Ask each engine to describe your firm and note whether "fee-only" and "fiduciary" appear unprompted. If they don't, engines are categorizing you alongside commission-based firms. That distinction is your entire positioning, and it's being lost in the channel a growing share of prospects consult first.
The distinction your whole practice rests on
You know the difference between fee-only, fee-based, and commission. Most prospects don't — which is precisely why you spend so much of every first meeting explaining it.
Now consider what happens when that explanation is delegated to a machine. A prospective client asks ChatGPT or Perplexity for advisors near them. The engine returns three or four names with a sentence of description each. If your sentence doesn't contain the words that distinguish you, you have been placed in the same bucket as the firms whose model you built yours in opposition to — and the prospect never learns otherwise, because they never get to the first meeting.
This isn't a ranking problem. There's no position to check. It's a description problem, and it's invisible unless you go looking.
The check
Ask each engine, by name:
"Tell me about [firm name] in [city]."
Then read the response for three specific things:
- Does "fee-only" appear? Unprompted, in the engine's own description.
- Does "fiduciary" appear? Same test.
- What compensation language does appear instead? "Financial advisor," "wealth management firm," and "financial services" are all neutral-to-negative here — they're the language that covers everyone.
Then ask the discovery question:
"I'm looking for a fee-only fiduciary financial advisor near [city]. Who should I talk to?"
This is the more diagnostic of the two. If you don't appear for a query that names your exact model, something is wrong with how your identity is represented — not with your visibility generally.
Then the uncomfortable one:
"What's the difference between [your firm] and [a large brokerage in your market]?"
If the engine struggles to articulate a difference, or invents one, you've learned something worth knowing.
Run each three times across a week. Answers vary between sessions; one run is an anecdote.
Why the words go missing
Three patterns account for most of it.
The words aren't on your site in the places that get read. Many advisor sites state "fee-only" once, in an About page paragraph, and nowhere else. Meanwhile every service page, every bio, and the homepage describe "comprehensive wealth management" — language indistinguishable from a wirehouse. The engine has more evidence for the generic description than the specific one.
Your third-party listings say something different. A directory profile from six years ago listing you under "Investments." A LinkedIn company description written when the firm was structured differently. An old bio on a former employer's site. Engines weight independent corroboration heavily, and stale corroboration is still corroboration.
Your compliance-driven caution removed the distinguishing language. This one is worth naming carefully. Advisors sometimes strip specific claims from their sites out of an abundance of regulatory caution, and end up with copy so hedged it says nothing an engine can attribute. Describing your own compensation structure accurately is not a performance claim — but if you've been advised otherwise, that's a conversation to have with your compliance reviewer rather than a matter to settle from a blog post.
What you can and can't conclude
Verified — What each engine said about you, on the date you asked, in its own words. Save the transcripts.
Unconfirmed — Why. You're reading output, not retrieval. Whether the omission traces to your own copy, a stale directory, a third-party page that mentions you, or a training-data artifact isn't visible in the answer. Determining that means auditing your off-site footprint and your on-site entity signals together — and even then some of it remains inference.
Directional — That the omission matters commercially. It's a reasonable and well-supported inference that being described without your differentiator costs you consideration. It is not something anyone can currently measure precisely at the level of your individual firm, and you should be sceptical of anyone claiming a number.
Do this before you change anything
The check produces a document: dates, engines, exact wording. That record is worth more than any single fix, because it's the baseline you measure against later. Without it you can't tell whether anything you do afterwards worked.
How engines describe you is one of six symptoms in the full map at how do I tell if my website is losing me clients.
More on how we work with financial advisors.
General information for advisors, not legal or compliance advice. Confirm any website language change with your compliance reviewer.