How much of a client's first conversation is already on the website
We read every public page of 483 Chicago adviser websites and checked each against 25 questions a prospective client asks before hiring an adviser: fees, minimums, custodian, fiduciary status, credentials, how to get started.
Firms serving individuals answer 46% on average across 345 sites. Institutional managers answer 12% across 138. The rest of this section uses the retail set, since minimums and fee rates only make sense there.
The 25 questions, ranked by how often the answer is on the site
Read this as a list of what a chatbot would have to invent. Anything under 50% is a question most Chicago advisers leave for the AI to guess at.
| Client question | Answered on site | |
|---|---|---|
| Do you have any disciplinary history? | 1% | |
| What is your account minimum? | 14% | |
| What is your actual fee rate? | 21% | |
| What are your office hours? | 25% | |
| Do you earn commissions? | 28% | |
| Do you handle insurance? | 34% | |
| Who holds my money? | 36% | |
| How much do you manage? | 37% | |
| How often will I hear from you? | 40% | |
| Is there a client portal? | 40% | |
| How do you charge? | 43% | |
| Are you a fiduciary? | 43% | |
| How do I get started? | 43% | |
| What is your investment approach? | 44% | |
| Where is your Form CRS / ADV? | 46% | |
| Do you do financial planning? | 48% | |
| What account types do you manage? | 48% | |
| How long have you been in business? | 51% | |
| Do you help with taxes or estate planning? | 52% | |
| Who regulates you? | 54% | |
| Are you independent? | 55% | |
| What credentials does your team hold? | 69% | |
| What is your phone number? | 74% | |
| Who do you work with? | 79% | |
| Where is your office? | 79% | |
| How do you protect my information? | 82% |
What clients ask an adviser to do, not just tell them
Six common requests that are actions, not answers. The tier is how a gated system treats them: Tier 2 means the AI can propose and a human approves; Tier 3 means a human only. The percentage is how many sites offer any online path for the request today.
| Client request | Gate | Sites with a path |
|---|---|---|
| Schedule a meeting with my advisor | Tier 2 | 11% |
| Update my address or phone number | Tier 2 | 7% |
| Send me my statements or tax forms | Tier 2 | 3% |
| Open a new account | Tier 3 | 9% |
| Transfer or withdraw funds | Tier 3 | 5% |
| Change my allocation or place a trade | Tier 3 | 0% |
Does size help?
| Firm size | Sites | Average coverage |
|---|---|---|
| Under 20 employees | 306 | 36% |
| 20 to 499 | 168 | 37% |
| 500 and up | 7 | 23% |
| Size not reported | 2 | 35% |
The technology behind the sites
- Website platform: Custom/Unknown (356), WordPress (101), Unknown (60), Squarespace (23), Wix (17)
- Custodian named on site: 16 of 577. Schwab (13), Fidelity (3), Altruist (1)
- Portfolio tools named: Orion (5), Black Diamond (2), YCharts (1), Envestnet (1)
- Planning tools named: eMoney (3), RightCapital (2), MoneyGuidePro (1)
- Online scheduling (Calendly or similar): 5
- Press or news page: 87. Social profile linked: 304
What this means if you add AI to your site
A generative chatbot answers every one of the 25 questions with the same confidence, including the 17 your site never addresses. Those answers are invented, and under current guidance the firm owns them.
A gated system serves only the answers a human has approved, in the firm's own words, and logs the rest for someone to write. Coverage stops being a risk and becomes a to-do list.
Every firm in this study can see its own scorecard: which questions its site answers, quoted, and which it leaves open.
Method
Firms: every SEC-registered investment adviser with a main office in the Chicago area per the SEC's public roster, 577 in total, 546 with a website on file. Sites were read from their sitemaps or by following internal links, excluding blog and news posts, with no page limit short of 300. 24 sites could not be reached and 39 returned no readable text; both are excluded from averages. Questions were matched against page text with fixed patterns, and every "answered" result is backed by a quoted sentence from the firm's own site. No language model generated any answer or statistic in this report. Crawl date: 9/12/2026.