United States — n = 255
Finding an advisor in the United States
What the 255 pages we walked in the United States look like on the six, and how each business model here compares with itself in the other countries. The firm-by-firm findings live on the business-model pages.
What the United States looks like on the six
Mean 3.08 of six across 255 pages.
Can you see a real person at all?
78%
200 of 255
200 of 255 show a named advisor somewhere on the page without asking for a form first. On the other 55, a visitor never sees an individual at all.
Can you narrow by what you need?
27%
70 of 255
70 of 255 offer a control for specialty, credentials, or how an advisor is paid. On the other 185, location is the only thing a visitor can narrow by, or there is nothing to narrow by at all.
Can you narrow by who fits you?
18%
45 of 255
45 of 255 offer a control for the language a visitor speaks, the community they belong to, or the life event they are facing. On the other 210, who the visitor is makes no difference to who they are shown.
Can you reach them yourself?
59%
150 of 255
150 of 255 give a visitor that named advisor’s own phone, email, or calendar without submitting their details to the firm first. The other 105 do not.
Can you keep your details until you choose?
60%
152 of 255
152 of 255 let a visitor reach the advisor they picked without joining a queue, asking for a callback, or filling in a match form. On the other 103, the route runs through the firm.
Can a machine find them?
66%
168 of 255
168 of 255 put their advisors in the served bytes, where a crawler or an answer engine can read them. On the other 87, the advisors are invisible to machines.
The largest population in the study and the one closest to the overall picture, which is what a 255-surface sample of a 255-surface market tends to be. The interesting variation in the United States is not national, it is by business model — see Segments, where the distance between the best and worst kinds of firm is far wider than the distance between any two countries.
26 of the 255 pass all six. 55 pass none.
On 55 of them no named advisor appears at any depth. A visitor who arrives wanting to choose a person never gets to the point of choosing.
91 hand a visitor a named advisor they were given no way to choose — the connection works and the matching never happened. That is the study’s central finding, and it holds here.
20 advertise a way to narrow by language. Whether each one works is a separate question, and this study answers it separately: several ship a language control the page never transmits.
Business model separates these surfaces more than anything else does. Professional body registers here average 4.89 of six across 9 surfaces; digital advice and direct-to-consumer surfaces average 0.62 across 8. Both are in the same market, under the same regulator, serving the same consumer.
By business model
The same business model, read against itself in each country
A bank is not a wirehouse and a wirehouse is not a lead marketplace, so a country mean on its own hides more than it shows. Every row here opens the full firm-by-firm finding for that business model.
| Business model | Surfaces | Mean of six | Median | Elsewhere |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Professional body registerssee all 9 | 9 | 4.89 | 6 | — |
| RIAs & independent wealth managerssee all 73 | 73 | 3.82 | 4 | ZA 3 |
| Broker-dealers, IBDs & platformssee all 41 | 41 | 3.2 | 4 | CA 3.59 |
| Banks & credit unionssee all 42 | 42 | 3.1 | 4 | CA 4.5ZA 0 |
| Insurance carrierssee all 48 | 48 | 2.52 | 3 | CA 2.7ZA 0.69 |
| Fraternal benefit societiessee all 17 | 17 | 2.41 | 3 | — |
| Lead marketplacessee all 16 | 16 | 1.88 | 1 | — |
| Digital advice & D2Csee all 8 | 8 | 0.62 | 0 | — |
Every one of the 255 United States pages is listed in full, with its controls, its transcript and the URL we audited, on its business-model page. Each appears exactly once in this report.
Looking for one firm?
This page is the country read. To find a named firm, search it on the index — every United States page is in there — or open the business model it belongs to in the table above.
Every part of this report
By business model