New Study Finds Advisor-Owned Websites Lead ChatGPT's Financial Advisor Recommendations

ASHEVILLE, N.C. - Rezul -- A new independent study from Bonfire Studio, a website design and digital strategy firm serving regulated industries, finds that ChatGPT's recommendations for financial advisors vary dramatically based on the type of question asked.

The study ran a structured set of prompts through ChatGPT, simulating the way a prospective client might ask the AI assistant to recommend a financial advisor, then tracked and categorized every source the model cited in its responses. The methodology and full findings, including limitations, are publicly available.

Key findings include:

• Advisor-owned websites were the largest single source category, accounting for 45.0% of all 1,048 citations recorded, and appearing in 83.7% of all answers. The single most-cited domain in the entire study was napfa.org, the National Association of Personal Financial Advisors, with 97 citations, more than any individual advisory firm.
• Visibility varied enormously by question type. Advisor-owned sites captured 66.3% of citations when the question asked for a tax planning advisor, but only 21.1% when the question asked for an estate planning advisor, a 45-percentage-point range within the same profession.
• Repeating a question produced different firms but the same source mix. Asking the same set of questions twice on the same day, only 53.6% of individual firm domains recurred between runs, yet advisor-owned share of citations held steady at 49.1% in both.
• Advisor-owned share declined as market size increased, from 49.1% of citations in Charlotte to 36.9% in New York, a pattern that held consistently across all five metros studied.

"When we set out to do this study, we were curious where ChatGPT pulls from when someone asks it to recommend a financial advisor. What we found is that the single most common source was advisory firms' own websites — ahead of directories, professional associations, and financial media. The findings suggest a firm's own website plays a bigger role in how it shows up than a lot of people in this industry assume," said Sara MacQueen, President of Bonfire Studio. "Advisory has always run on referrals, and AI is quietly becoming a modern one. When someone asks ChatGPT who to hire, it names firms. That's worth paying attention to."

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Bonfire Studio conducted the research independently of any client engagement, with the study design and prompt set finalized before any results were reviewed.

The full study, including methodology and limitations, is available at:
https://meetbonfire.com/research/chatgpt-financial-advisors