Accounting and Tax Software: 3 of 5 Name No AI Company

3 of 5 named accounting and tax software products name no AI company in their own robots.txt. 2 of 5 name any AI company. 1 of 5 blocks any AI company. All 5 returned a readable file on September 1, 2026, so this shelf has 0 unreadable hosts.

Five products are not an industry. Every figure on this page is about Drake Tax, SafeSend, SmartVault, TaxDome, and Karbon only. The 40% share that names any AI company is a share of those five, not a rate for accounting software, its buyers, or the web.

A robots.txt file is a plain-text request a site publishes about crawling. It is not a licence and not an API policy. The parent census of 30 named products is the series page.

3 of 5 accounting and tax products name no AI company.

Thirty named vertical business-software products, five in each of six industries (Insurance agency software; Accounting and tax software; Healthcare practice software; Legal practice software; Property and construction software; Field service software), asked one question each: what does the robots.txt you publish say about 11 named AI crawlers from 6 AI companies.

The cohort is US Tech Automations’ own named list, written out in the builder, and is not a ranking, a sample, or anything derived from another publisher’s data.

Thirty named companies are not an industry. Nothing here is representative of insurance software, accounting software, or the web, and no figure may be presented as a rate for anything wider than these thirty. A vendor that never names an AI company has NOT allowed it — unmentioned is its own answer and must never be reported as allowed.

A vendor whose address returned an HTML page instead of a plain-text file has not answered at all; it is unknown, never open. robots.txt is a request about crawling, not a licence and not permission to use content, and a vendor blocking a crawler is not evidence about its API, its integrations, or its product. This edition is one reading on one day; a change between editions is a change in what the vendor published, not proof of intent.

Five Named Products Are Not a Market

The ask on this shelf is the same as the rest of the census: 11 crawler names from 6 AI companies — GPTBot, ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, Claude-User, Claude-SearchBot, Google-Extended, PerplexityBot, Perplexity-User, CCBot, and Applebot-Extended — read from each product’s own file.

Blocked means the product names that AI company and the group contains a bare Disallow: /. Allowed means the product names that company and does not shut the whole site to it. Unmentioned means the product has never named that company. Unmentioned is not allowed. None of these five is unreadable.

The distinctive fact is the split inside the five, not a blended “accounting” rate. Three files — SafeSend, SmartVault, TaxDome — leave all 11 names unmentioned. Drake Tax names most of the list without a site-wide shutoff. Karbon is the blocker row on this shelf and, in the 30-company cohort, sits inside the cohort-wide count of 1 vendor blocking any AI company.

3 of 5 named accounting and tax products leave all 11 crawler names unmentioned.

1 of 5 named accounting and tax products blocks any AI company.

Each Accounting and Tax File, Row by Row

Closed-to-everyone on every row is no. None of these five uses a wildcard site-wide shutoff. That still does not convert an unmentioned token into an allow.

Drake Tax

Drake Tax published a readable robots.txt. It blocked 0 of the 11 names, allowed 9, and left 2 unmentioned. It declared 2 sitemaps. For a tax-firm operations manager, this is the file that actually discusses AI crawlers without a site-wide shutoff. It is still only a crawl request. It says nothing about Drake Tax’s API, desktop tools, or e-file pipeline.

SafeSend

SafeSend published a readable robots.txt and named none of the 11 crawlers: blocked 0, allowed 0, unmentioned 11. It declared 0 sitemaps. Silence here is the same answer as SmartVault and TaxDome. It is not permission for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, or anyone else on the list.

SmartVault

SmartVault published a readable robots.txt. Blocked 0, allowed 0, unmentioned 11. It declared 1 sitemap. A document-vault vendor that never names an AI company has not invited an assistant to learn its help center. It has also not published a block. The honest word is unmentioned.

TaxDome

TaxDome published a readable robots.txt. Blocked 0, allowed 0, unmentioned 11. It declared 1 sitemap. Practice-management pages that an assistant cannot be told about in robots.txt are not therefore secret, and they are not therefore open. The file simply does not discuss the 11 tokens.

Karbon

Karbon published a readable robots.txt. It blocked 3 names, allowed 8, and left 0 unmentioned. It declared 3 sitemaps. This is the only row on the shelf — and the blocker counted in the 30-company cohort’s 1 vendor blocking any AI company — that both names the full ask and shuts the door on part of it. A block is still not evidence about Karbon’s product, pricing, or partner API.

2 of 5 named products on this shelf name any AI company.

How This Shelf Compares Inside the Cohort

The comparison uses the sealed industry rows from the 30-company cohort, not a wider accounting market. Field service software is the naming outlier at 60% of its five. This accounting and tax software shelf is next at 40% of its five, and it is the only one of the 6 industries whose five include a blocker.

Across the 30-company cohort, 26 vendors answered and 21 of those 26 named no AI company — 80.8% of the 26, cohort of 30. This shelf does not match that silence: 3 of its 5 are silent, but 2 of 5 name crawlers. The field service software cut is the other naming shelf. The insurance agency software cut is a 0% naming row among the files that answered.

Do not read 40% of five as “accounting software is more open than legal software.” Legal practice software’s 0 of 5 is five other named products. Different names, same question, same day.

How These Five Addresses Were Read

Read from each vendor’s own published robots.txt on September 1, 2026 as USTA-DataResearch. Method notes live on the research index. Figures on this page are copied from the sealed snapshot; nothing is estimated, modeled, or extrapolated.

Thirty named vertical business-software products, five in each of six industries (Insurance agency software; Accounting and tax software; Healthcare practice software; Legal practice software; Property and construction software; Field service software), asked one question each: what does the robots.txt you publish say about 11 named AI crawlers from 6 AI companies. The cohort is US Tech Automations’ own named list, written out in the builder, and is not a ranking, a sample, or anything derived from another publisher’s data.

Thirty named companies are not an industry. Nothing here is representative of insurance software, accounting software, or the web, and no figure may be presented as a rate for anything wider than these thirty. A vendor that never names an AI company has NOT allowed it — unmentioned is its own answer and must never be reported as allowed.

A vendor whose address returned an HTML page instead of a plain-text file has not answered at all; it is unknown, never open. robots.txt is a request about crawling, not a licence and not permission to use content, and a vendor blocking a crawler is not evidence about its API, its integrations, or its product. This edition is one reading on one day; a change between editions is a change in what the vendor published, not proof of intent.

A related but different cohort is the Accounting sites crawler audit. That page is not these five products. Do not blend the two denominators.

1. List the five. Drake Tax, SafeSend, SmartVault, TaxDome, Karbon — the accounting and tax software row in the builder.

2. Read each file. Score blocked, allowed, or unmentioned for 11 tokens from 6 AI companies. All 5 produced a plain-text file, so 0 are unknown.

3. Keep the five in the sentence. Publish 3 of 5, 2 of 5, 1 of 5, and 40% of the five. Never promote those counts into an industry rate.

1 of 5 named accounting and tax products blocks any AI company.

Key Takeaways

• 5 of 5 accounting and tax products published a readable robots.txt.

• 3 of 5 name no AI company; unmentioned is not allowed.

• 2 of 5 name any AI company — a 40% share of the five.

• 1 of 5 blocks any AI company: Karbon blocked 3 names.

• Drake Tax allowed 9 names and left 2 unmentioned.

• SafeSend, SmartVault, and TaxDome each left 11 names unmentioned.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Who inside an accounting firm should care about these five files?
A: A tax-firm operations manager or IT lead whose staff already asks an assistant about Drake Tax, Karbon, TaxDome, SmartVault, or SafeSend. The file decides what that assistant is requested to read. It does not decide whether your firm may use the product.

Q: Are 3 of 5 silent files an accounting-software rate?
A: No. 3 of 5 is SafeSend, SmartVault, and TaxDome. Five named products are not an industry. The 40% naming share is of those five, on September 1, 2026, and must stay attached to that denominator.

Q: What is different about Karbon and Drake Tax on this shelf?
A: Karbon blocked 3 names, allowed 8, and left 0 unmentioned. Drake Tax blocked 0, allowed 9, and left 2 unmentioned. Both named AI companies. Only Karbon blocked any. Neither row is an API policy.

Q: Did any of these five fail to publish a file?
A: No. Vendors answered is 5, vendors unreadable is 0. Every share on this page is over all 5 asked. That is not true of every industry row in the 30-company cohort.

Q: Does unmentioned mean an assistant can train on the help center?
A: No. Unmentioned means the file never named that crawler. It is not permission and it is not a block. SafeSend, SmartVault, and TaxDome each have unmentioned 11. That is silence.

Put AI-Access Data to Work

A tax-firm operations manager should put Drake Tax, Karbon, TaxDome, SmartVault, and SafeSend on a weekly robots.txt watch. The trigger is a change to Karbon’s blocked count of 3, a change to Drake Tax’s allowed count of 9, or the first named group on a file that today leaves 11 names unmentioned.

A CPA-firm marketing lead trying to get practice-management answers out of an assistant should treat SafeSend, SmartVault, and TaxDome as currently unpublished on the 11 tokens, and should re-check those three files whenever the vendor ships a help-center redesign.

A retrieval-pipeline engineer wiring tax-document workflows should record Karbon as the shelf’s only blocker row and should alert if that blocked count of 3 moves, rather than assuming a one-time policy.

US Tech Automations automates those re-reads and routes a file change into an agentic workflow. The company homepage is the public door.

Source: US Tech Automations Research — computed from the sealed vendor AI-access snapshot, September 1, 2026.