends to fall between teams, so nobody quite owns the number. It does make the conversation with a board harder than it needs to be, especially when someone asks what all that investment in thought leadership is actually delivering.
How much of your best work reaches someone new?
The guide starts with this question, and it's worth asking before you read anything else.
Pick the piece your firm put the most into over the last year or two. Then ask yourself how many of the people who engaged with it didn't already know you. If the honest answer is "we don't really know", you're in good company. But not knowing is useful information in itself, because it tells you what you need to start measuring.
What's in the guide
The Expertise Gap turns that question into something you can measure. It includes an audit you can run in an afternoon, which gives you a single number to track and a benchmark to judge it against, based on what we've seen across firms of a similar size and shape.
It also looks at the organisational reasons why good thinking gets stuck, what happens when too much of a firm's visibility sits with a few people, how to make the case for change with your board and what to do when a partner says no.
It's free, and everything in it can be done in-house.
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