The biggest names in wealth management found out this week that ChatGPT has never heard of many of them, which is a strange thing to learn about yourself in a press release.
The same week, the custodian that holds many independent RIAs' assets plugged Claude straight into its advisor platform, and the company behind Claude filed to sell shares to the public.
Three stories from this week that matter for your practice.
AI Search Skips Most Top-Ranked RIAs. Niche Firms Keep Getting Named.
On Wednesday, WealthManagement.com reported on a study from the PR firm Gregory, which asked ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews 248 questions written the way affluent professionals look for an advisor. The questions covered eight groups, including physicians, dentists, attorneys, business owners and pro athletes, and produced 8,389 answers.
Of the firms on CNBC's 2026 Financial Advisor 100, 84 were never named, and none of the top 10 appeared at all. LPL ranked first on Barron's Top 100 RIAs list and showed up in 0.4% of answers. Meanwhile Dentist Advisors, a Salt Lake City firm that works with dentists, was the fourth most mentioned firm in the whole study at 7% of responses. Hockey Wealth Group showed up in 85% of answers about the National Hockey League.
Why you should care: This is the best news a solo advisor with a clear niche has had in a while. Gregory's co-CEO Joe Anthony said a firm that understands physicians or pro athletes "may be far more visible to those clients" than a national firm managing billions, and the data backs him up.
The sources matter too. Firms' own websites were cited in 89.5% of the AI answers, far ahead of directories and media. So the pages you write about the people you serve are doing real work, and a firm with no niche pages is invisible to anyone who asks a chatbot for help.
Schwab Just Plugged Claude Into Advisor Center.
On Wednesday at its IMPACT conference, Schwab Advisor Services announced that Claude for Financial Advisors is now available through Schwab Advisor Center. Schwab says it's the first RIA custodian to offer Anthropic's advisor tools, and an authenticated connection lets RIAs reach their Schwab data from inside Claude.
Schwab also added Ester, a tax and estate planning assistant from Wealth.com that reads trusts, wills and tax returns and draws estate flowcharts. An introductory version is free until February 2027, with a paid version starting in early 2027. Schwab also announced an investment in Nevis, which uses AI agents for onboarding and other operations work.
Why you should care: Schwab supports more than 17,000 independent RIAs, so this is the moment AI moves from a side tool into the custodian many of you already log into every day. Anthropic's Peter Nolan said that with that data in Claude, advisors "can get answers across their book of business in moments."
For a solo firm, the free Ester trial is the easiest thing here to test, since it costs nothing until February. Claude for Financial Advisors is a bigger decision. Kitces reported earlier this month that it requires an Enterprise plan with a 20-seat minimum, so price it out before you plan around it, and put any new data connection through the same vendor review you'd give any other tool.
Anthropic Filed to Go Public. Your Clients Are Going to Ask.
On Monday, Anthropic filed an S-1 with the SEC for an initial public offering, according to CNBC. The company plans to list on the Nasdaq under the ticker ANT, with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley leading the deal.
The filing shows $16.29 billion in revenue for the first half of 2026, up from $4.59 billion for all of 2025, and a loss of $80.7 billion for the same six months, about $72 billion of which came from accounting charges tied to convertible notes. Anthropic's last private round in May valued it at $965 billion. The price range and share count weren't in the filing yet.
Why you should care: When a company many of your clients use every day goes public, the questions start before the first trade. You'll hear "should I buy it on day one" from someone who has never bought an individual stock.
A short answer you write once beats ten answers made up on the spot. It might cover how IPO pricing works, why early trading can swing hard, how much a single stock fits in their plan, and the fact that CNBC reported staggered lock-ups that let employees and early investors start selling on the first day. Keep it educational, run it past compliance and have it ready before the ticker shows up on the news.
Source: Anthropic IPO live updates on the AI lab's S-1 filing (CNBC)
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About ten minutes a week. Nothing goes out until you approve it.
Start your 7-day free trialONE THING TO TRY THIS WEEK
The Gregory study found AI answers cited firms' own websites 89.5% of the time, and the niche firms that kept getting named had written pages for the people they serve. This week, use one prompt to turn a question your niche asks into a draft post for your site.
Step 1. Open Claude or ChatGPT in a new chat. Fill in the brackets and paste this.
I'm a financial advisor at [firm name] in [city], and I work mostly with [who you serve]. Suggest five questions someone like that would actually type into ChatGPT or Google when they're looking for help with their money, in their own words, and wait for me to pick one. Then write a blog post of 600 to 900 words that answers it plainly in the first two sentences, uses the follow-up questions a reader would ask as headings, and explains things in plain language with no product recommendations, performance claims or promises. Finish with a two-sentence description of who I help that I can use on my directory profiles, and flag anything compliance should look at closely.
Step 2. Pick a question and edit the draft until it sounds like you. If you can post to your site, post it. If a vendor or compliance handles your site, send it to them, and update your directory profiles with the new description while you wait, since AI answers cited directories in about a quarter of cases too.
Step 3. Next month, paste the same prompt and add "I've already written about" followed by your past topics, so you get new questions.
Being the firm AI names for your niche starts with writing down who you help.
Sam is the founder of Amplify for Advisors and Watt, the Amplify for Advisors Agent. A former RIA owner whose work has been featured in Forbes, NerdWallet, Nasdaq, and more, he teaches financial advisors to use AI in their own voice while staying compliant.