Financial advisors
How you are paid, the smallest account you take, where you are registered: a client can ask an assistant all three before calling you.
A couple ten years from retirement asks ChatGPT for a planner near Ottawa who charges a flat fee and takes accounts under [amount]. With web search on, the reply can name a few firms, each with a line about fees and fit. That line can state your terms correctly only where a page it read does.
An answer can describe an advisory firm accurately on five points only where each is written down: the services, the clients, how the firm is paid, its minimum and its registration. The firm's own pages can state all five, and the regulator's public register states the fifth as well, so the firm's name has to read the same in both.
How your customers ask
How people describe the advisor they want
Five facts behind a question about an advisor
Each of those questions is a list of conditions: a service, a kind of client, a way of paying in the client's own words, a size (no minimum, accounts under a figure) and, in the last one, a registration the person means to check.
With web search on, an AI assistant reads a handful of pages before it answers, and an answer can repeat your minimum only where a sentence states it. A fee schedule handed over at the first meeting gives a text fetch nothing to read.
What the site states, and who else states the same fact
| Fact | Stated on the site as | Where it goes | Also stated by |
|---|---|---|---|
| Services | Each service by its plain name (financial planning, retirement income, investment management, planning a business sale) and what the firm does not do | A services page, and a page for each service you want clients for | Your Business Profile, and the register if it lists your permitted activities |
| Clients served | The situations taken on, by name: people within [n] years of retiring, owners selling a business, [a profession], a death in the family, a move abroad | The homepage, and a page per situation | Directory profiles you fill in yourself |
| How the firm is paid, and the minimum | Who pays the firm (the client, product providers, or both), in its own words; the schedule as its own terms, [fee] for [service]; and the minimum, [minimum], or that there is none | A fees page in HTML, linked from every page that invites a meeting, and the contact page | The disclosure documents the firm publishes, the client's agreement, directory profiles |
| Registration | The registration as the regulator lists it: registered name, registration type, number and jurisdiction, linked to the firm's entry on the regulator's public register | The about page, and one line in every footer | The regulator's public register itself |
| People | Each advisor's name, role and designations as the issuing body writes them, and their register entry | The about page, a section per person | Each person's register entry |
| The firm | One name (the registered name, with any trading name beside it), one address, one main number | Every footer, every listing, the markup | The register, the Business Profile, every directory profile |
Copy the registration from the register, character for character: the name, the type and the number. Where the register gives each entry a stable address, link the entry; where it offers only a search form, link the form and say which name to search. The right-hand column is why: two versions of one fact leave a reader guessing which is current.
Registration, disclosure, advertising and fiduciary rules for advisors differ by jurisdiction, and this page states none of them. The site states the firm's facts; what has to appear beside them is for the regulator, the compliance officer or counsel. The words independent, fee-only and fiduciary have an article of their own.
Markup for an advisory firm: FinancialService, people, registrations
On schema.org, FinancialService, a financial services business, sits directly under LocalBusiness, so the local fields apply to an office. Its own property, feesAndCommissionsSpecification, takes text or a URL, so the markup can point at the fees page. None of the four types beneath it (AccountingService, AutomatedTeller, BankOrCreditUnion, InsuranceAgency) is a planning firm.
Write it as JSON-LD with the fields Google's local business documentation lists, and legalName where the registered name differs from the one on the door. Each advisor can be a Person listed as an employee. A registration, the firm's or an advisor's, fits hasCertification, used on Organization and Person: a Certification whose issuedBy names the regulator, certificationIdentification holds the number, validIn the jurisdiction and url the register entry. The type's definition counts regulatory certifications and gives a government as one kind of issuer.
Leave ratings out of the firm's node: under Google's review snippet rules, a business that controls the reviews about itself is ineligible for review stars, and whether client reviews may appear on your pages at all is for the compliance officer. For an office that sees clients only by appointment, Google's Business Profile guidelines leave hours off the profile, so say on the site how a meeting is booked.
Our crawl of 9,483 small business sites, read for an advisory firm
Our audit of 9,483 small business websites fetched each site's homepage, contact page and about page with a crawler that ran no scripts, across 40 trades and 90 metros in the US, Canada, Europe and the UAE, in late August and early September 2026. Every figure here is across all 40 trades; we publish no advisor-only cut.
61.5% of the sites had no question-and-answer content of any kind, and 50.7% had a question as a heading with no answer under it that a machine could isolate. On an advisor's site that would be a heading asking about fees, with a paragraph about values under it.
43.1% were inconsistent about who and where they are across their own three main pages, 36.9% gave more than one phone number, and 34.1% had no postal address a machine could parse. An advisory firm has one more place for its name to disagree, because the register states it too.
17.8% carried no schema.org markup, and on most of the others the markup described the website, not the business. 2.1% kept real content, such as a price list or a service menu, in a PDF, and 7.2% served our crawler a challenge page instead of the site.
For 9,240 of the businesses we also asked Claude, with web retrieval on, one buyer question from their trade and metro, and 14.9% were named. One question, one assistant, one day: a direction for the whole sample, not a figure for advisors.
Seven steps for an advisory firm's site, first to last
- Take a first reading with a fixed panel of client questions, scored as our methodology sets out; the questions come from what investors ask at each stage.
- Run the crawler access check and open the fees page with scripts off; three places an advisor's facts live covers the portal and the register.
- Copy the registration into the footer and the about page, linked to its entry, and use one firm name everywhere you control.
- Publish who pays the firm, the fee schedule and the minimum as text: stating how an advisory firm is paid.
- Give each client situation you want more of a page with counts, process and fee: situation pages an advisor can test.
- If the firm arranges insurance, state its licensed lines and how it is paid for them: disability cover questions.
- Read every page for promises with the compliance officer (describing the work, not the result), add FinancialService markup that repeats the pages, and read the panel again a month later.
Go deeper
Six questions an advisory firm asks, one article each
AI Engines
Three places an advisor's facts live, and which ones AI crawlers reach
Local & Industries
How your advisory firm is paid, stated in words a client can check
Brand & Positioning
Situation pages for an advisory firm, and a test of what they change
Local & Industries
Disability cover questions: what an advisor who arranges it states
Brand & Positioning
Describing the work, not the result: what an advisor's pages can say
Content & Answer Pages
What investors ask before, during and after hiring an advisor
Objections an advisor raises, answered
Every client's fee is different. How can we publish one?
Publish the basis rather than one number: a flat fee, an hourly rate, a percentage of assets, a retainer or a mix, with what moves it and your own range, such as [fee] to [fee] for [service]. A page that says only "tailored to you" gives an answer nothing to repeat. The compliance officer reads the wording first.
We are registered with more than one regulator. What goes in the footer?
Each registration as its register lists it: the registered name, the type, the number and the jurisdiction, each linked to its entry, one line per regulator, in the same order everywhere. A registration held by a person rather than the firm goes in that person's section of the about page.
We meet clients by video and have no office. What changes?
The five facts stay the same; the address is what changes. Under Google's Business Profile guidelines, a profile is for a business with a physical location customers can visit or one that travels to customers where they are, and an address the firm rents but does not work from is not eligible. A firm that meets clients only by video is neither, so the site states where it is registered and which places it serves, and the markup is an Organization: schema.org defines LocalBusiness as a physical business or branch.