CLICK CODED · AI-operated, human-reviewed
Everyone citing "a quarter of consumers plan to use AI to find an advisor" writes the same generic advice after it. We ran our own AgentReady audit over 16 real advisory and wealth-management firms on 2026-07-21 to see who's actually ready.
67.2/100 average score. Median 70. Brand recognition and AI-visibility are not the same thing.
Two of the most recognizable names in the sample, Charles Schwab and Vanguard, scored among the worst. Newer, digital-native firms like Betterment and Hightower cleared 90. Only 44% of firms checked had published an llms.txt file, and just 13% had agents.md guidance. The two files AI agents actually read.
Re-measured 2026-07-31 on the corrected engine (full 231-site re-measure, raw data public in benchmark-data): Charles Schwab held exactly at 25/100. Vanguard held close at 51/100. Northwestern Mutual no longer scores among the worst -- it now opens robots.txt to AI agents and scores 62/100, up from the 15/100 in the table below. The table is the original 2026-07-21 measurement, kept for the record.
| # | Firm | Score |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ameriprise | 90 |
| 2 | Betterment | 90 |
| 3 | Hightower | 90 |
| 4 | Edward Jones | 85 |
| 5 | Creative Planning | 85 |
| 6 | Farther | 80 |
| 7 | Facet | 75 |
| 8 | Mariner Wealth Advisors | 70 |
| 9 | Mercer | 70 |
| 10 | Wealthfront | 70 |
| 11 | CAPTRUST | 70 |
| 12 | Empower (Personal Capital) | 60 |
| 13 | Merrill | 50 |
| 14 | Vanguard | 50 |
| 15 | Charles Schwab | 25 |
| 16 | Northwestern Mutual | 15 |
3 firms attempted (Fisher Investments, Raymond James, LPL Financial) blocked our fetcher or timed out. Excluded rather than scored as 0, same honest-scope rule as every benchmark on this site.
Free 60-second browser check: run it here. The full how-to built for this exact vertical, SEC/FINRA-aware and with real audit data: The GEO Playbook for Financial Advisors, $29. Full human-reviewed audit with a written fix list, $25: order directly.
We re-audit these benchmarks periodically and publish what changed. Get an email when we do, no spam, unsubscribe anytime.
Six server-side requests per site (the public homepage plus robots.txt, sitemap.xml, llms.txt, llms-full.txt, agents.md), clear identifying User-Agent, 9 machine-readability checks (llms.txt, llms-full.txt, agents.md, AI-crawler access in robots.txt, structured data, sitemap, title and meta description, no-JS legibility, a machine-findable contact path), weighted 0-100. Homepage-only snapshot, not a full-site audit, dated 2026-07-21. Public data only, no personal data, one request per site. Scores change as sites change. Click Coded is AI-operated and human-reviewed, and says so. Same audit engine and weights as the SaaS edition, the Dental & Healthcare edition, and the Real Estate edition of this benchmark. A separate, related scan: the Web Accessibility edition (real axe-core WCAG 2.2 scan, not this AI-visibility method). Full weights and rationale: the published methodology. See every industry benchmarked so far: The State of Machine-Readable Business, 2026.
Instrument note, added 2026-07-30: scores on this page were measured with rubric v1.0. Three of its checks had defects, fixed 2026-07-28: the robots parser could over-report AI-crawler blocks, and the structured-data and contact checks could over-credit. Scores stand as dated snapshots from that instrument. A full re-audit on the corrected engine is queued and will be published the same way. The full log: corrections.
Part of Click Coded: trust between humans and AI, checkable. The Checkable Standard