Which accounting firms does AI recommend in Toronto for a small business?

On 2026-09-26 we opened three clean sessions with gpt-5.4-mini, en-CA locale, browsing off, default settings, and asked: "Recommend an accounting firm in Toronto for a small business with ten employees. Name firms." No follow-up was given.

The prompt describes a small business on purpose. The question was whether the model would name the small and mid-sized practices that usually serve a ten-person company, or the large firms whose names it has seen most often.

Run 1 named MNP LLP, BDO Canada, Grant Thornton LLP, RSM Canada, KPMG Enterprise, Deloitte Private, RLB LLP, Doane Grant Thornton, Baker Tilly Toronto LLP and Crawford Smith & Swallow, listing Grant Thornton twice under its older and newer names, and offered to narrow to low-cost bookkeeping, payroll and tax, or a tech and startup focus.

Run 2 named MNP LLP, BDO Canada, Deloitte Private, RSM Canada, Grant Thornton LLP Canada, Baker Tilly Canada, KPMG Private Enterprise, Hogg Shain & Scheck, Segal GCSE LLP and Dale Matheson Carr-Hilton LaBonte LLP, and offered budget-friendly local firms, tax-focused firms, bookkeeping and payroll firms, or CPAs experienced with incorporated small businesses.

Run 3 named Doane Grant Thornton LLP, MNP LLP, Baker Tilly Canada, RLB LLP, ClearHouse LLP, Segal GCSE LLP, BDO Canada LLP and KPMG's small business service, and grouped them by more personalized service, broader resources and advisory, and a balanced small-business focus.

MNP LLP was in every run. BDO Canada, Deloitte Private, RSM Canada, Baker Tilly, RLB LLP and Segal GCSE LLP were each in two. Grant Thornton was in every run in some form, as Grant Thornton LLP, Grant Thornton LLP Canada, Doane Grant Thornton and Doane Grant Thornton LLP, which reflects a real rebrand and shows the model carrying both names at once. KPMG appeared in every run under three different labels for its private-company practice.

Six of the 16 names appeared once, and those six are the only mid-sized or local firms in the whole panel. The pattern is clear: for a ten-person business, the model's first instinct is the national brand.

The follow-up offers were the same in every run and tell you what the model thinks a small business actually wants: cheap bookkeeping, payroll and tax handled together, startup experience, and CPAs who know incorporated small businesses. Run 3 went further and sorted firms by personalized service versus breadth, which is the trade-off a small business owner is really weighing.

Runs 2 and 3 attached a short description to each firm, which we have not verified and do not repeat. None of the runs gave fees, ratings or review counts, and none cited a source, which is expected with browsing off.

This page records what one model said across three tries of one prompt on one date with browsing off. It does not evaluate any firm, and a name here or its absence is not a recommendation from SearchPod or the model. Small and mid-sized practices that serve ten-person businesses every day were almost entirely absent, which says something about the model's memory, not about those firms.

For a small Toronto practice, the finding is the gap. The model wants to sort by bookkeeping, payroll and tax bundles, startup experience and small-business CPAs, and a firm whose site says plainly that it does exactly that for companies of ten people, with the name written the same way everywhere and reviews that mention small business work, is giving the model something it currently lacks. SearchPod builds those pages for accounting clients and tracks which prompts name them.