Marketing

How to Get Your Firm Recommended by ChatGPT and Perplexity

Getting named inside AI answers is now a real client-acquisition channel for advisors. Here is the research-backed playbook: what ChatGPT and Perplexity actually read, and the five moves that get a firm recommended.

Bhavya Barot

Bhavya Barot

— 9 min read
How to Get Your Firm Recommended by ChatGPT and Perplexity

When a prospect opens ChatGPT and types "who is a good financial advisor for tech employees in Austin," someone gets named. It is either you or it is the firm down the street. This article is about how that decision gets made, and what an advisory firm can actually do about it.

We maintain a step-by-step version of this playbook here: How can an RIA get clients from ChatGPT and AI search?

Key takeaways

  • AI assistants recommend the firms the web already talks about: brand web mentions correlate with AI visibility (0.664) far more than backlinks.
  • ChatGPT assembles its answer from your site, directory profiles, press, podcasts, and reviews - not from any ad you can buy.
  • First step: complete, consistent public facts plus content that answers real client questions in a form an AI can lift and cite.

On this page

We spend our days inside this question at Valora, so we read the research seriously. Three findings do most of the work in this piece, and they are worth your time even if you never read anything else on the topic.

Finding one: AI assistants lean hard on what the web already says about you

Ahrefs analyzed 75,000 brands to see which factors correlate with visibility in Google's AI Overviews, and the result was blunt: the strongest correlations were with how often a brand is mentioned across the web, not with classic SEO metrics. Brand web mentions showed a correlation of 0.664 with AI Overview visibility, far ahead of backlinks. You can read the full analysis on the Ahrefs blog (ahrefs.com/blog/ai-overview-brand-correlation). A follow-up study extended the same pattern to ChatGPT and Google's AI Mode: the brands AI talks about are the brands the web talks about (ahrefs.com/blog/ai-brand-visibility-correlations).

Translate that into advisory terms. ChatGPT does not know you are good. It knows what is written about you: your own site, your directory profiles, press mentions, podcast appearances, reviews, and the places other sites reference your name. The recommendation is assembled from that material.

Finding two: AI answers cite sources, and you can become one of them

The most cited academic work on this is the GEO paper from researchers at Princeton, Georgia Tech, the Allen Institute, and IIT Delhi, published at KDD 2024 (arxiv.org/abs/2311.09735). They tested which content characteristics make generative engines more likely to surface and cite a source. Three tactics stood out, lifting visibility by up to 40 percent in their benchmark: including relevant citations, adding quotations from credible voices, and backing claims with statistics.

Notice what those tactics have in common. They make your content look like evidence. A page that says "we provide holistic wealth management" gives an AI nothing to work with. A page that says "43 percent of our new clients arrive holding concentrated employer stock, and here is how we handle the first 90 days" gives it a quotable, specific, checkable claim. The AI is looking for the second kind of sentence.

Finding three: the volume of AI answers is large enough to matter

Ahrefs also ran the largest public analysis of AI Overviews to date, covering 55.8 million AI Overviews across 590 million searches (ahrefs.com/blog/insights-from-56-million-ai-overviews). AI-generated answers are no longer an experiment on the edge of search. They are a standard part of how people research decisions, and high-trust decisions like choosing an advisor are exactly the ones people research hardest.

Put the research together and the playbook is not mysterious. It has five parts.

1. Decide what you want to be recommended for. "Financial advisor" is too broad to win. The AI assembles answers to specific questions: advisor for physicians, advisor for equity compensation, advisor for retirement income in a specific city. Pick the two or three questions your best clients would actually type, and build your visibility around those.

2. Say the same thing everywhere. Your website, your Google Business profile, your LinkedIn, your directory listings, and your ADV should describe the same firm, serving the same people, in the same words. Inconsistency reads as uncertainty, and uncertain entities do not get named.

3. Publish pages that answer real questions with real substance. Not keyword pages. Pages that genuinely answer "how does a 401(k) rollover work when you leave a tech company" with specifics, numbers, and your point of view. Per the GEO research, cite credible sources, quote real voices, and use statistics. Be the source the AI quotes.

4. Earn mentions off your own site. Guest on the podcasts your peers listen to. Contribute quotes to trade publications. Keep your directory profiles complete and current. Every credible third-party mention is another vote the models can count, and the Ahrefs correlation data says mentions are the currency that matters most.

5. Make your site machine-readable. Clear page structure, descriptive headings, FAQ sections, schema markup where it fits, and no important text trapped inside images. The AI can only recommend what it can read.

The part nobody wants to hear

This compounds slowly. A directory cleanup takes a weekend; a citation footprint takes quarters. The firms that will own these answers in two years are the ones publishing and earning mentions now, while most of the industry still treats AI search as a curiosity. That is genuinely good news: the bar is effort and consistency, not budget.

If you want a starting point, run your own firm through the question your best prospect would ask. We built a free two-minute check for exactly that: Can ChatGPT find your firm? The answer is usually uncomfortable, and it is always useful.

ChatGPT and Perplexity do not read the same web

One nuance worth knowing: the major AI assistants do not cite identical source sets. A 2026 measurement of 3,292 citations across ChatGPT and Perplexity found meaningful differences in how often each engine surfaces small businesses and which domains each prefers (lumengeo.co/blog/which-ai-engine-cites-small-businesses). Perplexity behaves like a search engine with citations attached, leaning on pages that rank well and read clearly. ChatGPT leans more heavily on entities it already "knows" from training data and on heavily referenced sources.

The practical consequence: you cannot optimize for one engine and assume the others follow. The safe strategy is the boring one - be mentioned widely, be described consistently, and publish content worth citing. That portfolio works on every engine, including the ones that do not exist yet.

A worked example: two firms, one question

Imagine two RIAs in the same city, similar size, similar credentials. A prospect asks Perplexity: "financial advisor for doctors in Denver."

Firm A's website says it offers "comprehensive wealth management for individuals and families." Its directory profiles were last touched in 2022. It publishes nothing. Nothing else on the web mentions it by name.

Firm B's website has a page titled "Financial planning for physicians in Denver" that walks through residency-to-attending transitions, disability insurance, and student loan strategy with actual numbers. The founder has been quoted twice in trade press about physician finances. Three podcast appearances carry show notes with the firm's name and specialty. Its profiles are complete and identical everywhere.

Firm B gets named. Not because it is better - for all we know Firm A is brilliant - but because Firm B left a trail of specific, consistent, citable evidence and Firm A left none. The AI can only recommend what it can see.

What does not work

Three temptations to skip. First, thin "AI bait" pages - dozens of near-duplicate pages targeting every city and niche combination. They dilute your site's credibility with both Google and the AI engines, and they are obvious to a human prospect the moment one ranks. Second, fake reviews and manufactured mentions; the models are trained on the web's consensus, and manufactured consensus is both detectable and, for an advisor, a compliance problem. Third, waiting for a silver-bullet tool. There is no submission form for ChatGPT's recommendations. There is only evidence, accumulated.

How to measure progress

Once a month, run a fixed set of prospect questions through ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Mode from a clean browser: your niche, your city, your specialty. Record whether you appear, who does, and which sources get cited. The cited sources tell you exactly what to build next - if a competitor keeps getting named off a podcast transcript or a directory category, you know where your next effort goes. Treat it like a ranking report, because that is what it is becoming.

Done researching? The free readiness check shows whether AI search can find and recommend your firm, and you can reach the team straight from it: Can ChatGPT find your firm?

The honest summary

Getting recommended by AI is not a trick. It is the same reputation work good firms have always done - publish useful things, be specific about who you serve, show up in places that quote you - with one new requirement: the evidence has to exist in writing, in public, in a form a machine can read. Advisors who built their practices on handshake referrals now need that same reputation to exist on the web. Start before your competitors figure that out.

A 90-day starter plan

Days 1-14: fix the foundation. Rewrite your homepage and bio to name exactly who you serve and what you do for them, in plain language. Align every directory profile, your LinkedIn headline, and your Google Business profile to the same description. This is the consistency layer everything else sits on.

Days 15-45: publish three answer pages. Pick the three questions your best clients asked before they hired you. Write a full page on each, with specifics, numbers, and your firm's actual point of view. Cite credible sources where you make claims - the GEO research says citations and statistics are what make content quotable to a machine.

Days 46-90: earn five outside mentions. Pitch two podcasts your peers listen to. Offer quotes to two trade publications covering advisor topics. Speak at one local or virtual event with a public page. Five real mentions in 45 days is achievable for any firm willing to ask, and each one compounds.

Then repeat the cycle. Measure monthly, adjust the questions you target, and keep going. Ninety days will not make you dominant, but it will make you visible - and in most markets right now, visible is enough to be the only firm in your niche that shows up at all.

Questions advisors ask us about this

Does this replace referrals? No. It feeds the same moment. Referred prospects still check you out before they call, and an increasing share of that checking happens inside an AI answer. Being named there makes the referral stick; being absent raises a doubt you never hear about.

How long until it works? Expect a quarter before consistent appearances, and a year before the flywheel is obvious. The Ahrefs correlation data is clear that mentions drive visibility, and mentions accumulate at the speed of real reputation work.

Is this different for small firms? It favors them, for now. A solo RIA with a tight niche and five good answer pages can own a specific question outright, because the big firms publish generic content at scale. Specific beats big inside an AI answer.

Sources: Ahrefs, "An Analysis of AI Overview Brand Visibility Factors" (75,000 brands); Ahrefs, "Top Brand Visibility Factors in ChatGPT, AI Mode, and AI Overviews"; Aggarwal et al., "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization," KDD 2024 (arxiv.org/abs/2311.09735); Ahrefs, "Insights From 55.8M AI Overviews Across 590M Searches."

Where this advice has limits

Correlation is not a guarantee: strong web mentions make citation more likely, not certain, and AI answers vary by prompt, model, and day. None of this replaces the fundamentals - a firm whose site cannot convert a visitor gains little from being mentioned.

Where Valora fits

This is the system we are building for advisors - monitoring what AI engines say about your firm and building the mentions and content that earn recommendations. See your starting point with the free readiness check: Can ChatGPT find your firm?

The bottom line

AI recommendations are assembled from what the web already says about you. Make your facts complete and consistent, publish answers worth citing, and earn mentions in the places these engines read. That is the whole game, and any firm willing to do the work can play it.

Frequently asked questions

1. How does ChatGPT decide which financial advisors to recommend?

It assembles an answer from what the web already says about you: your site, directory profiles, press, podcasts, reviews, and other mentions. Ahrefs' analysis of 75,000 brands found web mentions correlate with AI visibility (0.664) far more than backlinks.

No. There is no ad slot inside a ChatGPT answer. Visibility comes from being mentioned and cited across the public web in ways AI engines can verify.

3. What is the first step to showing up in AI answers?

Make your firm's public facts complete and consistent - who you serve, what you do, where, credentials, fees - then publish content that answers the exact questions your ideal clients ask, in a form an AI can lift and cite.

Want to see whether AI search can find and recommend your firm? Run the free readiness check - and if you want to talk it through, you can reach us straight from the results: Can ChatGPT find your firm?

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