We read the websites of 1,792 fee-only financial advisory firms in October 2026. Most say the same things. Retirement appears on 91% of them, fee-only on 74% and fiduciary on 71%. About 4 in 10 name no specialty beyond retirement, tax or estate planning. About half publish a price we could verify. And 2% mention AI at all, at a time when clients increasingly ask AI to help them choose an advisor.
What we found, in brief
The phrase counts come from the text of up to three pages per site (1,792 sites). “Verified” rows come from facts backed by a quote we found word for word on the firm’s own site (1,670 sites). The methodology is at the end.
Everyone says the same three things
Retirement, fee-only and fiduciary are the core of nearly every fee-only firm’s homepage. They’re true and they matter to clients. They no longer help a client choose between firms, though, because nearly every firm says them.
That matters more now than it used to. A client who asks an AI assistant “Who’s a good fee-only advisor near me?” gets an answer built from the pages the assistant reads. If every page in a city says “fee-only fiduciary retirement planning”, the assistant has nothing to tell firms apart, and the client’s specific question (stock options, a divorce, a pension decision) decides who gets named.
Few firms name a niche
We looked at the specialties each firm describes on its own site, counting only those backed by a quote.
15% of firms named no specialty we could verify, and another 26% named only retirement, tax or estate planning. Together that’s 41%, or about 4 in 10, with nothing on the site that marks them out for a particular kind of client.
The audiences firms say they serve tell the same story. Pre-retirees (33%) and retirees (32%) lead. Physicians (7%), divorced clients (6%) and cross-border families (1%) are rare.
For a client with a specific need, that’s a short list to choose from. For a firm, a named niche is the cheapest way to stand out.
About half publish a price
We counted a firm as publishing a price only if the number appeared in plain text on its site and we could match the quote.
29% of firms didn’t say how they charge in a way we could verify, whether by AUM, flat fee, hourly or a planning fee.
Where firms do publish, the numbers are consistent. Among fee-only firms that publish prices, the median ongoing planning fee is $4,500 a year, a one-time plan $2,000, an hourly rate $300, and the first-tier AUM rate 1% (see the Wellspent fee report).
Clients compare prices before they call, and AI assistants quote prices when they can find them. Half the firms in this study can’t be quoted.
Almost nobody mentions AI
Only 2% of sites mention AI, ChatGPT or artificial intelligence at all. Reading those passages, most are market commentary (“AI is changing investing”) or a contrast with the firm’s own service (“working with a real person, not an AI chatbot”). Just 0.6% name an AI assistant such as ChatGPT.
Firms don’t need to talk about AI on their websites. The finding matters for a different reason: very few firms appear to be writing with AI as a reader in mind, even though AI assistants now read their pages to answer client questions.
Proof and content
- Press: 21% show an “as seen in” or “featured in” style badge.
- Blog: 23% have one.
- Podcast: 6% mention a podcast, either their own or an appearance.
- Free consultation: 31% offer a free or complimentary first meeting.
- Virtual: 29% say, in a way we could verify, that they work with clients virtually.
What this means for a fee-only firm
- Say who you’re for. One or two named niches, in your clients’ words, give searchers and AI assistants something to match.
- Publish your fees in plain text. It puts you in the half of firms that can be quoted. See How to get your firm recommended by AI assistants.
- Treat fee-only and fiduciary as the starting point. They tell a client you’re safe to consider, not why to choose you.
- Write for the questions clients ask. A page that answers “Should I take my pension as a lump sum?” does more work than a general services page.
- Back your site up elsewhere. Press mentions and verified directory listings confirm what your site says. See How AI assistants choose which financial advisors to recommend.
Methodology
Sample. Fee-only advisory firms listed in the Wellspent public graph with a website, as of October 2026, in the US and Canada. Listings are screened against Wellspent’s fee-only test: no commissions reported on Form ADV, no broker-dealer or registered representative ties, and no insurance agency affiliations (see the methodology).
Collection. We fetched up to three pages per site (typically the homepage, a services or about page, and a fees page) on October 27 and 28, 2026, honoring each site’s robots.txt and without proxies. 1,792 sites returned enough readable text to analyze.
Verified facts. For 1,670 sites, an AI model extracted facts (specialties, audiences, fee models, prices, minimums, virtual service), and we kept a value only if its supporting quote appeared word for word on the firm’s page. Specialties, audiences, fee models, prices and virtual service in this study come from these verified facts.
Phrase counts. Retirement, fee-only, fiduciary, CFP, free consultation, blog, press badges, podcast and AI mentions come from matching specific phrases in the page text, with samples read by hand to check for false matches. A firm counts once per phrase however many times it appears.
Limits. We read at most three pages per site, so a fact on a deeper page may be missed, and the shares are best read as what a visitor or crawler sees on a firm’s main pages. Firms without a website, or whose sites blocked or failed our fetch, aren’t included. Shares are rounded. We don’t name individual firms.