For years, AdvisorFinder has focused on one problem. Helping financial advisors be found.

The Virginia Beach company built its marketplace to help consumers research and connect with financial advisors. But in 2024, AdvisorFinder began noticing something new in its own analytics.

“For our first year in business, our traffic came from Google, like everyone else’s,” said Drew Keever of AdvisorFinder. “Then in 2024, visitors started arriving from ChatGPT and Perplexity.”

The traffic was small at first, but it continued to grow. Then financial advisors began telling AdvisorFinder that prospective clients were mentioning AI too. They had asked ChatGPT for a financial advisor and been given a firm’s name.

“That’s when it stopped looking like a novelty,” Keever said.

What AdvisorFinder was watching was a change in how consumers discover financial advisors. And Keever believes the important distinction isn’t whether ChatGPT replaces Google.

“I don’t think AI replaces search. I think it replaces the list,” he said.

Google has also incorporated AI-generated answers into its search experience, allowing users to get information directly in the results before deciding whether to click through to a website.

For financial advisors, Keever believes that changes the competition.

“Ten blue links gave you a chance,” he said. “A single AI answer names two or three firms. If you’re not one of them, you’re not on the page at all. There’s no fifth place.”

AdvisorFinder has responded with AdvisorFinder Intelligence, a new platform designed to help financial advisors understand how they appear across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity and what they can do to improve their visibility. The platform also evaluates areas including search visibility, website health, online credibility and local presence.

For AdvisorFinder, Intelligence isn’t a change in mission. It extends work the company was already doing around advisor discovery.

“Same job, one step earlier,” Keever said.

The marketplace helps consumers who are already looking for an advisor find one. Intelligence focuses on whether a firm appears when someone asks AI for a recommendation in the first place.

The research behind the product has also uncovered unexpected problems. Keever said AdvisorFinder regularly found AI recommending advisory firms that no longer existed after being acquired. Old directory listings and web pages could cause AI to treat an acquired company as a separate business, splitting the firm’s digital reputation across multiple identities.

AdvisorFinder built technology to address the problem and ultimately incorporated it into Intelligence.

Keever said AdvisorFinder’s research also suggests smaller firms may have an opportunity to compete with much larger organizations.

“Being specific about who you serve and saying it the same way in every place you appear matters more than the size of your marketing budget,” Keever said.

A specialized firm with a clear audience and consistent digital presence can potentially be recommended ahead of a national firm with a much larger marketing operation.

But if Keever is right, businesses may increasingly be competing not to move higher on a list of search results, but simply to make the answer.

“If you’re not one of them, you’re not on the page at all,” Keever said. “There’s no fifth place.”