Guest: Brian Thorp, CEO & Founder, Wealthtender
Most financial advisors are still operating as if online reviews do not apply to them.
For a long time, that made sense. Testimonials were restricted. Compliance teams were cautious. And while doctors, attorneys, and other trust-based professionals built public review profiles, financial advisors were largely left out of the conversation.
That has changed.
The SEC Marketing Rule opened the door for advisors to use testimonials and endorsements in their marketing, provided they follow the right compliance requirements. At the same time, prospects have become more conditioned than ever to look for social proof before making a decision.
And now there is a third factor advisors need to understand: AI search.
When someone receives a referral to a financial advisor, they rarely stop there. They search Google. They check LinkedIn. They look for reviews. Increasingly, they ask tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity what is known about that advisor.
That is where client reviews become more than a nice-to-have.
According to Brian Thorp, CEO and Founder of Wealthtender, roughly 90 percent of financial advisors have zero online reviews. Not a limited review presence. Not a weak one. Zero.
That means one compliant client review can immediately separate an advisor from the majority of competitors in their market.
But the bigger opportunity is not just the star rating. It is the story inside the review.
When a client explains why they chose an advisor, what problem they were trying to solve, what experience they had, and what outcome mattered to them, that review becomes a trust signal that prospects can read and AI tools can understand.
For advisors who specialize in serving a specific type of client, that matters. A review from a business owner, widow, physician, executive, retiree, or energy company employee does more than say, “This advisor is good.” It helps define who that advisor is good for.
In this episode of The Influential Advisor Podcast, Brian Thorp explains how financial advisors can build review authority compliantly, why third-party reviews matter for AI search visibility, and how advisors who move early may create a meaningful advantage in how they are found, evaluated, and recommended.
The SEC Rule Change That Made All of This Possible
For decades, financial advisors operated in a world where their most satisfied clients couldn’t say a single public word on their behalf. The SEC’s longstanding prohibition on testimonials meant that, while doctors built Zocdoc profiles and lawyers accumulated Avvo reviews, financial advisors sat on the sidelines.
That changed with the SEC Marketing Rule, which finally permitted advisors to solicit and use testimonials in their marketing, subject to specific compliance requirements. Brian Thorp saw this coming in 2019, before the rule was finalized. He built Wealthtender specifically to give advisors a compliant infrastructure to take advantage of it.
The rule’s passage wasn’t instant. It took until 2021 for the SEC to finalize the marketing rule, but the framework it created transformed what’s possible. Advisors who have moved quickly to build their review presence have established a compounding advantage that their slower-moving competitors haven’t caught up to yet.
What Wealthtender Is and Why a Platform Built Specifically for Advisors Matters
Brian Thorp spent most of his corporate career at Invesco, ultimately serving as head of the US key account team. When he left to build Wealthtender in 2019, his model took a serious look at what trust-based professions like medicine and law had already figured out, and brought it into wealth management.
The inspiration was straightforward. Platforms like Zocdoc had already shown that consumers in trust-based professions (like doctors and lawyers) were actively using profession-specific review sites when making decisions about who to work with. The difference wasn’t just convenience. It was the quality of the information in reviews from people who had actually used the service, filtered for relevance, and displayed with appropriate context.
Wealthtender built that infrastructure for financial advisors, with one additional layer that general platforms can’t offer. It provides a full compliance architecture designed around the SEC’s marketing rule requirements. Disclosures are built in. The review workflow is designed to avoid the compliance landmines that can make Google reviews a liability rather than an asset.
Google Business Profile vs. Wealthtender: The Compliance Gap Most Advisors Don’t Know About
Many advisors already have a Google Business Profile, and some have client reviews on it. This feels like a reasonable starting point. The compliance reality is more complicated, and it comes down to adoption and entanglement, two terms that every advisor’s compliance team knows.
What adoption and entanglement mean in practice
If you direct clients to your Google Business page, acknowledge that the page exists, or respond to reviews posted there, the SEC may consider you to have “adopted” that content. Once you’ve adopted it, you’ve taken responsibility for everything published there, including reviews that contain prohibited content, reviews from people who shouldn’t be reviewing you, or any language that runs afoul of the marketing rule.
The problem is that Google doesn’t have a compliance team that understands the SEC’s requirements. You can’t call them to remove a problematic review on short notice. You have limited control over what gets published and how it’s displayed. And you can’t cherry-pick which clients receive your review solicitation. The SEC requires a non-cherry-picking approach.
What some compliance consultants allow and why there’s still a gray area
Some compliance consultants have given guidance permitting advisors to solicit reviews on Google, as long as they then do nothing with the page, don’t acknowledge it, don’t link to it, don’t respond to reviews. That’s a narrow path, and other compliance consultants consider even that approach too risky, given the SEC’s open questions about Google reviews and the enforcement actions that are expected to follow.
Wealthtender’s approach is to build everything around the SEC’s requirements from day one, so there’s no gray area to navigate. All required disclosures are automatically appended to reviews when they’re published. The platform is designed so that advisors can compliantly promote their reviews in marketing materials without exposure.
For advisors who already have Google reviews and want to get onto a compliant platform, Wealthtender has built an import tool that pulls Google reviews through the platform’s compliance workflow, adding the required disclosures so those reviews can be publicly promoted compliantly.
The SEC isn’t done watching this space. In December 2025, the Division of Examinations issued its third Marketing Rule risk alert, specifically flagging deficiencies in how advisors are using testimonials and endorsements. The most common failure is that required disclosures are not provided clearly and prominently at the time a testimonial is disseminated, including reviews on advisor websites, social media, and through referral programs. For advisors navigating this on their own, that’s a live compliance exposure. For advisors using a platform built around those disclosure requirements from day one, it’s confirmation that they made the right call.
Who Can (and Who Still Can’t) Solicit Reviews
Before going further, it’s worth being clear about who the SEC marketing rule’s permissions apply to.
Regulatory impediments
The marketing rule covers SEC-registered investment advisors. State-registered advisors operate under state rules, which have been modernizing. Approximately forty states have now updated their rules in line with the SEC’s approach. A handful of states, including California, still prohibit testimonials. The North American Securities Administrators Association (NASAA) has been applying pressure on the holdout states, and Thorp expects those remaining states to fall in line in the near term.
Home office impediments
The larger ongoing impediment is wirehouse affiliation. Many wirehouse firms still prohibit their advisors from soliciting reviews, even though it would be permissible under both SEC and FINRA rules. This creates a structural disadvantage. Independent advisors are actively building review authority, while wirehouse advisors are unable to.
Thorp’s prediction is that one wirehouse firm will be the first to permit it, recognize the competitive advantage, and trigger a rapid industry-wide shift. The question is which firm moves first and which of their competitors follows within months.
Case Study: United Financial Planning Group—$200 Million to More Than $400 Million AUM
United Financial Planning Group: New York
Starting point: approximately $200 million in assets under management.
An individual advisor at the firm started collecting reviews on Wealthtender. After seeing the impact on that advisor’s visibility and new business, the firm’s founder got on board and rapidly collected dozens of reviews across the firm. Today, the firm has over forty reviews on Wealthtender.
Their current AUM is more than $400 million, which has more than doubled in roughly three years. The firm credits its Wealthtender review presence as a significant factor in that growth.
Two specific business wins documented by the firm:
Win 1: A prospect conducting a Google search saw gold stars next to the firm’s Wealthtender profile in search results. Those stars made United Financial the first call the prospect made.
Win 2: A prospect had narrowed their search to United Financial and a national wirehouse firm. The wirehouse made its pitch on brand recognition and institutional credibility. The prospect pushed back. “Why would I work with you over them?” The independent firm responded, “Do they have reviews that look like this?” The prospect reviewed the client stories. Not just the star ratings, but the actual experiences and moved $1.5 million to the independent firm the following day.
The wirehouse firm’s inability to show reviews became a liability. When the prospect asked why the wirehouse didn’t have any client reviews, the answer was, “Our home office doesn’t permit it.” That answer itself raised a red flag about why a firm would prevent its clients from speaking on its behalf.
How to Ask Clients for Reviews the Right Way
The SEC’s non-cherry-picking requirement means that when you begin soliciting reviews, you send the invitation to all current clients, not a curated list of your happiest ones. In practice, this is less scary than it sounds. The data from Wealthtender’s more than 6,000 collected reviews shows that over 99 percent are five-star reviews. Current clients are clients for a reason. They love the work you’re doing.
The first send: email all current clients
Wealthtender provides a template that hundreds of firms have used successfully. The recommended language is intentionally simple and low-pressure:
The typical response rate: 10 to 20 percent of clients respond within the first forty-eight hours. For a firm with eighty clients, that’s eight to sixteen reviews in two days.
Ongoing cadence: the annual review follow-up
After the initial send, the most effective ongoing practice is a simple follow-up approximately one week after each annual client review meeting:
This timing takes advantage of the natural moment when clients have just reflected on the value the relationship provides, making them more likely to want to share their experience.
Do Star Ratings or Client Stories Matter More for AI Search?
Star ratings get attention. But for both prospects and AI engines, the story the client tells is where the real value lives.
Consider an advisor who specializes in helping Chevron employees in the Dallas area transition into retirement. That advisor has a landing page explaining their expertise. But if they also have reviews on Wealthtender where clients write things like, “John helped me navigate my retirement transition from Exxon,” those reviews are now working as keyword-rich, contextually relevant trust signals that match the exact search intent of other energy industry employees looking for retirement planning help.
The advisor’s landing page says, “I can do this.” The client reviews say, “They did it for someone like me.” That combination of positioning claim plus social proof is what moves people from “this looks promising” to “I want to talk to them.”
How ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity Are Using Your Reviews Right Now
This is where the story moves from familiar marketing territory into something most advisors haven’t fully grasped yet.
When a prospect goes to ChatGPT or Gemini and asks, “What do clients say about [Advisor Name]?” or “Find me a financial advisor in [city] who works with tech executives,” AI tools are not just looking at your website. They’re searching for signals across third-party platforms, and they’re treating reviews on independent platforms like Wealthtender as more credible than testimonials published on your own website.
The reason is straightforward. Anyone can post whatever they want on their own website. A review on a third-party platform with compliance disclosures, transparent methodology, and real client attribution carries more epistemic weight. AI engines have learned this from training data that mirrors how humans evaluate trustworthiness online.
The output is thematic summaries. When Wealthtender has enough reviews for an advisor, ChatGPT and Gemini don’t just return “this advisor has twelve five-star reviews.” They return something closer to, “Clients consistently describe this advisor as highly responsive, particularly strong at explaining complex tax situations, and especially effective at working with clients going through major life transitions.” That summary, appearing in an AI response to a prospect who is specifically looking for what you’re described as being good at, is extraordinarily valuable positioning.
Winning the AI recommendation game: the complete credibility stack
This matters more for financial advisors than for almost any other profession. Google classifies financial content as Your Money or Your Life (YMYL), meaning it holds advisor websites to higher Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) standards than sites on lower-stakes topics. Every element of the credibility stack below is also an E-E-A-T signal. A consistent, cross-platform presence doesn’t just help AI engines find you. It’s how Google decides whether your content deserves to rank at all.
Thorp’s framework for advisors who want to show up when AI tools are asked to recommend someone:
- Modern website that clearly articulates your expertise, your niche, and who you serve, written in language that clearly communicates those things to bots crawling your content
- LinkedIn profile (at minimum), consistent with your website in name, firm, location, and areas of specialization
- Google Business Profile. Even with reviews turned off, its existence is a credibility signal that confirms you’re a real, established business
- Professional designation profiles (CFP, FPA, NAPFA, etc.) kept current. These cross-references confirm your credentials across the internet
- Wealthtender profile with a meaningful number of reviews. This is the trust and reputation layer that converts credibility signals into confident AI recommendations
- Consistency across all profiles, including name, firm name, address, and specializations, should match everywhere
Building Your Individual Review Profile (Even If Your Firm Hasn’t Committed Yet)
One of the most important structural points from this conversation: reviews matter at the individual advisor level, not just the firm level.
Wealthtender’s research found that 83 percent of people who receive a referral to a financial advisor go online afterward to search for reviews, and they’re not looking for reviews about the firm. They’re looking for reviews about the specific human being they’re going to be working with, potentially for the next decade.
This means an individual advisor can build a Wealthtender profile and a review presence that serves their personal brand, independent of whether the firm as an institution is participating. As long as the individual advisor has the necessary permissions (from their home office, compliance team, or as a registered individual), they can begin collecting reviews that build their personal authority.
This is especially meaningful for advisors at larger firms where firm-wide buy-in may be slow to come. The case study above started exactly this way. One individual advisor at United Financial Planning Group started collecting reviews, demonstrated the impact, and the firm eventually followed. That individual’s head start became a model that the rest of the firm adopted.
The Four-Step Framework for Building Review Authority That AI Engines Trust
- Establish your credibility foundation. Make sure you have a modern website, an active LinkedIn profile, a claimed Google Business Profile (even with reviews off), and current professional designation profiles. These are the signals AI engines use to confirm you’re a real, credible professional before they consider recommending you to anyone.
- Start your Wealthtender profile and send your first all-client email. Use the template language provided. Expect 10 to 20 percent of clients to respond within forty-eight hours. That first batch of reviews will likely be the clearest signal you’ve ever received about the impact you’re having on your clients’ lives.
- Embed the widget on your website and begin promoting reviews compliantly in your marketing. Use Wealthtender’s tools to create compliant social media graphics from individual reviews. Incorporate relevant client stories into niche-specific landing pages. Sprinkle testimonials into lead nurture sequences.
- Monitor what AI engines say about you. Go to ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity and ask what clients say about you. See what comes up. Then iterate. If the summaries don’t yet reflect your positioning accurately or specifically, that’s a signal to collect more reviews from clients in your target niche whose stories reinforce your specialization.
Frequently Asked Questions
Turn your client relationships into your most powerful marketing asset
If you’re a financial advisor who’s been putting off building your review presence, the competitive window is closing. Early movers are building authority that compounds. Advisors who wait are watching competitors accumulate the reviews, the AI visibility, and the social proof that makes every other form of marketing more effective.
To learn more about Wealthtender, search “Wealthtender” in ChatGPT, Gemini, or Google. Brian’s team has done the work to make the platform easy to discover through exactly the channels advisors are trying to master.
Reach Brian directly at brian@wealthtender.com or visit wealthtender.com.
If you’re ready to pair your client reviews with a book that attracts the right clients, see how our book publishing for financial advisors works, or reach out to Influential Advisor Media to talk about your book.
