How Financial Advisory Firms Can Win in the Age of AI: An Interview with Evan Bailyn, the Founder of GEO
The financial advisory industry is undergoing a profound shift in how clients discover and evaluate advisors. High-net-worth individuals and families increasingly turn to AI platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity to answer their most important financial questions, and those platforms respond not with a list of links, but with a short list of names they trust. We sat down with Evan Bailyn, CEO of First Page Sage and the founder of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), to understand what this means for independent advisory firms like Cincinnati-based Journey Advisory Group.
Bailyn’s agency, founded in 2009, has become one of the most respected names in organic marketing. First Page Sage was the first agency to offer GEO services in 2023 and has since conducted landmark research into how ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude make commercial recommendations. We spoke with Evan about why fiduciary advisory firms are uniquely positioned to benefit from the GEO opportunity and what it takes to become the advisor an AI recommends.
Journey Advisory Group: Evan, let’s start with some context. You’ve spent nearly two decades helping companies grow through organic marketing, first with SEO, now with GEO. What is GEO, and why should an independent financial advisory firm care about it today?
Evan Bailyn: Generative Engine Optimization is the practice of earning recommendations from AI engines, such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews, when someone asks a buying question. When a prospective client types “who are the best fiduciary financial advisors in Cincinnati” into ChatGPT, the AI produces a confident answer. It names specific firms. GEO is how you get your firm on that list.
For financial advisors, this matters right now because the discovery journey for high-value clients is changing. Affluent individuals who are making major financial decisions, like retirement planning, estate structuring, and wealth management, are doing serious research before they ever pick up the phone. A growing portion of that research happens through AI, not traditional search. If your firm doesn’t appear in those AI answers, you may never enter the consideration set at all, even if you have a stellar track record and deep community roots.
Journey Advisory Group: What signals does an AI engine like ChatGPT actually look at when deciding which financial advisor to recommend?
EB: It’s a combination of what the model internalized during training and, for tools that do real-time retrieval like ChatGPT, what it finds on the web when someone asks a question. In both cases, a few signals carry the most weight.
First, how consistently does your firm appear on respected third-party sources? That includes financial planning directories, local business publications, editorial rankings like those from Newsweek or USA Today, and comparison articles. When a model encounters your name repeatedly across credible, independent sources, it starts to build an association between your brand and authority in your category.
Second, does your website demonstrate genuine topical expertise? Not just a list of services, but content that shows you understand the specific problems your clients face, like retirement income planning, tax-efficient wealth transfer, managing concentrated positions, and business succession. The depth and specificity of your content tells the AI whether you’re a generalist or a real authority.
Third, and this is often overlooked: consistency. AI systems struggle with fragmented or contradictory brand signals. If your messaging, credentials, and areas of expertise read the same way across your website, your press mentions, and third-party profiles, that coherence reinforces your credibility in the model’s eyes.
Journey Advisory Group: Journey Advisory Group is a fiduciary firm serving clients in the Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky region. What does GEO look like practically for a firm with that profile?
EB: A firm like Journey is actually well-positioned. Being a fiduciary is a meaningful differentiator, and “fiduciary financial advisor” is exactly the kind of qualifier that shows up in the high-intent queries AI engines are answering. When someone asks, “What’s the difference between a fiduciary and a non-fiduciary advisor?” or “Why should I work with a fiduciary?” and Journey has substantive, authoritative content answering those questions, that builds the model’s association between Journey and fiduciary expertise.
On the local side, regional specificity is a significant advantage. AI engines are quite good at answering “who” and “where” questions, and a firm that has deeply established itself as the authority on wealth management in the Cincinnati metro through content, press coverage, community presence, and citations from local business media will consistently surface when buyers in that region ask those questions. The Cincinnati Business Courier rankings Journey has received, for example, are exactly the kind of third-party validation that feeds into AI retrieval systems.
Journey Advisory Group: You mentioned content depth. What kinds of content actually move the needle for a financial advisory firm trying to build GEO traction?
EB: The content that performs best is content that answers the real questions clients are asking before they engage an advisor. Not promotional material, but actual educational depth. For a comprehensive planning firm like Journey, that means substantive guides on topics like how to evaluate whether you’re on track for retirement, what to look for when choosing a financial planner, how fee structures differ between advisory models, or how to think about wealth transfer in the context of estate planning.
Generative engines are essentially trying to identify the most trustworthy, knowledgeable source for a given topic. When your content consistently answers questions with real specificity, the model begins to treat your domain as authoritative. That authority then transfers to your firm’s brand when someone asks a recommendation question.
One thing I’d emphasize for financial advisors specifically: the “who do you trust with my money” query is fundamentally different from “where should I eat lunch.” The stakes are high, and AI engines know it. They weight signals of credibility and expertise more heavily in financial categories than in many others. That actually benefits firms like Journey that have genuine expertise and a track record; it creates a higher bar that marketing-heavy competitors can’t easily clear.
Journey Advisory Group: How does GEO relate to the SEO work that advisory firms may already be doing? Is it entirely separate, or do they reinforce each other?
EB: They reinforce each other significantly, which is good news for firms that have already invested in SEO. The retrieval layer that ChatGPT and other AI engines use when pulling real-time information leans heavily on what ranks well on Google. If your content earns strong Google rankings for searches like “best fiduciary advisor Cincinnati” or “retirement planning Northern Kentucky,” that content is also likely to surface in AI retrieval pipelines.
The distinction is in what you optimize for. Traditional SEO focuses heavily on keyword density, click-through rates, and technical signals. GEO is more focused on topical authority, brand consistency across sources, and what I’d call “superlative presence”, or being featured in the kind of best-of and top-firm content that AI engines treat as highly credible. A firm that ranks well for informational queries and also appears consistently in respected editorial rankings is doing both simultaneously.
The mistake I see firms make is treating these as either-or. They hear about GEO and think they need to abandon their SEO strategy. In reality, a well-executed SEO strategy is also a strong GEO foundation. The two channels are more intertwined than most people realize.
Journey Advisory Group: What’s the biggest mistake financial advisory firms make when approaching digital marketing, and how does that connect to the GEO opportunity?
EB: The most common mistake is leading with credentials rather than expertise. A lot of advisory firm websites essentially read as a resume without demonstrating the substance that makes those credentials meaningful. Credentials matter to compliance, but what earns AI recommendations, and frankly what earns client trust, is demonstrated expertise in the problems your clients actually face.
The second mistake is assuming that paid advertising is a substitute for organic authority. Generative engines don’t serve ads. When ChatGPT recommends a financial advisor, it’s drawing on its understanding of who the credible authorities are, not who has the biggest Google Ads budget. Firms that have invested almost entirely in paid channels are invisible to this growing discovery pathway.
The underlying issue in both cases is the same: a firm’s digital presence hasn’t been built to signal genuine expertise and authority. That’s exactly what GEO addresses. And the firms that start building that infrastructure now through content, third-party visibility, and consistent brand signals will have a compounding advantage as AI-driven discovery becomes the dominant way high-net-worth clients find their advisors.
Journey Advisory Group: What’s your overall message for an independent advisory firm thinking about where to invest in marketing right now?
EB: The best independent advisory firms have something that can’t be manufactured quickly: genuine expertise, long client relationships, and a reputation built on real results over time. What GEO does is make that reputation legible to AI by translating what a firm like Journey actually is into the kind of signals that generative engines recognize and reward.
The window right now is genuinely open. Most advisory firms are not thinking about AI visibility at all. The firms that start building GEO infrastructure today will be the ones the AI recommends two years from now when a prospective client asks who to trust with their financial future. That is an enormous opportunity, and the cost of waiting is that someone else takes that position first.