We Audited 22 Wealth Management and Advisory Sites for AI Visibility

Why we audited financial advisors

Wealth management is a deeply trust-dependent purchase. People hand over savings, a business sale or an inheritance, and they usually do it on a referral from an accountant, an attorney or a friend. Reputation and relationships matter, and the firms in this audit have plenty of both.

But a growing number of people now check privately first. They ask an AI assistant what a fiduciary is, what an advisor costs, or who handles a business sale, and they read the names that come back. So we asked a plain question. When a buyer asks without naming a firm, which wealth firms get named, and is being large and established enough?

How the audit works

The tool reads each firm's homepage, classifies it in the words a client 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 scored above 60%

No firm was named in four or five of its five queries. The best three, Ameriprise Financial, Creative Planning and Mariner, reached 60%. Six firms, including Bernstein, Cerity Partners and Hightower Advisors, were not named in a single query.

These are not obscure practices. They are some of the best-known names in American wealth management. Scale did not translate into being named.

What kind of question loses the most

This is the pattern that separates wealth management from the other industries we have audited. Generic comparison queries did best, named 8 of 16 firms, because "top financial advisors compared" invites a list of large brands and these are large brands. Category queries named a firm in 9 of 32 cases, and local queries in 2 of 16.

The problem-first query named a firm in none of 16. Questions like "I need help planning for retirement" or "I have significant assets and need help managing them" are exactly how an anxious buyer talks. No one in this sample answered it well enough to be named.

Who got named instead, and where the answers came from

When an established firm was not named, AI named a familiar name. Creative Planning was named as an alternative in 12 of 80 answers, Mariner Wealth Advisors in 10, UBS and Fidelity in 9 each, Charles Schwab in 8 and Vanguard in 7. Edward Jones, J.P. Morgan Wealth Management, LPL Financial and Morgan Stanley followed. Some of those are firms in our own sample, which is the point: the same few brands recur whatever the question.

The sources behind the answers depended on the question. Across 616 citations on 264 domains, Wikipedia was the largest single source at 31, followed by NerdWallet (21), Unbiased (18), Yelp (14), InvestmentNews (14), SmartAsset (11) and Wealthtender (10). Local queries leaned on Yelp and Wealthtender plus the large institutions' own sites. Comparison queries leaned on Unbiased, Newsweek's advisory-firm rankings, InvestmentNews and Financial Planning. Problem-first queries were a different world: they drew on Fidelity, Vanguard and Schwab guidance, a U.S. Department of Labor retirement guide and U.S. News. Advisor directories were not among the top sources there.

Two things are worth noting. First, the person asking a situation question was being answered by neutral, plain-English educational content, and none of the firms in this sample were in it. Second, advisor-matching and review sites such as Unbiased, Wealthtender and SmartAsset showed up repeatedly, which means a firm's profile there can matter as much as its own pages. Regulator records, such as the SEC's adviser search and FINRA BrokerCheck, did not appear among the cited sources, although FINRA's investor education pages did appear twice. A careful buyer will still check those records, so they should match what your site says.

Reading the sample honestly

Not every entry in this audit is a client-facing advisory firm, and we would rather say so than let the average mislead.

• One entry, Baird, was read by the tool as a coastal and river engineering consultancy. The domain we used was not the wealth firm, and its queries were about marine engineering. It scored 20% and accounts for 8 of the 18 own-site citations. We have left it in the table and in the headline numbers rather than drop a result after the fact, and we show the average without it below. We could not re-run the audit for this update.
• One entry listed as "Focus" in the tool output is Buckingham Strategic Wealth, a wealth firm. It is labeled that way in the table.
• Four entries were advisor platforms or networks: Focus Financial Partners, Hightower Advisors, Sanctuary Wealth and Carson. The tool wrote some of their queries for advisors considering a platform, not for clients looking for an advisor. Three of the four scored 0%.
• Several others are broker-dealers or banks that also offer advisory services, including Ameriprise, Edward Jones and Stifel.

Restricting to the 11 firms the tool audited as client-facing wealth managers, average visibility was 30.9% (340 points across 11 firms), still with 0 of 11 named on the problem-first query. The conclusion does not change, but the average is higher for client-facing firms, and we expect a small independent advisor to fare worse still.

The six we could not scan

Six of the 22 sites we tried, Cambridge Trust, Edelman Financial Engines, Fisher Investments, LPL Financial, Raymond James and Rockefeller Capital, could not be audited. Our crawler could not read enough of the site to run. We cannot tell from outside whether the cause was bot protection, and we cannot tell whether the same protection stops the crawlers AI assistants use. Notably, lpl.com was still cited 9 times in other firms' answers, and Edelman Financial Engines was named as an alternative 4 times, so being hard for our tool to read did not make them invisible.

What to do with this, if you run a firm

1. State your fee model and your status in plain words. "Fee-only, independent, fiduciary advisor for business owners" is easy to place. "A holistic approach to your financial life" is not. Say how you are paid, whom you serve, what it takes to start, and where you are registered, in words that match your regulatory filings.
2. Check your listings against your site. Compare your name, locations, advisors, credentials and fee description across Unbiased, Wealthtender, SmartAsset, Yelp, your Wikipedia entry if you have one, and the regulator search. Inconsistent entries make you hard to place.
3. Write for the event, not the philosophy. Build educational pages for the sale of a business, a rollover, an inheritance or a retirement date. Explain the options and the trade-offs without telling a stranger what to do.
4. Show credentials accurately. List the designations people actually hold, in the form the issuing body allows, and make them verifiable.
5. Go through compliance first. Under the SEC Marketing Rule (Rule 206(4)-1 under the Investment Advisers Act) and FINRA rules for broker-dealers, your compliance officer should approve website pages, articles and outreach before use, and your firm should archive them. No performance claims, no promises.
6. 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 financial advisors is built for. It is written for regulated firms, with your compliance officer approving every piece. For the outbound question, our guide on how financial advisors get new clients without relying on referrals covers referral dependency, and our guide to cold email compliance covers the rules.

Every firm we audited

* The tool classified baird.com as a coastal and river engineering consultancy, so this entry is off-category. † Listed as "Focus" in the tool output; the domain is buckinghamstrategicwealth.com.

Not scanned (error or too little readable content): Cambridge Trust, Edelman Financial Engines, Fisher Investments, LPL Financial, Raymond James, Rockefeller Capital.

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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Run the free audit

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 22 established wealth management and advisory sites: 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 US firms: large national wealth managers, broker-dealers, banks with wealth arms, and advisor platforms. It is a sample that we picked, not a random one and not a census. It likely flatters the average, because small independent advisors are not in it. A firm's score also depends on how our classifier read its homepage, and as noted above, one entry was misread and four were audited as platforms.

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 client language. Results come from one run on one day, and AI answers change over time. We did not test whether any firm pays for directory or ranking placement. Own-site share is an exact match of the cited domain to the firm being tested.

On regulation. Nothing here is legal, compliance or investment advice, and nothing is a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Advisor marketing is regulated, including by the SEC Marketing Rule and FINRA rules, and your own compliance officer decides what applies to your firm.

FAQ

Related reading

• AEO, GEO and SEO for financial advisors
• How financial advisors get new clients without relying on referrals
• We ran a real AI visibility audit on 29 B2B companies
• 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