For most of our history as financial advisors, "marketing" your practice meant "prospecting", the process of going out and sourcing new people who might someday do business with you… usually via either cold outreach (e.g., cold-calling or cold-knocking), or creating opportunities to connect and meet people (e.g., going to networking meetings, or hosting a seminar). Success was defined by how effective people were at a high-volume-rejection activity (the more "no's" you get, the closer you are to the next "yes"!?), where the end goal was to find some connection to strike up a conversion, build rapport and trust, and try to engage the prospect to become a client.
Then the internet arrived in the late 1990s, and consumers began to go online, surfing websites to find products to buy or service-providers to hire. Which meant financial advisors, too, needed to get their own websites to give consumers an opportunity to hire them. Except because the typical financial advisor had no other marketing process to get prospects to their website, the typical advisor website itself was often little more than a digital version of the marketing brochure they might have handed out at an in-person seminar (that they could digitally redirect prospects to after a seminar or networking meeting). Accordingly, most advisor website designers created "build-once, deploy-many" platforms with extremely standardized templates that allowed advisors to drop in their firm-specific marketing details, get compliance approval, and then "have a website" that prospects (or perhaps referrals) could be directed to.
Yet the reality is that websites can do so much more than just be a place to direct a prospect that the advisor has already met or been introduced to. In an era of search engines (and now AI), consumers often do their research online first, before reaching out to or engaging with a potential service-provider, and the most successful service-providers – from plumbers and electricians to doctors and financial advisors – may be identified by a future client online, researched, and by the first contact the prospect has already decided who they intend to work with.
However, this approach – where a website isn't just a digital marketing brochure for existing prospects, it's a way to be found online in the first place – doesn't work if the search engines don't surface it as a search result in the first place. Which in reality is usually the case, because so many financial advisor websites are not built adhering to the technical specifications it takes to have "good" Search Engine Optimization (SEO), don't have dynamic content (to keep the website freshly indexed), and don't have clear messaging that helps guide LLMs about when to surface this particular advisor and their website in an AI-driven search query (to support Answer Engine Optimization, or AEO). Such that in practice, most advisor websites generate few search results beyond those who were already looking up the firm by name (which unfortunately means that prospect, by definition, already knew about the advisor, and weren't actually using the search or AI engine to discover the advisor).
And so in that vein it's notable that website and advisor marketing startup WealthReach is raising $1M of seed capital to build and iterate on this, with their "Living Sites" offering that specifically aims to build and maintain websites that are engineered for good SEO and AEO, and leverages AI to create fresh and more dynamic content for the advisor's target audience (and to keep the site more favored in SEO, even developing new content pages on the kinds of topics the firm's prospects are searching for). Coupled with a tool called Convert that uses cookies to identify ~40% of visitors and tie them to an actual person (that the advisor can then monitor or outright reach out to).
For advisors, the rising industry focus on driving organic growth makes it appealing to have the potential for prospects to proactively find your website without already knowing it and searching for it by name, as a pathway to get introduced to new prospects. Yet the caveat is that even with Living Sites' dynamic content and better SEO/AEO structure, it doesn't help if the firm isn't clear about what differentiated target market it's pursuing in the first place. Firms that do have a clear target market, whether it's focused on retirees, or doctors, or business owners, or even just being the leading fee-only fiduciary in their town (i.e., 'local SEO'), have more straightforward paths to differentiate their websites and become findable (with WealthReach's help). But Living Sites still can't make a differentiated website for an undifferentiated advisor.
In the broader industry context, though, WealthReach's launch is a good example of leveraging AI where it's good, but not doing so more than it needs to be used. For instance, AI can help draft marketing content, and keep fresh content flowing (while still having a compliance approval process). When Convert spots prospects, and pulls in data from existing marketing databases and public profiles to learn about them, AI can help craft an initial outreach email or LinkedIn message to them. Yet WealthReach is still built on a more 'traditional' chassis of deploying a well-constructed website, with the right markup and schema to be SEO and AEO friendly, using 'traditional' cookies and marketing technology to identify prospects (rather than being entirely AI-driven).
Ultimately, the real driver – as with any organic growth tool – will be whether advisors actually get new clients through their new "living" website from WealthReach. Which, again, will still be difficult to many, because it's hard for any platform to optimize and differentiate the website of an undifferentiated advisor. And advisors who are more clearly differentiated are often more willing to invest further into their own custom website anyway. Nonetheless, WealthReach seems to have a more compelling price point than a 'custom' website, and more capability than a traditional template-based advisor website provider (albeit at a slightly higher price point for website, though cost-effective given its dynamic content updates relative to hiring a custom content writer), which makes WealthReach an interesting entrant to the advisor websites space. Even if many will simply use it to capitalize on how to be the best/most differentiated firm in their local market… which is a remarkably viable marketing tactic unto itself as Local SEO continues to rise in popularity!?
This article first appeared on the Nerd’s Eye View at Kitces.com at https://kitc.es/advisortech-july2026, and has been reprinted here with permission.
Ben Henry-Moreland
Ben Henry-Moreland is a Senior Financial Planning Nerd at Kitces.com, where he specializes in writing and speaking on financial planning topics including tax, practice management, and technology. He also co-authors the monthly Kitces #AdvisorTech column. Drawing from his experience as a financial planner and a solo advisory firm owner, Ben is passionate about fulfilling the site’s mission of making financial advicers better and more successful.
Michael Kitces
Michael Kitces is Head of Planning Strategy at Focus Partners Wealth, which provides an evidence-based approach to private wealth management for near- and current retirees, and Focus Partners Advisor Solutions, a turnkey wealth management services provider supporting thousands of independent financial advisors through the scaling phase of growth.
In addition, he is a co-founder of the XY Planning Network, AdvicePay, fpPathfinder, and New Planner Recruiting, the former Practitioner Editor of the Journal of Financial Planning, the host of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, and the publisher of the popular financial planning industry blog Nerd’s Eye View through his website Kitces.com, dedicated to advancing knowledge in financial planning. In 2010, Michael was recognized with one of the FPA’s “Heart of Financial Planning” awards for his dedication and work in advancing the profession.
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