I tried to search for myself in AI last week to see if I’d come up in the results. My first attempt was in Claude, but it recognized me from our past conversations and basically said “Sam, that’s a fun question to get from you.” Not exactly the unbiased test I was looking for.
So I switched to ChatGPT and typed “I’m looking for a financial advisor who specializes in helping advisors use AI for content and communication.”
ChatGPT gave a beautifully organized answer. Five companies, three categories, a comparison framework, even a “how to choose” section with bullet points. It looked incredibly thorough.
One problem. Three of the five recommendations were done-for-you marketing agencies that don’t teach advisors anything. One was a lead gen advertising course. And one appears to not exist at all. ChatGPT confidently recommended a company that I couldn’t find any evidence of after 10 minutes of searching.
It never mentioned me. It never mentioned Amplify for Advisors. The one person who’s actually doing the thing the prompt described was completely invisible to the tool, and what it recommended instead was mostly wrong. I will say my prompt could’ve been much clearer (you know the whole garbage in, garbage out thing) but you get the point from the results I received back.
Two takeaways from that experience. First, this is what your prospects are seeing when they search for an advisor. Confident, well-structured answers that may or may not be accurate. Second, if you’re not appearing in those results, someone else is. And that someone else might not even exist.
This issue teaches you how to fix that.
You spend hours every week on content that should take minutes. Amplify for Advisors gives you the frameworks and prompts to get that time back. $20/month. New issues every Tuesday and Friday.
Why This Matters More Than You Think
You already know that referrals are the primary way advisors get new clients. That hasn’t changed. But how people follow up on a referral has changed significantly.
A friend says “you should talk to my financial advisor.” Five years ago, the next step was a Google search. Now, increasingly, the next step is asking ChatGPT or Perplexity “what should I know about working with a financial advisor who specializes in [whatever your niche is]?” or even “who are some financial advisors in [city] who work with [your niche]?”
Twenty-five percent of high-income prospects are already using AI to find advisors. And the number is higher for people under 50.
If you’re not appearing in those results, you’re not losing clients to a competitor who’s better than you. You’re losing them to a competitor who’s more visible to AI. And visibility to AI is a completely different skill than visibility on Google or LinkedIn.
The good news is that most advisors haven’t figured this out yet. The window to get ahead of this is still wide open.
What AI Actually Looks For (And What It Ignores)
I wrote a detailed article on this that covers the mechanics in depth. You can read the full piece at amplifyforadvisors.ai. But here’s the short version of what I learned.
AI doesn’t search the internet the way Google does. It builds confidence about topics and people based on patterns it finds across multiple sources. When it sees your name connected to a specific topic in multiple places, it starts to trust that association.
Three things make AI confident enough to mention you:
Specificity. AI can’t figure out what you’re known for if you write about a different topic every week. The advisors who are starting to surface in AI results have a narrow focus. They’re not “financial advisors.” They’re “the advisor who writes about equity comp for tech employees” or “the advisor who specializes in retirement planning for physicians.” If you built your authority topics in Issue #45, you already have this.
Consistency across platforms. Your website says one thing. Your LinkedIn says the same thing. Your newsletter covers it regularly. AI sees the pattern and gains confidence. If your content is scattered across unrelated topics, AI sees noise instead of signal.
Structured, crawlable content on a website you control. This is the one most advisors miss entirely. LinkedIn posts aren’t easily crawlable because LinkedIn blocks web scraping and automated data extraction. Substack posts are behind a layer that AI models don’t always access reliably. But a blog post on your own website with a clear title, a direct answer in the first paragraph, and organized subheadings is exactly what AI models are built to parse.
The Test You Should Run Right Now
Before you do anything else, run this search. Open ChatGPT (or Claude, or Perplexity) and type:
“I’m looking for a financial advisor who specializes in [your niche] in [your city].”
Read what comes back. Does it mention you? Your firm? Does it describe someone who sounds like you?
If not, that’s not a failure. It’s just information. And it tells you exactly where to focus.
Now try a second search:
“What should I look for in a financial advisor who helps with [your primary authority topic]?”
See if the criteria AI describes match the content you’ve been publishing. If you’ve been writing consistently about that topic, the AI’s answer should sound like a description of what you do. If it doesn’t, there’s a gap between what you know and what AI can find.
The System: Making AI Find You in 90 Days
Here’s the practical plan. This builds directly on the authority topics you chose in Issue #45 and the content ecosystem you started building there.
Month 1: Build your AI-discoverable foundation.
Write one article per authority topic on your own website. Not a blog post in your normal style. An AI-discoverable article, which is structured differently.
The title should be the exact question your ideal prospect would type into ChatGPT. “How Should Tech Employees Handle RSUs When Changing Jobs?” or “What Questions Should I Ask a Financial Advisor About Retirement Healthcare Costs?” or “How Do Small Business Owners Prepare Financially for Selling Their Company?”
The first paragraph answers the question directly. No story, no preamble. Just the answer. Then expand with clear subheadings that break the topic into sections. Close with a natural mention of who you help.
If you set up Google Search Console (it takes about 15 minutes and it’s free), submit your sitemap and request indexing for each article. This tells Google your content exists, and Google’s data feeds into AI models.
Month 2: Build consistency across platforms.
Keep posting about your authority topics on LinkedIn. Every post reinforces the association between your name and your expertise. When you publish a new newsletter issue on one of your topics, link to the full article on your website in the post or in the comments.
The goal isn’t to create new content for every platform. It’s to make sure every platform tells the same story about what you specialize in. A LinkedIn post this week on equity comp, a newsletter issue next week that goes deeper on one angle of it, and an article on your website that answers the specific question prospects are asking. All connected and all reinforcing the same expertise.
Month 3: Expand your footprint.
Look for opportunities to get your name and expertise referenced on sources beyond your own website. A guest article on an industry publication. A comment or quote in a news story. A podcast appearance where you discussed your authority topic. Each independent reference gives AI another data point that increases confidence.
You don’t need to be everywhere. You need a handful of references across independent sources that all point in the same direction.
The Prompt
This prompt does two things. First, it audits your current AI visibility by searching for you the way a prospect would. Second, it generates a complete action plan for improving your discoverability based on what it finds.
