From SEO to GEO: How advisors can be discoverable in the age of AI

For more than two decades, Google has been the default gateway to the internet. Now, with the rise of ChatGPT and other AI search tools, financial advisors and their marketing partners are rethinking how they get discovered online.

OpenAI said earlier this month that ChatGPT was nearing 700 million active weekly users, far outpacing the over 450 million monthly active users for Google’s rival AI chatbot, Gemini. While Google still dominates traditional search with upwards of 90% global market share, even Alphabet and its $2.5 trillion market cap is feeling pressure. The company launched several “Just Ask Google” TV advertisements to reinforce its search relevance at a time when alternatives such as Elon Musk’s Grok, Anthropic’s Claude and Perplexity are changing how people look for information.

For advisors, the shift raises a critical marketing question: How will clients find you when information flows through AI, not search engines? Historically, search engine optimization (SEO) has been a staple of advisor marketing. Ranking high on Google meant visibility to prospects typing queries such as “financial advisor near me.”

“It’s something that I think a lot about in terms of the shift from traditional SEO — how people type in different queries into Google looking for an advisor and how information content surfaces, in terms of what that looks like now, and what that’s going to look like in the future with AI and LLMs [large language models],” said Eric Adamowsky. Adamowsky is growth marketing lead at Farther, a tech-centric RIA that recently surpassed $13 billion in pipeline assets. “A lot of the content coming by way of AI and the summaries that you get, we need to make sure that we’re front and center as that citation or reference.”

From SEO to GEO and AEO

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) or AI engine optimization (AEO) are terms used by marketing professionals to describe their strategies for AI search visibility.

“SEO helps a company appear higher on a search engine but still relies on a human click. GEO, however, feeds the information right to the searcher. Content that’s well-researched, authoritative and formatted in a way to let AI process the information will help advisors appear in generated summaries,” said Ariel Kouvaras, Senior Managing Director and Head of AI Integration at communications firm Sloane & Company. “Content will also shift over time. We will see increased use of bullet points, headers, and grouping of information – because that’s how AI likes to read and such structures support better accuracy of information.“

Wealthtender, an advisor marketing website, is hosting a webinar Tuesday titled, Is ChatGPT Recommending You…or Your Competitors? Speakers for the webinar include advisor marketing expert Samantha Russell of FMG Suite, who writes on LinkedIn that advisors should appear on online review platforms and media publications to improve their AI search visibility. 

“The traditional rules of SEO are changing every day in the face of AI’s growing dominance. SEO still matters, but not necessarily in the way that it once did,” said Rob Farmer, SVP at StreetCred PR. “Paid search may still be effective, but it should absolutely be augmented by a sustained and strategic program of content and news. Language model-driven search is driven as much by relevance and context as it is by keywords. Advisors should make sure their messages are being deliberately and strategically fed into the marketplace.” 

LLM preferences

Personal finance company SmartAsset has also begun altering its content strategy for AI-driven search.

“Licensed financial advisors who choose to author content online may be given preferences by LLMs due to their topical authority, so make sure to include your credentials in your byline. Online reviews are more important than ever, not only as a trust signal for individuals but also LLMs,” SmartAsset CMO Brian Bourque told InvestmentNews. “We’re augmenting our content with specific formats, such as FAQs and unique insights, to more closely resemble how people search via LLMs.”

While some advisors or financial firms have traditionally led paid marketing campaigns through Google Ad platforms, that strategy will also shift to account for AI search engines. While paid advertising is not currently offered through ChatGPT, RIAs such as Farther expect that to evolve.

“Even though none of the major AI platforms to my knowledge have come out and said, we’re going to offer paid advertising in the same way that Google has the Google Ads program, my thesis is that they will have that at some point,” said Adamowsky. 

Firms that rely more on referrals to generate client leads — which is the case for most high-net-worth providers — will not be as impacted by search performance as those advisors who serve more for retail investors. 

“For some advisors, SEO really is sort of meaningless,” said April Rudin, CEO of wealth marketing firm The Rudin Group. “For more retail advisors that rely on SEO for clients to help find them, people who might have more tech enabled clients, I think their first stop is going to be ChatGPT or one of the other [AI] platforms.”