The lead-gen middlemen sitting between buyers and you.
When a buyer asks ChatGPT or Google AI for a Hawaii wealth manager, the AI cites your firm’s own website 47% of the time and third-party content the other half. The largest single block of that third-party content is two lead-gen platforms most firms do not actively manage.
The cross-category picture
Own-site citation share across all seven measured surfaces. The pooled web-searching figures in the cross-category teardown run lower because they exclude the two model-knowledge engines.
| Category | Own-site share | 3rd-party share |
|---|---|---|
| Hawaii consumer banking | 53% | 42% |
| Hawaii wealth management | 47% | 49% |
| Honolulu dental practices | 44% | 52% |
| Hawaii law firms | 39% | 58% |
For wealth, the read is closer to half-and-half. About half the AI-citation surface for your category is on your own site (clean it up, the leverage is real). The other half is off-site (lead-gen platforms, named-founder bylines, published rankings, Wikipedia presence for principals). The full Hawaii wealth-management teardown covers the 42-firm cohort, the lead-gen middleman pattern, and Claude’s structurally thin training-data presence for the category.
The Bing organic gap, specific to wealth
Bing organic returns zero Hawaii wealth-firm websites across 787 results in our data. The gap is cohort-wide. Bing organic is measured as a classic-search control, not as an AI answer engine; whether ranking in it changes any AI answer is not something this measurement tested.
The observed condition is Bing organic visibility for the named queries. The current Bing top 5 for these questions is dominated by national publications (SmartAsset, Investopedia, Forbes) and lead-gen platforms, not Hawaii-specific firm content. We report where Bing organic visibility sits for the named queries, run over run.
The Claude training-data finding (worth flagging)
Claude answers from its training data rather than searching the live web. Across 646 Claude mentions in our wealth measurement, only 14% went to firm-owned websites. The other 86% pulled from third-party content even though Claude could have named the firms. For comparison: Claude cites Hawaii law firms 51% firm-owned and Honolulu dental practices 34%. Hawaii wealth firms have a structurally thinner Claude training-data presence than the other relationship-business cohort we measured.
What that means: a buyer asking Claude “should I work with [your firm]” is unlikely to get a substantive answer drawing from your firm’s brand presence. Closing that takes longer than any other move in the engagement (Claude’s training data refreshes on a schedule we do not control), but the signals that move it are nameable: Wikipedia presence for named principals, sustained press coverage, named-author bylines in publications AI ingests.
What an engagement looks like for a Hawaii wealth firm
The standard engagement shape, scoped to a wealth firm:
- Scoping call (30 min). Lock the 18 buyer questions a real Hawaii wealth-management buyer would ask AI (an example set is published at /methodology/#query-set). Lock the cohort. Confirm the questions reflect your specific buyer (high-net-worth, business owner, physician, retiree, inherited wealth, etc.).
- The baseline month. Daily measurement across the six AI tools: four citation-grade engines that search the live web (Perplexity, ChatGPT search, Gemini grounded, Google AI Overviews) and two model-knowledge engines that answer from training data (Claude, Gemma), alongside Bing organic as a classic-search control.
- Research memo + clear list of fixes. Named competitors, observed gaps per question, prioritized punch list scoped to two parallel workstreams (on-site cleanup + off-site authority work).
- Monthly delta memo after the baseline month. What moved, what did not, drift alerts when a competitor moves on your category.
For wealth firms specifically, the punch list typically covers: (1) SmartAsset and getwarmer.com profile presence, (2) Bing organic visibility, tracked as a classic-search control, (3) Claude training-data signals, (4) the named-comparison query positioning when your top 2-3 competitors are mentioned by name. We name the specific gaps in the paid engagement. The free check does not.
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Honest scope
- 42-firm cohort grew through three rounds of cohort-coverage expansion. Cohort includes both Hawaii-based independent firms and the Hawaii practices of national firms (Morgan Stanley, Merrill, UBS, Edward Jones, Raymond James, etc.). Bank wealth subsidiaries (FHB wealth, BOH wealth) are double-tracked with the banking cohort.
- Hawaii-specific. National wealth-mgmt brands without Hawaii presence are not in the cohort.
- Measurement-only. We do not write content, edit pages, or change your site. Your team or your agency does.
- The initial measurement (1 run, 15 firms) reported 27% own-site / 70% third-party and suggested wealth was the "relationship-end" category. Three rounds of cohort expansion showed that was an artifact of incomplete cohort coverage. The corrected number is 47% own-site, closer to dental than to law. We document the correction publicly on the cross-category teardown and on the wealth-management teardown itself. Self-correction is part of the discipline.
NeverRanked home · Full wealth-mgmt teardown · Cross-category gradient · How we measure