All five phases are done. Competitive rank changes depending on which of the audit’s three methods measures it.

Full roster detail, including domain_relevance and the per-competitor gap tables, in keyword-brief.html §04 and §09.

Full-coverage motivation tagging (0 ambiguous rows, up from 30% coverage in the prior revision) reversed an earlier, partial-data reading that looked roughly sell/buy balanced. ATB’s presence rate is roughly even between the two sides — the buy-side pool is simply much larger. Detail in keyword-brief.html §06–07.

The single most-repeated case: “cpa firms for sale in california” (volume 70) is cited inside the AI Overview by four different competitors — go2bbi.com, accountingfirmsold.com, accountingpracticesales.com, and poegroupadvisors.com — each at AI Overview position 1, while ATB ranks organically at positions 4–60 across four different pages and is cited by none of them. The two leading citing domains are the same two zero-organic-overlap, client-named domains that lead breadth above — a domain invisible to keyword-overlap discovery can still be the domain an AI Overview cites on ATB’s own core sell-side terms. Source: gaps/gap-ai-overview.csv.

This is a wider pattern than the AI Overview gap alone — the same zero holds for local pack, featured snippets, and People Also Ask. Source: gaps/gap-serp-features.csv (592 rows).

The pattern already named in Phase 1 — most competitors’ keyword gap isn’t cleanly on-category — holds again at the page level. Sources: gaps/gap-keywords.csv, gaps/gap-pages.csv.

Method — the same judgment Phase 1 already established for all-keywords.csv, applied fresh to Phase 2’s larger gap sets (most of which were never run through Phase 1’s classification — a different, larger pull). Six ordered rules, first match wins, same discipline as the motivation rule set:

• 1. Brand-collision. The keyword textually matches a roster competitor’s name/domain root and ranks for ≤2 distinct domains across the whole gap-keywords.csv set — real ranking concentration, not just a text match, decides this (see QA below for why the text-only version of this rule was wrong on the first pass). → off-category.
• 2. Phase 1’s base gate, reapplied unchanged: on-category requires both a transaction term (sale, buy, merger, valuation, succession, broker, roll-up, financing, acquisition, transition, exchange) and an accounting-entity term (practice, firm, CPA, accounting, accountant, bookkeeping) in the same keyword. Anything short of both is off-category here — exactly Phase 1’s own dropped.csv treatment (off_category_no_transaction_entity_match), not a new judgment call.
• 3–5, applied only to keywords that passed rule 2 (both terms present): payroll content → off-category · audit-lead-gen (financial-statement/compliance audit services, a different service line) → off-category · generic tax-prep/compliance content (filing, IRS forms, tax calculators, crypto/foreign-exchange tax topics) → off-category.
• 6. Out-of-state / out-of-country regional-hub content. A non-CA US state name in the keyword itself, or the competitor’s own ranking URL is a non-CA state/Canada regional-hub page or an individually geo-tagged listing page (e.g. .../united-states/northeast/new-york/, .../canada/ontario/, or a listing slug decoding to “…, fl”) — verified from the URL’s own geography, the same standard already used for the accountingpracticesales.com New York hub page above. → off-category.
• Anything clearing all six rules → on-category.

Two genuinely close calls, resolved on evidence rather than forced either way, both caught in QA: “cpa sales practice” and “accounting practice sales [state]” variants text-match a competitor brand (cpasales.com, accountingpracticesales.com) but each ranks across 5–7 unrelated domains in the gap dataset, not just the one domain the brand belongs to — real ranking behavior overrules the text match, so these were kept on-category (or, for the state-tagged variants, correctly routed to rule 6 instead). An earlier pass of rule 1 used text-matching alone and wrongly excluded both as brand-collision; fixed by gating the rule on ranking concentration (≤2 domains) before accepting a text match, the same domain-diversity check now folded into the rule itself. prohorizons.com/pacific/ was kept on-category rather than flagged out-of-state despite the page-level region name, because Phase 1 already documented prohorizons.com as CA/OR/WA-focused and one of its own on-category gap keywords on that exact page is “ca practice sales” — real evidence of California relevance, not a forced call either way.

Off-category rule breakdown, for transparency — gap-keywords.csv: no transaction/entity match 6,505 · out-of-state/out-of-country regional hub 312 · brand-collision 22 · payroll 3 · generic tax-prep 2 · audit-lead-gen 0 (no keyword that cleared the base gate also matched this rule). gap-pages.csv: no transaction/entity match 1,208 · out-of-state/out-of-country 25 · brand-collision 8. New files: gaps/gap-keywords-on-category.csv (762 rows) and gaps/gap-pages-on-category.csv (87 rows), each carrying a new on_category_rule column stating which rule matched. The original gap-keywords.csv / gap-pages.csv are untouched — still the full/general reference, unchanged row-for-row.

Method: for each cluster, its keywords were intersected against the exact 602-row keyword set atbcal.com’s own domain/keywords pull returned (the same set Phase 2’s 2.3/2.4 sge with_link/without_link pulls were run against) to get “ATB ranks organically.” Of that intersection, each keyword’s own serp_features field (cross-validated against the saved sge without_link raw file — both methods agree exactly, 90 of 90 keywords) determined whether it triggers an AI Overview. Since ATB’s global sge with_link pull already returned a genuine, structurally confirmed empty set (0 of 602 rows, logged in RUN-LOG.md, Phase 2 step 2.4), every cluster subset of that same 602-row set is mathematically guaranteed to be 0 as well — this table reports that per cluster rather than leaving it assumed. 8 of 11 clusters have at least one AI-Overview-triggering keyword ATB ranks for; in all 8, the citing count is 0. Practice listings (11) and ATB’s own branded cluster (6) carry the most such keywords — the largest exposure, and still zero. Separately, and unrelated to citation: the two clusters with the highest cluster-wide AI Overview trigger rate (blog/news, succession/merger) are also where ATB’s organic presence is thinnest or entirely absent. Full method and the per-cluster script output logged in RUN-LOG.md; the un-cross-referenced 11-row table (cluster-wide share only) remains in competitive-map-summary.md §5, unchanged.

27 gaps were flagged and documented during collection (RUN-LOG.md, Groups A–E: stuck/`processing` SERP tasks, retried at least once each, never resolved). A further 9 gaps were found only during this consolidation: an audit of every raw file’s own embedded keyword against the filename it’s saved under found 12 files across two metros (Merced, San Luis Obispo–Paso Robles — both in Group E’s territory) holding a duplicate copy of a different keyword’s result, meaning the keyword that should have been there was never really captured. RUN-LOG.md’s own account of this incident caught 4 mislabeled task IDs and 2 dropped keywords at the time; the full content-vs-filename audit found the true extent was larger. All 36 gaps, tagged by discovery method with task IDs where known, are in 03 — Search/raw/known-gaps.csv. Manifest merge detail (115 colliding keys / 125 excess rows across the 6 source manifest files, mechanical duplicates — not related to the 9 content gaps above) is in search-summary.md.

Phase 2’s domain/competitors overlap metric (national, keyword-count-based) ranked accountingbroker.com #1 (198 common keywords with ATB) and go2bbi.com #2 (166), while accountingpracticesales.com and poegroupadvisors.com registered zero organic keyword overlap and were flagged “invisible to keyword-overlap discovery.” On this California-metro SERP breadth measure — a live capture of the 151 selected keywords across all 25 metros, not a domain-level API snapshot — those same two zero-overlap domains are the two most dominant in the dataset, and go2bbi.com falls to 10th with well under half their footprint. Two roster domains (greengrowthcpas.com, goodaccountants.com) show genuinely zero breadth on this specific keyword set — they never place inside the top-20 organic results for any of these 151 keywords, in any of the 25 metros — and a third (zbscpas.com) shows almost none (1 of 275, 0.4%).

Correction, found during Phase 5 verification. This chart originally reported prohorizons.com and cpasales.com as zero breadth too. Both actually rank in derived/breadth.csv under their www. subdomain rather than the bare domain — a domain-matching gap in the script that filtered the 3,000-domain field down to the 13-domain roster. Corrected here: prohorizons.com 225 of 275 (81.8%, 4th overall) and cpasales.com 174 of 275 (63.3%, 9th overall). search-summary.md and RUN-LOG.md carry the same correction.

ATB’s own breadth: 197 of 275 (71.6%), 6th of the 14 roster+ATB domains (tied with accountingfirmsold.com, behind prohorizons.com), 2,229 total organic appearances, split 1,323 sell-side / 830 buy-side / 76 tagged both. Source: derived/breadth.csv.

The 13 keywords where atbcal.com is cited: accounting firms for sale near me, accounting practice broker, brokerage accountant, brokerage accounting, sell cpa practice, selling a cpa practice, selling a tax practice, selling an accounting practice, selling cpa practice, selling tax practice, selling to accountants, tax firm for sale, tax practice for sale. Local pack: ATB appears in exactly 1 of 794 local-pack-bearing pairs (accounting practice broker × San Diego–Chula Vista–Carlsbad) — consistent with Phase 2’s finding that ATB has no published physical address. Source: derived/serp-features-domains.csv.

Source: raw/manifest-final.csv, page-level serp_features summary per pair.

ATB’s 2,229 organic appearances split roughly 59% sell-side / 37% buy-side / 3% both — a similar sell-lean to what Phase 1 found in raw search-demand volume, though Phase 1 found buy-side demand volume itself larger; which side ATB shows up for and which side has more total search volume are not the same question. derived/top-20-per-metro-cluster.csv holds the top 20 organic results (by rank_absolute) for each of the 275 metro×cluster combinations.

10th slot was deliberately left empty at Gate 2 (no directory/marketplace platform met the bar; see §p3 roster note) — this is 9 of 10 filled slots plus ATB itself, not a 10-competitor field. All 9 competitors beat ATB on every one of the three tracked metrics; the gap to the weakest of them (accountingfirmsold.com) is still 7× ATB’s share of voice. No prior-period baseline exists in this account for atbcal.com — this is the first data point on record, not a measured decline. Source: raw/leaderboard.json, raw/atbcal-overview-and-prompts.json.

Directly on ATB’s own tracked prompts (getAiSearchPromptsByTarget, limit=100 × 5 engines): ai-overview 0 of 100, ai-mode 1 of 100, chatgpt 1 of 100, perplexity 0 of 100, gemini 0 of 100 returned — 2 of 500 possible rows. The third instance above surfaced separately, inside the 60 competitor-anchored prompts pulled for §p4-who-instead below. Source: raw/atbcal-overview-and-prompts.json, ai-who-instead.csv.

The Accounting Practice Sales-anchored pull carries real off-category noise consistent with Phase 1’s already-documented branded-collision pattern — 8 of its 30 prompts (“funny tax facts,” “tax funny,” “fun tax,” “funny taxes,” “tax fun,” “funny way to say no,” “accountant marketing,” “best accounting podcasts”) are not accounting M&A queries at all, flagged offcategory_noise: y in the CSV rather than silently dropped. The Poe Group Advisors pull is cleaner — 0 of its 30 flagged off-category. Full 62-row detail, every prompt’s complete brand list and cited domains, in ai-who-instead.csv.

The mirror case: go2bbi.com ranks 2nd by Phase 2 overlap but falls to 10th of 14 in Phase 3 breadth and 7th of 10 in Phase 4’s leaderboard — the steepest decline of any Direct-tier competitor. The two zero-overlap domains also lead AI Overview citation in both Phase 2 (§p2-aio, 60% of citing rows) and Phase 3 (§p3-aio, the two largest citing domains in a much larger dataset). Full table and method in synthesis.html §02.

Even Phase 3’s largest number is small against the same dataset’s leaders — accountingpracticesales.com cited 1,070 times, poegroupadvisors.com 759, against ATB’s 137. Full detail in synthesis.html §03.

The demand pool is larger buy-side; ATB’s organic footprint and everything the audit found of its AI visibility sit on the sell side. Full detail in synthesis.html §04.

The 4th client-named domain, Green Growth CPAs, sits in Different Track — zero overlap (Phase 2) and zero breadth (Phase 3) — the only client-named domain not on the leaderboard, consistent with the client’s own description of it as an acquirer, not a broker. Full table in synthesis.html §05.