Advisor AI visibility is becoming a competitive battleground, and a new tool from fintech AdvisorFinder aims to show RIAs exactly where they stand. The company has launched AdvisorFinder Intelligence, a service that scores how financial advisors appear across ChatGPT, Claude, Google's Gemini, and Perplexity, and offers a roadmap for improving those rankings.
AdvisorFinder was founded in 2022 by Jason Friedman, who previously was a Virgina-based advisor at Merrill Lynch. The starting price for AdvisorFinder Intelligence is $99 per month, with pricing changing based on the number of geographic locations and the volume of AI search queries a firm wants to track.
“Being generic is one of the single largest mistakes that we see firms of all sizes make if they want to show up in AI results,” Friedman says. “As an example, calling yourselves a comprehensive wealth management firm for high-net-worth individuals or families. That is a very generic quote, and an LLM is not going to mention you if you are generic.”
To better optimize AI, Friedman says advisors should prioritize having more specific and consistent descriptions across their digital footprint, including websites and directory listings.
“What the advisor can control is the inputs. Do they have accurate data on themselves on their website? Do their website pages have proper heading structures? Do they have schema markup?” Friedman says for AI discovery optimization.
Advisors who use AdvisorFinder Intelligence receive a Digital Presence Report that grades their search visibility, website health, online credibility and local presence. The market for helping advisors and their AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) also includes startups like Wealthreach, which produces content and landing pages for advisors looking to improve their AI search presence.
“Traditional Google search was primarily based on content being created from an advisor's website or a firm's website and having the website optimized,” says Friedman. “AI is taking far more different inputs. They're looking at PR. They're looking at directory listings. They're looking at the consistency of content across an article about them, as well as their website.”
Even as Google remains dominant for search, the engine now has AI overview summaries powered by Gemini that appear at the top of search results. AI has effectively become the “front door” for finding financial advice, says Friedman.
“That is absolutely changing the landscape of how people are finding advisors. Instead of looking for articles to find answers, they are searching on Google and they're getting an answer from typically an AI overview,” Friedman says.
AdvisorFinder’s inaugural State of Advisor Discovery report found that 45% of people searching for an advisor are considered “wealth builders” rather than retirees. The AEO Leaderboard from AdvisorFinder ranks the top 300 advisory firms based on their visibility across AI platforms, with some of the industry’s largest RIA aggregators as the top-ranked firms.
"I think the advantage lies in the fact that some of those firms have been around for many years, so the data that ChatGPT or Claude used to train on was data that mentioned those firm names,” says Friedman. “The second thing is large firms historically were spending far more on marketing and on PR, so they are ahead of the curve on AI search because they have more consistent messaging across the internet.”
The top five ranked firms on the AEO Leaderboard in order are Mercer Advisors, Focus Partners Wealth, Mariner Wealth Advisors, Creative Planning, and Captrust—all of which are mega-RIAs that are near industry highs in assets under management. However, Friedman says that he’s seen smaller RIAs thrive over larger AI in specific location targets where the smaller firms focus on developing consistent messaging on their niche.
“Let's say, equity compensation in San Francisco, California. An advisor at a smaller firm could create rich, detailed content on that specific topic, and not only have it on their website, but be posting on Substack and have a YouTube channel with videos on that same topic,” said Friedman. “That's what can beat out a larger firm that is creating more generic content on a national scale.”
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