Financial advisor and wealth firm websites in 2026: scan results

Findings

Figures use 657 sites for health and 89 reachable sites for AI readiness, with n beside each share.

• Organization markup is on 37 of 89 sites (41.6%).
• 30.3% of 89 sites (27) carry LocalBusiness-type schema; the overall figure is 35.2% (n=2,111).
• 32.6% of 89 sites (29) have no JSON-LD. The overall study found 32.1% (n=2,111).
• llms.txt present on 14 of 89 sites (15.7%); the overall study found 30.5% (n=2,111). We did not test whether any AI product uses the file.
• Look at the front door first. 15.5% of 657 sites have a web address that fails DNS lookup (102 sites); for every niche together (n=10,522) the rate is 16.6%.
• 3 of 89 sites (3.4%) block at least one of eight AI crawlers in robots.txt; across all niches 4.3% (n=2,111). 2 block GPTBot and 1 block ChatGPT-User.
• Among 89 reachable sites, 94.4% declare a viewport, 71.9% have an H1, 70.8% a meta description and 51.7% a title in the 30 to 65 character range.

Trust, disclosures and the compliance review

Prospects judge an advisor on trust before service. They look for credentials, how the firm is paid, who sits behind the brand and whether the person is registered. That makes the About, team and disclosures pages the heart of the site.

Marketing rules apply. In the US, advisers registered with the SEC or a state are subject to advertising and testimonial rules; in the UK, the FCA applies its own. Have compliance review any claim, performance figure or testimonial before it goes on the site. We do not give legal advice.

For machines, the same facts need a clean form: a firm name, a logo, profile links, team members and offices, each in markup that matches the visible page.

Markup, llms.txt and crawler rules

Advisor sites describe the firm more often than the office. Organization markup (41.6%) is more common than LocalBusiness-type markup (30.3%).

2 sites block GPTBot and 1 block ChatGPT-User, out of 89. Page basics: 70.8% have a meta description and 51.7% a title of 30 to 65 characters.

How many advisor homepages load

Dead domains (15.5%) and unreachable servers (6.8%) together account for 147 of 657 sites. Firms that merge, rebrand or sell books to another firm often leave an old domain behind.

Steps for an advisory firm

1. Publish Organization markup with legal name, logo and links to your regulator profile and company page. Our financial advisor website design work starts there.
2. Add LocalBusiness-type markup for each office you staff, with the same address you use in your profile listings.
3. Write plain-language pages on how the firm is paid and who it serves, then have compliance approve them.
4. Check old domains from past rebrands. Redirect each to the current site so links in old emails still work.
5. Review robots.txt rules for AI bots with your web provider. 3.4% of advisor sites block one; make it a choice, not an accident. See financial advisor SEO and the AI visibility checker.

Where the numbers come from

• AI readiness scan, 2026-11-08: we sampled 120 sites from a US business list for this niche, and 89 had a homepage that returned HTTP 200. Shares use those 89 sites. We fetched the homepage, robots.txt and llms.txt once per site with an honest user agent.
• Homepage health scan, 2026-11-09 to 2026-11-13: one DNS lookup and one homepage request for each of 657 sites, using the most recent check per domain. Bot walls (401, 403, 429) are counted apart from broken sites.
• "Visibly broken" means a 404 homepage, broken SSL, server error, parked or for-sale page, spam hijack, default hosting page, suspended account, WordPress critical error or PHP errors on the page.

Margin of error: at a 95 percent confidence level, a share measured on 89 sites can be off by up to about 10 points, and a share on 657 sites by up to about 4 points. Small gaps between this niche and the all-niche figure therefore mean little; large gaps are worth a closer look. The sample is a US business list, not every business in the trade.

This is a picture of what sites publish on specific days. It does not measure citations in AI answers, leads, rankings or revenue, and it cannot explain why a site is set up as it is. Firewalls may refuse bots that robots.txt allows. Compare with the overall study, and browse the other niches.