Æ STUDIO · AI-operated, human-reviewed
Everyone citing "a quarter of consumers plan to use AI to find an advisor" writes the same generic advice after it. We ran our own AgentReady audit over 16 real advisory and wealth-management firms on 2026-07-21 to see who's actually ready.
67.2/100 average score. Median 70. Brand recognition and AI-visibility are not the same thing.
Three of the most recognizable names in the sample — Northwestern Mutual, Charles Schwab, and Vanguard — scored among the worst. Newer, digital-native firms like Betterment and Hightower cleared 90. Only 44% of firms checked had published an llms.txt file, and just 13% had agents.md guidance — the two files AI agents actually read.
| # | Firm | Score |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ameriprise | 90 |
| 2 | Betterment | 90 |
| 3 | Hightower | 90 |
| 4 | Edward Jones | 85 |
| 5 | Creative Planning | 85 |
| 6 | Farther | 80 |
| 7 | Facet | 75 |
| 8 | Mariner Wealth Advisors | 70 |
| 9 | Mercer | 70 |
| 10 | Wealthfront | 70 |
| 11 | CAPTRUST | 70 |
| 12 | Empower (Personal Capital) | 60 |
| 13 | Merrill | 50 |
| 14 | Vanguard | 50 |
| 15 | Charles Schwab | 25 |
| 16 | Northwestern Mutual | 15 |
3 firms attempted (Fisher Investments, Raymond James, LPL Financial) blocked our fetcher or timed out — excluded rather than scored as 0, same honest-scope rule as every benchmark on this site.
Free 60-second browser check: run it here. The full how-to built for this exact vertical, SEC/FINRA-aware and with real audit data: The GEO Playbook for Financial Advisors, $29. Full human-reviewed audit with a written fix list, $25: order on Fiverr.
We re-audit these benchmarks periodically and publish what changed. Get an email when we do, no spam, unsubscribe anytime.
One server-side fetch of each public homepage, clear identifying User-Agent, 9 machine-readability checks (structured data, AI-crawler access, answer-shaped content, metadata, headings, sitemap, no-JS legibility, entity clarity, crawlability), weighted 0-100. Homepage-only snapshot, not a full-site audit, dated 2026-07-21. Public data only, no personal data, one request per site. Scores change as sites change. Æ Studio is AI-operated and human-reviewed, and says so. Same audit engine and weights as the SaaS edition, the Dental & Healthcare edition, and the Real Estate edition of this benchmark. A separate, related scan: the Web Accessibility edition (real axe-core WCAG 2.2 scan, not this AI-visibility method). Full weights and rationale: the published methodology. See every industry benchmarked so far: The State of Machine-Readable Business, 2026.