How Advisors Can Increase Online Visibility in the Age of AI

Hello. Is it me you’re looking for?

Lisa Salvi, a managing director in Charles Schwab’s Advisor Services unit, isn’t a coder, designer or branding expert by trade, but that may not matter much in the age of artificial intelligence. Experimenting with large language models Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini, Salvi was recently able to mock up an entire brand for a hypothetical wealth firm offering a website and app in virtually no time at all, saving what could’ve been as much as $1.5 million. “To do this would’ve taken weeks, a lot of back and forth, photo shoots and a lot of incredible thinking,” she said during a presentation at a Schwab AI summit last week. The fake website looked clean and inviting, but it was optimized to be found by artificial intelligence.

Search engine optimization has long been a branding priority for advisors. If they want to be at the top of Google search when a potential client is looking for an advisor, firms need to make sure their website’s keywords, images, meta descriptions and more are the best they can be. But now, with the rise of answer engine optimization and generative engine optimization, firms are going to have to work extra hard to increase their online visibility. “It’s a huge opportunity for firms to lean into that now and start taking the very specific actions that will make them citable by LLMs,” Salvia told Advisor Upside. If an advisor is going to use an LLM for coding and designing a website, she recommends using the paid enterprise versions of the programs, not the free ones.

SE-Oh, Wow

Advisors didn’t get into the profession because they’re computer whizzes. So, we’ll try to break this down without getting too techy:

• AEO, or answer engine optimization, is making sure your content and website get sourced to provide quick answers. For example, if someone searches “What is a Roth IRA?” on Google, a concise answer could be pulled from your website.

• GEO, or generative engine optimization, concerns having LLMs like ChatGPT and Gemini learn from your content. The next time someone asks Grok how to create a budget tailored to their personal finances, the answer could be based on your thought leadership.

Easy Pickings. Salvi said an FAQ page is low-hanging fruit for increasing visibility to AI. “[LLMs] love a question and answer format. That’s a very easy thing that you can add to your website today.” Plenty of LLMs are trained on significant amounts of Reddit data. However, that is declining, and Salvi encourages advisors to focus their energy on LinkedIn content, getting quoted in media publications (hey, that’s us) and maybe starting a podcast to help increase both AEO and GEO. “When I look at all of those opportunities and all of the things advisors can do to enhance their visibility to AI, it gets me very excited for the future,” she said.