We crawled every own-domain website listed in the SEC’s investment adviser roster to see how registered investment advisers actually build and market their sites. Of 17,263 SEC-registered advisers on the roster dated November 2, 2026, 10,262 list their own domain. Those firms point to 9,926 unique websites, and 9,181 of them (92.5%) returned a measurable homepage in our November 2026 crawl. The headline: RIA websites are built for compliance, not for clients. 67.7% of sites run by firms that serve individuals link their Form CRS from the homepage, yet only 6.9% show or link to testimonials or reviews, 7.7% offer an online scheduling link and 1.9% state a price.
Short answer: In a November 2026 crawl of 9,181 live websites listed by SEC-registered investment advisers, 6.9% of individual-serving firms’ homepages showed testimonials or reviews, three years after the Marketing Rule compliance date of November 4, 2022. Only 2.9% of all sites blocked any of five major AI crawlers in robots.txt, while 15.5% published an llms.txt file, most of them generated automatically by the website platform. WordPress runs 41.0% of sites; advisor-specific vendors (FMG, Advisor Websites / Snappy Kraken, Twenty Over Ten, Broadridge) run 14.3% of individual-serving sites.
State of RIA Websites 2026: executive summary
This is the first public crawl of the full SEC-registered adviser population’s websites that we know of. Vendor benchmarks exist, but they cover a vendor’s own clients or a few hundred hand-picked sites. Here the sampling frame is the regulator’s own list, and every signal is defined, counted and checked by hand on a sample.
Three patterns stand out. First, the compliance layer is mostly in place and the marketing layer mostly is not: links to Form CRS, Form ADV and a phone number are common, while proof (testimonials), pricing and self-booking are rare. Second, the AI question is being answered by software defaults, not by firms: most llms.txt files come from Wix, GoDaddy, Duda or a WordPress SEO plugin, and close to half of the AI-crawler blocks come from Cloudflare’s managed robots.txt setting. Third, firm size changes the picture: firms under $100 million in regulatory assets are the least likely to have a website at all, and the largest firms are the most likely to block AI crawlers.
Key findings: 14 numbers from 9,181 RIA websites
- 8.2% of SEC-registered advisers (1,413 of 17,263) list no website at all on Form ADV. Among firms under $100 million in regulatory assets the share is 20.0%; at $10 billion and up it is 4.5%.
- 32.4% of firms (5,587) have a social media profile in the roster’s website field, LinkedIn in 3,405 cases. Only 134 firms (0.8%) list a social profile as their only web address.
- 92.5% of 9,926 unique adviser websites returned a measurable homepage; 2.0% were unreachable (no DNS record, refused or timed out after a retry) and 4.2% refused our crawler with a bot challenge or a 401, 403, 429 or 503 response.
- 97.1% of live sites load over valid HTTPS, but 10.9% still serve the plain http:// version instead of redirecting it to https://.
- WordPress runs 41.0% of all live RIA sites and 41.3% of individual-serving sites. Squarespace (8.5%), FMG (8.2%) and Wix (6.5%) follow among firms that serve individuals.
- Advisor-specific vendors run 14.3% of individual-serving firms’ sites but only 0.6% of sites for firms with no individual clients. FMG leads with 473 sites, then Advisor Websites / Snappy Kraken (229) and Twenty Over Ten (111).
- Only 6.9% of individual-serving firms show or link to testimonials or reviews on the homepage. On Form ADV, 9.7% of the same single-firm sites’ owners say their advertisements include testimonials.
- Of 396 individual-serving homepages with testimonial or review content, 210 belong to firms whose latest Form ADV answers No to Item 5.L(1)(c), the testimonials question. A hand check of 25 of them confirmed real client or customer testimonial content on 22.
- 67.7% of individual-serving firms link Form CRS from the homepage and 40.5% link Form ADV or the SEC adviser search. Among firms with no individual clients, who mostly have no Form CRS obligation, the CRS share is 6.3%.
- Only 2.9% of live RIA sites block at least one of GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended or CCBot site-wide. At firms with $10 billion or more in assets the share is 4.4%, against 2.4% at $100 million to $500 million.
- 128 of 262 AI-blocking sites (48.9%) carry Cloudflare’s managed robots.txt block, a setting in the CDN rather than a line a firm wrote.
- 15.5% of live sites publish an llms.txt file, more than five times the AI-blocking rate. 74.7% of those files carry the fingerprint of a platform or plugin that generates them automatically; 533 of 573 Wix-built RIA sites have one.
- 7.7% of individual-serving sites link an online scheduler. Calendly appears on 335 sites, more than every other scheduling tool combined (155). 72.3% show a phone number and 56.6% link a client login.
- 1.9% of individual-serving homepages state an advisory price (a fee percentage, a flat or hourly dollar fee, or a subscription rate), even though 15.3% describe themselves as fee-only. 7.7% of individual-serving sites still carry only a Universal Analytics tag, which Google stopped processing in July 2023.
Who has an RIA website at all: the Form ADV funnel
Every SEC-registered adviser must list its websites in Form ADV Part 1A, Item 1.I. The SEC investment adviser roster we used (the firm roster download dated November 2, 2026) carries one web address per firm plus a count of how many the firm reported. That single slot is the starting point for everything below.
| Step | Firms or sites | Share |
|---|---|---|
| SEC-registered advisers on the roster | 17,263 | 100% |
| List no website | 1,413 | 8.2% |
| Social profile in the website slot (LinkedIn, Facebook, X, YouTube, Instagram and others) | 5,587 | 32.4% |
| of which: a social profile is the only web address reported | 134 | 0.8% |
| Own domain in the website slot | 10,262 | 59.4% |
| Unique websites behind those firms (after removing shared domains) | 9,926 | |
| Live, measurable homepage | 9,181 | 92.5% of sites |
| Refused the crawler (bot challenge, 401, 403, 429, 503) | 417 | 4.2% of sites |
| Other HTTP error (404, 410, 500 and similar) | 97 | 1.0% of sites |
| Unreachable (no DNS, connection refused, timeout after retry) | 202 | 2.0% of sites |
| Placeholder, server default page or parked domain | 28 | 0.3% of sites |
Two notes on reading this. A social URL in the website slot does not mean the firm has no website: 5,453 of those firms reported more than one web address, and the roster file shows only one per firm. And 555 of the live sites (6.0%) redirected to a different domain, which can reflect a rebrand, a merger or a parent brand; we measured the page the visitor actually lands on.
| Regulatory AUM band | Firms | List no website | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under $100M | 1,812 | 363 | 20.0% |
| $100M to $500M | 7,621 | 654 | 8.6% |
| $500M to $1B | 2,440 | 142 | 5.8% |
| $1B to $10B | 4,020 | 193 | 4.8% |
| $10B and up | 1,370 | 61 | 4.5% |
Who builds RIA websites: platform and vendor market share
We identified the platform from the page source: generator meta tags, the hosts that serve the site’s own template assets, and vendor credits. Advisor-specific vendors are counted first when a site matches both a vendor and a general CMS. Advisor Websites and Snappy Kraken are shown together because Snappy Kraken acquired Advisor Websites in May 2022, and in our data every site carrying a Snappy Kraken “powered by” credit was served from Advisor Websites infrastructure.
| Platform | Individual-serving sites | Share | All live RIA sites | Share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| WordPress | 2,376 | 41.3% | 3,761 | 41.0% |
| Unidentified/custom | 940 | 16.3% | 1,870 | 20.4% |
| Squarespace | 487 | 8.5% | 778 | 8.5% |
| FMG | 473 | 8.2% | 486 | 5.3% |
| Wix | 374 | 6.5% | 571 | 6.2% |
| Advisor Websites / Snappy Kraken | 229 | 4.0% | 233 | 2.5% |
| Webflow | 189 | 3.3% | 380 | 4.1% |
| GoDaddy Website Builder | 120 | 2.1% | 191 | 2.1% |
| Twenty Over Ten | 111 | 1.9% | 113 | 1.2% |
| Next.js (custom) | 108 | 1.9% | 251 | 2.7% |
| Sitecore | 64 | 1.1% | 89 | 1.0% |
| Duda | 58 | 1.0% | 66 | 0.7% |
| HubSpot CMS | 49 | 0.9% | 80 | 0.9% |
| Adobe Experience Manager | 45 | 0.8% | 84 | 0.9% |
| Drupal | 38 | 0.7% | 69 | 0.8% |
| Weebly | 24 | 0.4% | 34 | 0.4% |
| Framer | 22 | 0.4% | 39 | 0.4% |
| Joomla | 12 | 0.2% | 14 | 0.2% |
| Showit | 11 | 0.2% | 14 | 0.2% |
| Gatsby (custom) | 10 | 0.2% | 31 | 0.3% |
| Broadridge | 8 | 0.1% | 8 | 0.1% |
The split by client type is the story. Among sites of firms with no individual clients (private funds, institutional managers), advisor-specific vendors hold 0.6%; those firms skew to WordPress, Webflow, custom builds and enterprise systems such as Sitecore and Adobe Experience Manager. Among individual-serving firms the advisor vendors hold 14.3%, and their share is highest in the $100 million to $500 million band (17.7%) and lowest at $10 billion and up (4.0%). 1,870 live sites (20.4%) showed no fingerprint we could attribute: custom builds, headless setups or platforms our fingerprints do not cover.
AI crawlers and llms.txt: blocking is rare and often accidental
We parsed each site’s robots.txt the way a compliant crawler does and recorded whether five AI crawlers may fetch the homepage: GPTBot (OpenAI model training), ClaudeBot (Anthropic model training), PerplexityBot (Perplexity search results), Google-Extended (a control token for Gemini training and grounding, which Google says does not affect Search ranking) and CCBot (Common Crawl). A site counts as blocking when a group that applies to the bot disallows the whole site.
| Regulatory AUM band | Live sites | Blocks any of 5 | GPTBot | ClaudeBot | PerplexityBot | llms.txt |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under $100M | 920 | 3.2% | 2.9% | 2.9% | 1.1% | 18.0% |
| $100M to $500M | 4,296 | 2.4% | 2.1% | 2.0% | 0.5% | 17.0% |
| $500M to $1B | 1,321 | 2.4% | 2.4% | 2.0% | 0.6% | 14.2% |
| $1B to $10B | 2,079 | 3.6% | 3.3% | 3.0% | 1.0% | 12.9% |
| $10B and up | 565 | 4.4% | 3.9% | 3.2% | 1.6% | 12.6% |
| All live sites | 9,181 | 2.9% | 2.6% | 2.4% | 0.8% | 15.5% |
Three details matter more than the totals. First, 128 of the 262 blocking sites carry the Cloudflare managed robots.txt block, which disallows GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, CCBot and several others but not PerplexityBot. That is why PerplexityBot is blocked on only 0.8% of sites. Second, 56 blocking sites never name an AI bot: they disallow every crawler with User-agent: *, which also tells Google and Bing to stay out. Third, the search-side bots are blocked even less often: OAI-SearchBot on 0.7% and Claude-SearchBot on 0.6% of sites. OpenAI says sites that opt out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, while blocking GPTBot only signals that content should not be used for training.
| Where the llms.txt file came from | Sites | Share of llms.txt files |
|---|---|---|
| Wix | 533 | 37.4% |
| Other / hand-made or unknown | 360 | 25.3% |
| WordPress plugin (Yoast) | 196 | 13.8% |
| GoDaddy Website Builder | 114 | 8.0% |
| WordPress plugin (AIOSEO) | 78 | 5.5% |
| Duda | 65 | 4.6% |
| Webflow | 42 | 2.9% |
| WordPress plugin (Rank Math) | 29 | 2.0% |
| Squarespace | 8 | 0.6% |
llms.txt looks like an AI-readiness choice, but in this population it is mostly a platform default: 533 of 573 Wix sites (93.0%) and 114 of 191 GoDaddy Website Builder sites have one, against 9 of 778 Squarespace sites. Google says you do not need new machine-readable files or AI text files to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, so treat the file as optional. If you want a practical primer, our guide to what llms.txt does and does not do covers it.
Testimonials three years after the Marketing Rule
The amended Marketing Rule let advisers use testimonials and endorsements with disclosures, and the SEC set the compliance date as November 4, 2022. Form ADV now asks about it directly: Item 5.L(1)(c) asks whether any of the adviser’s advertisements include testimonials. We compared that answer with what each homepage shows.
| Regulatory AUM band (individual-serving firms) | Live sites | Testimonials or reviews on homepage | Review widget | Testimonial disclosure text | Form ADV says ads include testimonials |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under $100M | 443 | 7.2% | 2.0% | 2.3% | 7.0% |
| $100M to $500M | 3,309 | 7.0% | 1.4% | 2.8% | 7.2% |
| $500M to $1B | 853 | 7.7% | 1.1% | 2.5% | 10.1% |
| $1B to $10B | 944 | 6.2% | 1.5% | 2.5% | 16.3% |
| $10B and up | 202 | 4.5% | 1.0% | 0.0% | 22.8% |
| All individual-serving | 5,751 | 6.9% | 1.4% | 2.6% | 9.6% |
Adoption is low at every size and lowest at the top: between 7.0% and 7.7% of individual-serving firms below $1 billion show testimonial content, against 4.5% at $10 billion and up. Review platforms barely register: dedicated review widgets (Indyfin, Wealthtender, Google review embeds and similar) appear on 1.4% of individual-serving homepages.
The cross-check against Form ADV is the more pointed result. We limited it to sites listed by exactly one firm, so the ADV answer and the website belong to the same adviser.
| Individual-serving, single-firm sites | Homepage shows testimonials | Homepage does not | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Form ADV 5.L(1)(c) = Yes | 186 | 340 | 526 |
| Form ADV 5.L(1)(c) = No | 210 | 4,686 | 4,896 |
Most firms that say they use testimonials do not show them on the homepage (340 of 526), which is normal: testimonials often live on an interior page, in a review profile or in social posts. The other cell is harder to explain away. 210 homepages show testimonial or review content while the firm’s latest ADV says its advertisements contain none. In a hand check of 25 of these sites, 22 showed genuine client or customer testimonials; 2 only mentioned testimonials in a compensation disclaimer, and 1 showed testimonials from the firm’s own representatives, which Rule 206(4)-1(b)(4)(ii) treats differently and Item 5.L(1)(c) excludes. Timing can explain some cases, since a site can change after the annual filing. Still, the SEC’s Division of Examinations said in an April 2024 risk alert that it found advisers who inaccurately reported on Form ADV that their advertisements did not include third-party ratings when their websites did. The same check applies to testimonials. We do not name any firm. For the mechanics of using testimonials compliantly, see our guide to client testimonials and case studies for financial advisors.
Compliance links vs conversion basics on RIA homepages
Form CRS General Instruction 11.A says an adviser must post its current relationship summary “prominently on your public website, if you have one, in a location and format that is easily accessible for retail investors.” The instruction does not name the homepage specifically. The homepage is still the easiest place to satisfy “prominently”, and most firms that serve individuals use it.
| Homepage signal | Individual-serving firms | No individual clients | All live sites |
|---|---|---|---|
| Form CRS link | 67.7% | 6.3% | 44.8% |
| Form ADV or SEC adviser search link | 40.5% | 7.6% | 28.2% |
| Phone number visible | 72.3% | 41.4% | 60.8% |
| Client login or portal link | 56.6% | 35.1% | 48.6% |
| Blog or insights link | 50.7% | 41.0% | 47.1% |
| Mentions fees or pricing | 38.9% | 15.2% | 30.0% |
| Uses the words “fee-only” | 15.3% | 0.5% | 9.8% |
| Embedded video player | 8.8% | 5.8% | 7.7% |
| Online scheduling link | 7.7% | 1.0% | 5.2% |
| Testimonials or reviews | 6.9% | 2.2% | 5.2% |
| States an advisory price | 1.9% | 1.0% | 1.6% |
| Meta (Facebook) pixel | 4.1% | 1.1% | 3.0% |
The pattern is consistent. Things a regulator or custodian asks for (CRS, ADV, a client login) are common. Things a prospect uses to decide (a price, proof from other clients, a way to book without a phone call) are rare. Client logins point most often to Schwab (587 sites), eMoney (389), Orion (292), Black Diamond (252), Tamarac or Envestnet (210) and Fidelity (209). Our checklist for what a high-converting financial advisor website needs covers the fixes in detail.
Analytics and content: who measures and who publishes
53.7% of live RIA sites load Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager on the homepage; 3.0% load a Meta pixel, 1.8% a LinkedIn Insight tag and 2.7% HubSpot tracking. 7.5% of sites carry only a Universal Analytics (UA-) tag, and standard Universal Analytics properties stopped processing data on July 1, 2023, so on those sites Google Analytics records nothing. Structured data is common but shallow: 61.4% have some JSON-LD, and the most common types are WebSite (4,556 sites) and WebPage (2,775), while 11.9% declare FinancialService, 1.2% FAQPage and 5.4% Person markup.
On content, 47.1% of homepages link a blog, insights or commentary section. We could read a publish date on 1,565 of those section pages; of those, 20.2% had a post dated within 90 days of the crawl and 33.0% within a year. On many FMG sites in our sample the homepage links a vendor-supplied resource center of articles, videos and calculators, so a recent date is not proof the firm wrote anything.
Master table: every signal by firm size
All live sites, grouped by regulatory assets under management from Form ADV Item 5.F(2)(c). Percentages are shares of live sites in each band.
| Signal | Under $100M | $100M to $500M | $500M to $1B | $1B to $10B | $10B and up | All |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Live sites (n) | 920 | 4,296 | 1,321 | 2,079 | 565 | 9,181 |
| Valid HTTPS | 96.7% | 96.5% | 98.0% | 97.2% | 98.9% | 97.1% |
| Redirects http to https | 88.5% | 88.9% | 89.7% | 88.7% | 91.5% | 89.1% |
| robots.txt present | 82.1% | 86.2% | 85.2% | 82.9% | 82.8% | 84.7% |
| Blocks 1+ AI crawler | 3.2% | 2.4% | 2.4% | 3.6% | 4.4% | 2.9% |
| llms.txt | 18.0% | 17.0% | 14.2% | 12.9% | 12.6% | 15.5% |
| Organization or LocalBusiness schema | 39.8% | 45.6% | 45.8% | 43.3% | 45.7% | 44.5% |
| FAQPage schema | 2.7% | 1.4% | 0.8% | 0.7% | 0.4% | 1.2% |
| Testimonials or reviews | 5.0% | 5.9% | 5.6% | 4.0% | 2.7% | 5.2% |
| Scheduling link | 5.3% | 7.3% | 4.4% | 2.2% | 2.1% | 5.2% |
| Blog or insights link | 35.1% | 46.3% | 47.7% | 50.1% | 59.8% | 47.1% |
| Client login | 32.4% | 50.8% | 54.8% | 48.4% | 43.9% | 48.6% |
| Video player | 6.0% | 7.2% | 7.8% | 8.2% | 12.0% | 7.7% |
| Phone visible | 46.1% | 67.6% | 66.5% | 55.6% | 38.6% | 60.8% |
| GA or GTM | 43.5% | 50.8% | 55.5% | 59.7% | 66.7% | 53.7% |
| Meta pixel | 4.0% | 3.3% | 2.8% | 2.2% | 2.7% | 3.0% |
| Mentions fees | 35.7% | 35.4% | 27.9% | 20.8% | 19.3% | 30.0% |
| States a price | 6.4% | 1.2% | 1.1% | 0.6% | 1.1% | 1.6% |
| Form CRS link | 34.1% | 54.8% | 48.1% | 33.0% | 21.2% | 44.8% |
| Advisor-specific vendor | 4.3% | 13.7% | 10.4% | 3.2% | 1.4% | 9.2% |
The same signals by headcount (Form ADV Item 5.A, total employees including clerical staff).
| Signal | 1 to 5 employees | 6 to 10 employees | 11 to 50 employees | 51 to 250 employees | 251 and up employees |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Live sites (n) | 3,834 | 1,997 | 2,519 | 645 | 185 |
| Blocks 1+ AI crawler | 2.6% | 2.7% | 2.7% | 4.3% | 7.6% |
| llms.txt | 17.4% | 15.3% | 13.2% | 13.6% | 16.2% |
| Testimonials or reviews | 4.8% | 5.8% | 5.4% | 5.1% | 3.2% |
| Scheduling link | 6.5% | 5.6% | 3.6% | 3.6% | 2.7% |
| Blog or insights link | 38.9% | 47.6% | 54.1% | 62.2% | 59.5% |
| Client login | 44.8% | 50.2% | 51.9% | 53.0% | 47.0% |
| GA or GTM | 44.7% | 54.0% | 61.4% | 73.2% | 66.5% |
| States a price | 2.6% | 1.1% | 0.7% | 0.5% | 2.2% |
| Form CRS link | 52.6% | 48.9% | 35.2% | 28.4% | 26.5% |
| Advisor-specific vendor | 11.8% | 11.0% | 5.6% | 3.4% | 3.8% |
RIA website statistics by state
US states with at least 100 live sites, by the main office state on Form ADV. Sorted by number of sites.
| State | Live sites | Testimonials | Form CRS link | Scheduling link | Blocks 1+ AI crawler | llms.txt | Advisor vendor |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NY | 1,345 | 4.1% | 25.7% | 2.8% | 2.4% | 11.9% | 5.1% |
| CA | 1,033 | 4.4% | 46.0% | 5.7% | 3.2% | 15.2% | 9.4% |
| TX | 613 | 5.7% | 42.7% | 3.9% | 2.9% | 15.5% | 8.6% |
| FL | 572 | 5.8% | 45.5% | 5.6% | 3.1% | 15.6% | 11.5% |
| IL | 329 | 4.9% | 41.6% | 3.3% | 2.1% | 16.4% | 7.0% |
| MA | 313 | 3.8% | 41.9% | 4.5% | 2.9% | 13.4% | 7.0% |
| PA | 293 | 5.1% | 58.4% | 5.8% | 2.7% | 20.1% | 11.3% |
| CT | 260 | 3.5% | 28.8% | 3.5% | 2.7% | 15.0% | 5.8% |
| NJ | 211 | 5.7% | 49.3% | 4.7% | 2.4% | 15.6% | 10.4% |
| OH | 206 | 9.7% | 58.3% | 6.8% | 3.4% | 17.0% | 16.0% |
| CO | 204 | 5.4% | 55.9% | 12.3% | 2.9% | 21.6% | 10.8% |
| GA | 189 | 5.3% | 54.0% | 6.3% | 2.1% | 16.9% | 9.0% |
| MI | 164 | 5.5% | 63.4% | 6.1% | 2.4% | 18.3% | 17.1% |
| VA | 160 | 6.9% | 58.8% | 5.6% | 1.2% | 15.6% | 13.8% |
| NC | 158 | 7.0% | 63.3% | 7.0% | 3.2% | 10.1% | 9.5% |
| WA | 153 | 11.1% | 56.9% | 7.2% | 3.9% | 15.7% | 11.8% |
| MN | 144 | 6.2% | 53.5% | 4.2% | 4.2% | 16.7% | 16.0% |
| MD | 129 | 7.8% | 59.7% | 9.3% | 3.1% | 16.3% | 17.1% |
| AZ | 121 | 11.6% | 59.5% | 10.7% | 0.8% | 16.5% | 13.2% |
| TN | 114 | 1.8% | 55.3% | 5.3% | 5.3% | 14.0% | 7.9% |
| MO | 106 | 7.5% | 55.7% | 10.4% | 7.5% | 12.3% | 12.3% |
What advisors should do with these numbers
The data says the bar is low, which makes small fixes visible. Run this 10-point check on your own homepage. Each line has a pass condition you can verify in a few minutes.
| Check | Pass condition | Where RIA sites stand today |
|---|---|---|
| Form CRS is one click from the homepage | A link labelled “Form CRS” or “Client Relationship Summary” in the header or footer opens the current PDF | 67.7% |
| Proof is visible | At least one compliant client testimonial or third-party review, with the clear and prominent disclosures Rule 206(4)-1(b)(1) requires | 6.9% |
| ADV matches the website | If the site shows testimonials, endorsements or ratings, your latest Form ADV Item 5.L answers say Yes | see the cross-check above |
| A prospect can book without calling | A scheduler link (Calendly, OnceHub, Microsoft Bookings or similar) on the homepage | 7.7% |
| Price is stated | Your fee schedule, flat fee or minimum annual fee appears on the homepage or one click away | 1.9% |
| Analytics actually record | View source shows a G- measurement ID or a GTM- container, not only a UA- ID | 7.7% fail |
| AI search bots are allowed on purpose | robots.txt does not disallow OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot or Claude-SearchBot unless you decided to; check any Cloudflare managed block | 0.8% block PerplexityBot |
| http redirects to https | Typing http://yourdomain.com lands on https:// | 10.9% fail |
| Organization markup names the firm | JSON-LD with Organization or FinancialService, your legal name, address, phone and sameAs links to your SEC adviser page and LinkedIn | 44.5% |
| The ADV website field is clean | Item 1.I lists your own domain; the SEC roster file carries only one address per firm, and for many firms that address is a LinkedIn page | 32.4% of firms show a social URL |
Two judgement calls sit behind the checklist. Blocking AI training crawlers is a reasonable business choice, but blocking the search-side bots can remove you from those tools’ search answers (OpenAI states this for OAI-SearchBot); our guide on how financial advisors get cited by ChatGPT and AI search explains the trade-off. And adding testimonials is a compliance project before it is a marketing one: the disclosures, the written agreement for paid testimonials and the ADV answer all have to line up. If you want help prioritising, you can book a consultation. For context on the wider industry, our RIA industry statistics page covers firm counts, assets and growth, and the AI Search Readiness Study 2026 applies a similar crawl to small-business sites.
Methodology
Sample. The SEC investment adviser firm roster (Form ADV data, FOIA download) dated November 2, 2026, with 17,263 SEC-registered advisers. We took the “Website Address” field, separated social and media platforms (LinkedIn, Facebook, X/Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, podcast and blog hosts and similar), and normalised the rest to a host name without “www”. 10,262 firms map to 9,926 unique hosts. When several firms list the same host (affiliated advisers, relying advisers, a parent brand), the site is counted once and takes the attributes of the largest firm by regulatory AUM. Firm size, headcount, state and client type come from Form ADV Items 5.F(2)(c), 5.A, the main office address and 5.D. “Individual-serving” means the firm reports at least one individual or high net worth individual client in Item 5.D(a)(1) or 5.D(b)(1); 5,751 of 9,181 live sites belong to such firms.
Crawl. Fielded November 11, 2026 with a resumable asynchronous crawler: one host per worker, 15 concurrent workers across different hosts (an initial pass ran at 40; every host that failed in it was re-queued), a 15 second timeout per request, a standard desktop browser user agent, no form submissions. For each host we fetched the homepage over https (falling back to http, and to the www variant), probed whether http:// redirects to https://, fetched /robots.txt and /llms.txt, and fetched at most one extra page: the blog or insights index linked from the homepage. Hosts that failed were retried once at 5 workers. No JavaScript was executed, so content injected by scripts is not seen; 660 live homepages (7.2%) returned under 300 characters of visible text and are kept in the denominator, which makes every content signal a floor.
| Signal | Definition |
|---|---|
| Live (measurable) | HTTP 2xx after redirects, not a bot challenge, not a parked, placeholder or default server page |
| Valid HTTPS | Homepage loads at https:// with a certificate that passes standard verification |
| Platform | Generator meta tag, platform asset hosts (for example static.fmgsuite.com/site, static.twentyoverten.com template files, /sites/*.advisor.ws/files, static1.squarespace.com, static.wixstatic.com, /wp-content/) or a vendor “powered by” credit |
| Blocks an AI crawler | robots.txt group matching the bot token (or the * group if none) disallows / with no Allow: / |
| llms.txt | /llms.txt returns 200 as plain text (not HTML, not a redirect to another path), at least 20 characters |
| Schema types | All @type values in parsed application/ld+json blocks, including @graph; LocalBusiness includes subtypes such as FinancialService |
| Testimonials or reviews | Visible text with testimonial or client-review wording (stock-photo disclaimers removed) or an embedded review widget (Indyfin, Wealthtender, Google review plugins and similar) |
| Scheduling link | Link or embed for Calendly, SavvyCal, Acuity, HubSpot Meetings, OnceHub, Microsoft Bookings, YouCanBookMe, TidyCal, Zcal, Chili Piper, TimeTrade and similar |
| Blog or insights link | Same-site link whose text is Blog, Insights, Articles, News, Commentary, Perspectives, Resources or Research, or whose path contains /blog, /insights, /articles, /commentary or /news |
| Latest post date | Newest date on the linked blog page from datetime attributes, article:published_time, datePublished or written dates, not later than the crawl date |
| Client login | Link to a known custodian or portal host (Schwab, Fidelity, Pershing, eMoney, Orion, Black Diamond, Addepar, Tamarac and others) or link text such as Client Login, Client Portal, Account Access |
| Video player | YouTube, Vimeo, Wistia, Vidyard or Loom embed (background video tags excluded) |
| Phone visible | tel: link or a North American phone number in visible text |
| Analytics | Google tag (gtag.js, analytics.js, G- or UA- IDs), GTM container, Meta pixel (fbevents.js), LinkedIn Insight, HubSpot tracking script |
| Mentions fees | Visible text contains fee, fees, pricing, flat fee, fee-only, hourly, retainer or subscription |
| States a price | An advisory fee phrase followed by a dollar or percent figure, a percent followed by “fee”, or a dollar amount per hour, month, quarter or year; returns, NAVs, share prices, salaries and asset minimums excluded |
| Form CRS link | Link whose URL or text contains Form CRS, CRS, Relationship Summary or ADV Part 3 |
Precision check. We hand-checked a random sample of 30 live sites against the stored page source for every signal, then drew extra samples of detected positives for rare signals. Precision is the share of detected positives that were correct.
| Signal | Hand-checked positives | Correct | Precision |
|---|---|---|---|
| Platform or CMS (random 30-site sample) | 20 | 20 | 100% |
| Advisor vendor fingerprints (targeted: FMG, Twenty Over Ten, Advisor Websites / Snappy Kraken) | 24 | 23 | 96% |
| Blocks an AI crawler (robots.txt parse) | 12 | 12 | 100% |
| llms.txt present | 17 | 17 | 100% |
| Testimonials or reviews | 40 | 37 | 92% |
| Scheduling link | 12 | 12 | 100% |
| Blog or insights link | 16 | 16 | 100% |
| Client login or portal link | 18 | 18 | 100% |
| Embedded video player | 12 | 11 | 92% |
| Phone visible | 21 | 21 | 100% |
| Form CRS link | 13 | 13 | 100% |
| Google Analytics and Meta pixel tags | 12 | 12 | 100% |
| States an advisory price | 20 | 17 | 85% |
| Mentions fees or pricing | 7 | 5 | 71% |
Two signals are weaker and should be read as broad indicators: “mentions fees” (5 of 7 positives were about the firm’s own fees; others were phrases such as “fee drag”) and the latest blog post date, which we could read on only 1,565 of the blog pages we fetched. Recall (signals present but missed) was not measured systematically; in the 30-site sample we found one missed blog section and one missed CRS link, which we fixed before the final run.
Limitations
- Homepage only, plus robots.txt, llms.txt and one blog page. A firm can have testimonials, pricing or a scheduler on an interior page; our numbers measure what a visitor sees first.
- No JavaScript rendering. Script-injected widgets and single-page applications are under-counted, so content signals are floors.
- The roster file shows one website per firm. Firms whose roster address is a social profile are outside the crawl even when they report a real site elsewhere on Form ADV.
- Crawl access: 417 sites refused an automated request, and requests came from a European IP address, so sites that geo-block non-US traffic look unreachable.
- Form ADV answers are as of each firm’s latest filing; a website can change after it. The ADV comparison is a consistency check, not a finding of any violation.
- Detectors are pattern-based and imperfect; see the precision table. Shares for rare signals carry more relative error than shares for common ones.
Most quotable lines
- “Three years after the Marketing Rule compliance date, 6.9% of individual-serving RIA homepages show testimonials or reviews.”
- “67.7% of RIA homepages for individual clients link Form CRS; 1.9% state a price.”
- “Only 2.9% of SEC-registered advisers’ websites block AI crawlers, and 49% of those blocks come from a Cloudflare default.”
- “533 of 573 Wix-built RIA sites publish an llms.txt file, almost all of it generated by the platform.”
- “210 RIA homepages show testimonials while the firm’s Form ADV says its ads include none.”
- “8.2% of SEC-registered advisers list no website on Form ADV, rising to 20.0% below $100 million in assets.”
Cite this study
Christoph Olivier Consulting, “State of RIA Websites 2026: a crawl of 9,181 SEC-registered adviser websites,” November 2026, https://christopholivierconsulting.com/ria-website-study-2026/. Data: SEC investment adviser firm roster dated November 2, 2026; crawl fielded November 11, 2026. Download the aggregate table (61 segments by 55 signals, percentages of sites): ria_website_study_2026_aggregate.csv.
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Frequently asked questions
What percentage of RIAs use testimonials on their website?
In our November 2026 crawl, 6.9% of homepages of SEC-registered advisers that serve individuals showed or linked to testimonials or reviews. On Form ADV Item 5.L(1)(c), about 10% of the same firms say their advertisements include testimonials, so many use them on interior pages, review profiles or social media rather than the homepage.
What website platform do most financial advisors use?
WordPress, by a wide margin: it runs 41.3% of live sites of SEC-registered advisers with individual clients. Squarespace (8.5%), FMG (8.2%) and Wix (6.5%) follow. Advisor-specific vendors together run 14.3% of these sites, with FMG the largest, followed by Advisor Websites / Snappy Kraken and Twenty Over Ten. 16.3% showed no identifiable platform.
Do RIA websites have to link Form CRS on the homepage?
No. Form CRS General Instruction 11.A requires firms with a public website to post the current relationship summary prominently, in a location and format easily accessible for retail investors. The homepage is not mandated, but it is the simplest way to meet the standard, and 67.7% of individual-serving RIA homepages in our crawl link it there.
How many financial advisor websites block ChatGPT and other AI crawlers?
Very few. 2.9% of live RIA websites block at least one of GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended or CCBot site-wide in robots.txt, and 49% of those use Cloudflare's managed robots.txt block. OAI-SearchBot, which controls appearing in ChatGPT search, is blocked on 0.7% of sites.
Should a financial advisor website have an llms.txt file?
It is optional. 15.5% of RIA sites have one, but most were generated automatically by Wix, GoDaddy, Duda or a WordPress SEO plugin. Google says no new machine-readable or AI text files are needed to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. Clear pages, accurate business details and allowing search-side AI bots matter more.
How many RIAs list prices on their website?
Few. 1.9% of individual-serving RIA homepages state an advisory price such as a fee percentage, a flat or hourly fee or a subscription rate, even though 15.3% describe themselves as fee-only. Pricing may sit on an interior page, which our homepage-only crawl does not count.