It took Michael Barrasso a long time to convince his dad to send an email asking clients what they thought of his wealth management firm, United Financial Planning Group.
Processing Content
But after he got results from that query and published them on firm’s website as client testimonials, the boost in AI-driven traffic was almost immediate. Barrasso said the comments about his dad, firm president and founder Gerry Barrasso, went beyond simple statements like “Gerry is great.”
Many consisted of “paragraphs of heartfelt praise.”
“So not only that gave him confidence as an advisor and helped the firm overall, but also, when you get reviews like that, that’s a differentiator,” Michael Barrasso said. “When someone’s going to your website, that helps you convert people at a much much higher rate. And of course, AI loves reviews like that.”
Michael Barrasso is one of many industry professionals seeking to draw on such experiences to help RIAs find ways to stand out when prospective clients search for financial advisors on AI systems like Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude. Now a business consultant for United Financial Planning Group, most of his time is devoted to WealthReach, a prospecting and growth firm he co-founded last year in Hauppauge, New York.
To help wealth managers rank higher in AI search results, WealthReach announced Thursday it will acquire search-engine optimizer AdvisorRankings. Like many similar outfits, AdvisorRankings was founded to boost advisors’ visibility on Google but has since shifted to helping firms appear in AI-driven searches for financial expertise.
READ MORE: How advisors can act as hubs for clients’ lawyers, accountants
Word-of-mouth referrals will still look you up with AI
A Cerulli Associates survey from 2025 found that wealth managers still get most new clients from referrals from existing clients, friends or relatives. But even if an advisor is strongly endorsed by a trusted person, prospective clients are likely to do a quick online search before starting a new financial relationship.
Today, many of those searches will draw on AI. Even a simple Google query often produces an AI summary above a list of links to other web pages.
Michael Barrasso said United Financial Planning Group, also in Hauppauge, used to obtain most of its new clients from referrals and through membership in trade groups like the National Association for Personal Financial Advisors.
“But now it’s really, really skewed,” he said. “We get the majority of our clients through Google and through AI.”
READ MORE: Financial advisors face a ‘cliché crisis’ in marketing
Too many generic blog posts
Advice on AI use tends to be consistent across many industries. It’s no longer enough to cram websites full of search-optimized keywords in order to be picked up in Google searches. Now professionals must position themselves so AI systems are more likely to see them as an authority on a particular topic.
Michelle Burkowski, the head of marketing at the wealthtech consulting firm F2 Strategy, said success requires firms to formulate clear and distinct ideas about the industry and publish them in outlets that AI systems see as valuable.
Burkowski said blog posts on generic topics written about hundreds of times before will do little more than cause AI to experience the equivalent of having its eyes glaze over.
“It’s no longer you want to just show up,” Burkowski said. “You have to be associated with some kind of valuable content that people are searching for.”
READ MORE: AI for advisor marketing — without alienating clients
What is working now for advisors
In some cases, keywords can still be helpful. Chris Diodato, the founder of WELLth Financial Planning in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, said a recent webinar put on by the support and service group XY Planning Network stressed the boost advisors can get from advertising that they’re fee-only.
For fee-only advisors, their business model of relying strictly on management fees, rather than commissions and other transaction charges, is generally perceived by AI as a strong indicator that they’ll work in clients’ best interests.
“This has been fantastic for me, since my firm is fee-only and helps me compete with the big banks and brokerages out there who have much larger advertising budgets,” Diodato said.
Some advisors can find the seemingly endless supply of recommendations for ways to stay ahead with AI overwhelming. Bryan Byrer, the founder of Millennial Financial Planning in Indianapolis, said he has tried to incorporate guidance slowly over time, rather than try following all of it at once.
Byrer said he has focused on getting quoted as an expert in news articles (like this one), creating videos and other posts for LinkedIn and paying to have his firm listed on directories like FeeOnlyNetwork.com. He also ran an audit of his website and discovered he should lay more stress on his firm’s location in Indianapolis.
“Now when AI crawls my site, it will send my results to people living in Indianapolis or nearby and specifically target millennials and young investors in those areas,” he said.
READ MORE: Marketing rule missteps that could put advisory firms at risk
Hesitation over using client testimonials
One step Byrer has not taken yet is to seek out reviews from his clients. In that way, he’s similar to many other advisors. In a recent survey of 14,286 regulatory Form ADV filings by RIAs, the marketing firm Paithos found that only 11% of firms use client testimonials in their public statements.
Burkowski of F2 Strategy said that’s partly because the federal rules allowing testimonials in advisor marketing are still fairly new. Only in late 2022, with the implementation of its new market rule, did the Securities Exchange Commission begin letting advisors go public with what current and former clients were saying about them.
Burkowski said the regulatory hurdles for compliance with the SEC’s marketing rule are daunting to many firms. Advisors who want to gather testimonials have to send out inquiries to a broad swath of their clients and then make sure not to “cherry-pick” favorable results for publication.
And the required paper trail to show such steps were correctly taken can be burdensome to some firms. In some ways, small one-person operations may have an easier time complying.
“The difference is big, say, for a broker-dealer that might have 400 different practices or advisors under their purview but have one form of compliance,” Burkowski said. “That’s a lot to manage, versus maybe you know somebody who’s all operating under a single brand.”
READ MORE: Brand building for advisors: How to stand out
Too many firms try to be everything to everyone
Michael Barrasso said there are also many technical tweaks firms can make to the back ends of their websites to make it more likely the sites will catch the attention of AI. On website front ends, he finds too many advisors still present themselves as one-size-fits-all wealth managers — a good way to get ignored.
“A firm I was talking to last week does both tax planning and preparation in-house,” Barrasso said. “But it doesn’t say it anywhere on their website, except having ‘tax preparation’ under services. And I’m like, ‘That’s your thing. We’ve got to lean into this.’ So the whole website now is going to be structured towards that.”
