5WPR Data: Betterment Leads AI Mentions Among Robo-Advisors, But Fidelity’s Site Is Cited Twice As Often

NEW YORK, NY — 5W Public Relations (5WPR), the AI-era communications firm, today released The Robo-Advisors & Retail Investing AI Visibility Index 2026, a study measuring how Perplexity, ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude name and cite robo-advisor and retail investing brands in response to real buyer questions.

The study tested 24 prompts three times each across the four engines, generating 288 attempted answers and 186 returned answers with usable data, on September 6, 2026. Betterment led the appearance leaderboard, named in 69.4% of returned answers, followed closely by Vanguard (66.7%) and Fidelity (66.1%). Their confidence intervals overlap, meaning the data cannot establish that any one of the three is more visible than the others with statistical confidence.

A separate measure told a different story. Among the 186 answers that carried retrieval evidence, Fidelity’s own website was cited as a source in 26.3% of cases, the highest rate of any brand in the study and more than double Betterment’s 12.4% owned-domain citation rate. Robinhood, SigFig, Webull and Public each had a 0% owned-domain citation rate despite being named in returned answers, meaning their own sites supplied none of the evidence behind their AI mentions.

The study also found sharp disagreement between engines. ChatGPT named Vanguard in 97.8% of its returned answers, while Claude named it in just 30.4% of its own. Perplexity named Fidelity in 95.8% of returned answers, compared with 39.1% for Gemini. Publishers dominated the citation layer overall: Forbes was cited as a source in 72.6% of evidence-backed answers, more than any brand-owned domain measured in the study.

“Getting named by an AI engine and getting cited by one are two different outcomes, and this data shows a brand can lead one while trailing the other,” said Ronn Torossian, Founder and Chairman of 5WPR. “A robo-advisor that appears in seven out of ten AI answers but supplies none of the evidence behind them is being talked about without a seat at the table. The firms that win the next stage of this category will be the ones publishing pages built to be quoted directly, not just found.”

The Robo-Advisors & Retail Investing AI Visibility Index 2026 is part of 5WPR’s ongoing AI Visibility Index series, which has previously measured categories including wine brands, med spas, and celebrity endorsements. The full study, including engine-by-engine breakdowns, demand-cluster results and methodology, is available at 5wpr.com/research.

About 5W Public Relations

5W Public Relations (5WPR) is one of the largest private communications firms in the world, with offices in New York, Miami and Tampa. The firm builds earned, owned and paid strategies for clients across consumer, financial services, technology and healthcare, including a dedicated AI Search (GEO) practice that measures and improves how brands are named and cited by AI engines. Learn more at 5wpr.com.