In this issue:
- What AI Reads Before It Recommends You
- August 2026 Market Snapshot
- 3 Lead Generation Ideas
- Marketing Tactic
- AI Visibility Tool
What AI Reads Before It Recommends You
Picture two advisors in the same city. Same designation, same years in the business, roughly the same size book. A prospect asks an AI tool which one to hire, and it names one of them.
Not because they are better. Because the machine could confirm who they were, and could not confirm who the other one was.
Let’s look at how AI decides which advisor to cite.
How AI Actually Builds Its Answer
AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimization. It means being found and named by AI answer tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, & Perplexity, not just by search engines.
Here is the part most advisors have wrong. These tools do not keep a private list of good advisors in a magic black box. When someone asks for a recommendation, the tool goes and looks. It runs searches, opens pages, reads what it finds, and builds an answer on the spot.
It is doing fast research. Whatever it can find and verify in that moment becomes its picture of you.
The Places AI Looks
Your own website. Your about page, your service pages, your bio. It reads the words, and it also reads the code underneath that labels what those words mean. Schema markup is that code, a small set of tags that tell a machine "this is a person, this is her credential, this is where she works."
Regulatory and credential records. SEC adviser records, FINRA BrokerCheck, the CFP Board directory. These carry real weight because they are independent of you. You cannot edit them to say something flattering, which is exactly why a machine trusts them.
Third-party profiles like FinancialAdvisors.com. Directories, your Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, review platforms, social media, forums. These serve as outside confirmation that you exist the way you say you do.
Earned mentions. Podcast appearances, quotes in an article, a guest post, local or national press. These are the hardest to get and they count the most, because someone else chose to name you.
Good SEO Enables Good AEO
If AI finds you by searching and reading, then everything that helps you get found in search still helps you get found by AI.
Traditional SEO is not dead. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, the work of making your site findable and readable. It is the delivery system AEO runs on top of. A site that loads slowly, hides its content, or has no clear pages about what you do is hard for a person to find and just as hard for a machine to read.
AEO is a layer, not a replacement. Advisors who were told to abandon SEO were told something that will cost them.
Your High Value Punchlist
Here are the top 3 things you can do to help yourself get found in AI Search:
- Make your listings agree. Pull up your website, your Google Business Profile, your LinkedIn, and any directory you are in. Check that the name, firm, address, phone, and specialty match exactly. Fix the ones that do not.
- Check your credential records. Make sure your BrokerCheck and CFP Board information is current and matches what your site says.
- Give AI something worth quoting. A page that clearly answers a real question your clients ask is easier for a machine to pull from than a page about your philosophy.
Going back to those two advisors we mentioned at first. The one who got named did not outwork the other. He just made himself easy to confirm, like doing the above list, and then putting signals out into the market. That job is available to you this week.
August 2026 Market Snapshot
July sent mixed signals. Stocks drifted, the Fed held steady, and the bond market pushed back hard.
- Stocks lost a little ground. The S&P 500 finished July down 0.13%, its second straight monthly loss, closing at 7,489.72. The Nasdaq ended at 25,373.85 and the Dow at 52,485.03, its fourth winning month in a row. (ChartRowFRED)
- The Fed held, but the question flipped. Rates stayed at 3.5% to 3.75%, though three officials dissented in favor of a hike. Traders now see roughly 60% odds of an increase in September and have fully priced one in for December. (business-standard)
- Long bonds sold off. The 30-year Treasury yield jumped to 5.21%, its highest level since 2007, while the 10-year rose to 4.68%.
- Inflation eased, then energy jumped. The consumer price index fell in June, bringing the annual rate to 3.5%. Days later, crude oil settled 6.6% higher at $84.46 a barrel on renewed conflict with Iran.
3 Lead Generation Ideas
Get on a microphone, yours or someone else's.
Information used to be scarce. It is not anymore. Anyone can get a decent answer to a financial question in ten seconds from a free tool. What people cannot get easily, is a reason to trust the person giving the answer. That is the shift. We are moving to a trust economy, where being right matters less than being believed.
Podcasts are one of the few formats that transfer trust directly. When a host brings you on, some of the credibility they built with that audience carries over to you. The listener did not find you. Someone they already trust introduced you. And podcast audiences act on what they hear. Seventy-six percent of weekly listeners say they have done something after hearing a podcast ad, including visiting a website or recommending a product. Daily listeners spend 5 hours and 11 minutes a day with audio, compared to 3 hours and 57 minutes for Americans overall. That is a lot of time with people who chose to be there.
Get the video/audio, and repurpose it across all your channels. You could easily get 20 pieces of content from 1 podcast.
Target 401k rollovers from job changers.
People who changed jobs this year have an old retirement account sitting somewhere they have stopped thinking about. Most know they should do something and have no idea what. Build one simple page that answers the actual question, which is what are my four options and what does each one cost me. Then point local outreach at it. Someone searching for rollover help is not browsing.
Go after equity compensation questions.
If there is a public company, hospital system, or large tech employer in your area, some of those employees hold restricted stock units they do not understand. RSU stands for restricted stock unit, a grant of company shares that vests over time. Most holders have never been told what happens at vesting, what it does to their tax bill, or how much of their net worth is now tied to one employer. Build one clear page on the topic and name the employer type. Then offer a short session for anyone facing a vest this year. Narrow audience, real money, genuine problem.
Marketing Tactic: Run a NAP Audit This Month
NAP stands for name, address, phone. It sounds like the dullest item on your marketing list. It is also the fastest fix available, and most advisors have never checked it.
When an AI tool decides whether to recommend you, it cross-checks what it finds across your website, your Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, directories, and your BrokerCheck record. When those agree, confidence goes up. When they disagree, the tool cannot tell which version of you is real, so it names someone else.
Start with your legal name. Your business name is not a branding choice. It is whatever appears on your LLC filing, your DBA, or your registration with the SEC or FINRA. Google requires the real-world name, and listings using a marketing version can get suspended. Pull your formation documents and your ADV or BrokerCheck record. Whatever is there is your standard. If your branding has drifted from it, talk to your compliance team about which direction to correct.
Then match everything to it. Website footer and contact page, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, Facebook, and every directory you are listed in. Fix what does not match. Most directories have a claim or suggest-an-edit option.
The one people miss. Old listings from a previous firm are often still live and still ranking. Those hurt most, because they actively contradict your current information. Search your name plus your old firm and see what comes up.
FAVIR Launches September 10
This issue walked through where AI looks when it decides whether to recommend you. The obvious next question is what it actually found.
That is what FAVIR answers. FAVIR stands for Financial Advisor Visibility Index Rating, a score from 0 to 100 that measures how discoverable you are when someone asks an AI tool for a financial advisor. It scores nine areas, including the consistency of your listings, the strength of your credentials, your website, and how often AI tools actually cite you. It runs weekly, so you can see whether what you fixed made a difference.
It goes live September 10, and it lives inside your FinancialAdvisors.com profile.
Founding partner pricing is still open until launch. If you have been meaning to look at it, this is the month.
Reserve FAVIR Spot