64 City Rankings: RIA Visibility in AI Search

One firm leads 13 city rankings. Forty-nine other firms lead exactly one.

That is the clearest finding in AdvisorFinder’s August map of RIA visibility in AI search. Across 64 U.S. markets, 51 different firms occupy the number-one positions. Mercer Advisors accounts for 13 of those wins. Aspiriant leads two. Every other winner leads a single city.

The split complicates a familiar story about local search. National scale clearly matters: Mercer appears in the published top 15 on 59 of 64 city boards. But scale does not flatten the map into one national ranking repeated 64 times. Omaha, Atlanta, Indianapolis, Sacramento, and dozens of other markets have distinct leaders and very different competitive structures.

The useful question is therefore not whether local firms or national firms “win” AI search. Both can. The question is which kind of visibility matches the markets a firm actually serves—and whether that visibility is deep, broad, or merely scattered.

Each city produces a different field

AdvisorFinder’s August research used 6,420 consumer-style queries across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity. Of those, 6,400 were city-targeted: 100 for each of 64 markets, divided evenly across the four platforms. The remaining 20 supplied national coverage.

Each city board publishes the 15 independent RIAs named most often in that market’s query set. More mentions rank first. When two firms have the same number of mentions, the firm with the better average list position ranks higher. The displayed city score adds position-weighted context, but it does not determine the ordering.

That distinction matters. In six cities, the first- and second-place firms have identical mention totals. In Cincinnati, for example, Truepoint Wealth Counsel and Johnson Investment Counsel each appeared 37 times. Truepoint ranks first because its average position was 2.95, compared with Johnson’s 3.54.

City rankings and the national leaderboard also answer different questions. A national rank measures visibility across the complete research set. A city rank asks which firms repeatedly surface when the consumer’s question is anchored to one market. Comparing the raw city-score scale with the national 0–100 score would combine two unlike measures.

These are visibility rankings, not judgments about advice quality, performance, or suitability. They show which firms AI assistants name—not which firm a consumer should hire. The complete research design and limitations are available in the methodology.

Local depth is a legitimate strategy

The strongest concentrated profiles are not marginal appearances. Several city leaders recorded roughly 50 mentions across the 100 questions asked about their markets, often spanning all four assistants.

Carson Wealth leads Omaha with 53 mentions, an average position of 2.60, and appearances on all four platforms. The firm also ranks 16th nationally. Carson’s own site identifies Omaha as its headquarters and says the firm was founded in 1983. That combination—strong national visibility plus exceptional depth in its home market—is more useful than a simple “local firm” label.

HB Wealth leads Atlanta with 51 mentions at an average position of 3.00, again spanning all four platforms. It ranks ninth nationally. The firm says it was founded in Atlanta in 1989 and continues to maintain its headquarters there. HB’s profile shows that home-market depth and multi-market growth can coexist.

Bedel Financial Consulting leads Indianapolis with 48 mentions at an average position of 2.85 across all four platforms. Bedel, founded in 1989 and based in Indianapolis, ranks 14th nationally. Its city result is concentrated without being isolated from the national field.

Sacramento supplies the clearest example of separation. Towerpoint Wealth leads the city with 43 mentions, compared with 17 for second-place Adams Ashby Financial Advisors—a 26-mention gap, the largest in the current edition. Towerpoint describes itself as based in Sacramento and traces its founding to 2017.

For a firm whose addressable market is one or two metros, these profiles point toward the right benchmark. The objective does not have to be visibility everywhere. It can be becoming unmistakably associated with the market the firm is built to serve.

National breadth is a different kind of moat

The other strategy is visible in the firms that recur across city after city.

Firm	Top-15 city boards	City wins
Mercer Advisors	59 of 64	13
Creative Planning	44 of 64	1
Mariner Wealth Advisors	26 of 64	0
Savant Wealth Management	18 of 64	1
CAPTRUST	14 of 64	1

Mercer is the clearest breadth case. In addition to appearing on 59 boards, it leads markets ranging from Denver and Scottsdale to Tampa and San Antonio. The firm is headquartered in Denver and said in June 2026 that it operated through more than 118 locations nationally.

Yet breadth does not guarantee first place everywhere. Mercer wins 13 cities, not 59. Its result in each market still depends on how often and how prominently it appears in that market’s answers.

Creative Planning is the most interesting hybrid. It appears on 44 boards but wins only Kansas City, where it records 48 mentions at an average position of 2.83 across all four platforms. The firm says it began as a small Kansas City office and now serves clients in all 50 states. Its footprint combines national breadth with unusually deep visibility in a core market.

Aspiriant offers another version of the hybrid. It leads both Los Angeles and San Francisco; its location directory identifies Los Angeles as headquarters and lists a San Francisco office.

The larger pattern resists a clean local-versus-national divide. Forty-seven of the 51 distinct city winners also appear in the published national top 300, including 28 in the national top 50. Many market leaders are both locally salient and nationally visible. The difference is one of degree and footprint, not two separate species of firm.

A number-one rank can hide a wide lead—or a crowded podium

Rank alone does not show the distance between firms.

The widest current leads, measured with the mention count that actually determines rank, are concentrated in a handful of markets:

Market	Leader	Mentions	Runner-up	Mentions	Gap
Sacramento	Towerpoint Wealth	43	Adams Ashby Financial Advisors	17	26
Atlanta	HB Wealth	51	SignatureFD	26	25
Omaha	Carson Wealth	53	Lutz Financial	28	25
Dallas	Tolleson Private Wealth Management	36	True North Advisors	13	23
Nashville	Woodmont Investment Counsel	34	Melby Wealth Management	13	21
Denver	Mercer Advisors	38	Denver Wealth Management	17	21

St. Louis looks entirely different. Plancorp leads with 50 mentions, followed by Focus Partners Wealth with 45 and Moneta Group with 44. Together, the top three account for 139 mentions—the deepest top three in the current dataset. Cincinnati and Omaha are next at 107 each.

Plancorp says it was founded in St. Louis in 1983 and remains headquartered there. Its result is strong, but it sits inside a genuine three-firm cluster rather than far ahead of the field.

That distinction should shape how a firm reads its market. A challenger in Sacramento faces a different visibility problem from one in St. Louis. In one case, a single leader has substantial separation. In the other, relatively small changes in reach or average position could alter the podium.

The six equal-mention races make the same point from another direction. In Boca Raton, Boston, Cincinnati, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, and San Diego, average position—not mention volume—decides first place. A rank is the beginning of the diagnosis, not the entire diagnosis.

The map is stable enough to matter—and fluid enough to monitor

AI answers are probabilistic, and the assistants behind them continue to change. A city ranking should be read as an edition snapshot, not a permanent verdict.

Even so, the July-to-August comparison contains meaningful continuity. Washington, D.C. is excluded because its query set was corrected between editions. Across the remaining 63 like-for-like markets, 43 retained the same number-one firm.

The middle of each board moved more. The median city retained 10 of its 15 published firms. Among firms that appeared in both editions, the median within-market rank change was two places. Eleven cities retained all three podium firms; one retained none.

That combination—stable leaders with movement underneath them—is why recurring measurement is more useful than a one-time search. One answer can be anecdotal. A fixed, repeated query set can reveal whether a firm’s visibility profile is persistent, improving, or dependent on a narrow slice of the market.

Platform breadth supplies another robustness check. Fifty-eight of the 64 city winners appeared on at least three of the four measured platforms. Twenty-eight appeared on all four. A city win supported by several assistants is a different profile from one driven almost entirely by a single platform, even though platform count is not a separate city-ranking factor.

What the data does—and does not—say about local visibility

The results support an association between a market and the firms repeatedly named in questions about that market. They do not establish why an assistant formed that association.

A clear headquarters address, local service pages, consistent profiles, relevant third-party coverage, and evidence tied to specific client needs are all plausible inputs. They are also things a firm can inspect and improve. But the current dataset does not support a claim that any one of them caused a particular ranking.

The limitation is practical as well as philosophical. Visible source URLs are stored very unevenly across providers. Most OpenAI city answers in the August run include a visible URL in the answer text; almost none of the stored Anthropic answers do, and the stored Perplexity text includes none. Comparing apparent source patterns across all four platforms would therefore confuse a storage difference with an assistant difference.

Headquarters classifications need similar care. Form ADV is an essential identity source, but one public brand can be used by multiple legal entities. CAPTRUST, for example, appears under more than one registry record even though the firm’s own site identifies Raleigh as its headquarters and founding market. Automated registry matching is appropriate for verifying that a named adviser is real; it is not enough by itself to label every winner “hometown.”

The defensible conclusion is narrower and more useful: city-specific AI results have distinct structures, and firms with verified market roots appear among the strongest concentrated profiles. Why they achieved those profiles requires firm-level reporting, not a universal shortcut.

Choose the game your business actually plays

The right visibility strategy begins with the firm’s real service footprint.

If your firm is regionally focused

Start with the city board and the nearest relevant competitors—not the national top ten. Ask four questions:

Does AI consistently connect the firm with the correct city or metro?
On how many relevant questions does the firm appear?
When it appears, is it near the top of the answer?
Is that visibility supported across multiple assistants or concentrated in one?

A strong home-market association can be more commercially relevant than hundreds of mentions in places the firm does not serve. Defend that association before chasing national volume for its own sake.

If your firm serves multiple markets

Treat each active market as its own visibility program. Compare the firm’s city-board footprint with its actual offices, advisors, and client coverage. Look for markets where national recognition translates into local visibility—and where it does not.

The goal is not to manufacture dozens of interchangeable city pages. It is to make accurate facts, real local presence, service expertise, and third-party evidence easy for assistants to reconcile market by market.

The 64-city map does not reveal one universally superior footprint. It reveals two valid ways to build visibility: exceptional depth where the business is concentrated, and credible breadth where the business is genuinely present. The firms most likely to misread the data are those using one strategy while measuring themselves against the other.

About the data

This article uses the corrected AdvisorFinder August 2026 city export, generated August 9, 2026. The edition contains 6,420 completed queries with no recorded errors: 100 city-targeted queries for each of 64 markets plus 20 national queries, divided equally across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity. City ranks use total city mentions first and average answer position as the tiebreaker. Published city boards show the top 15 registry-verified independent RIAs.

Source: AdvisorFinder AI Visibility research, August 2026 edition. This is independent research, not investment advice or an endorsement. Rankings measure AI visibility, not firm quality or suitability. Read the full methodology and limitations.

First-party firm sources

Editorial disclosure

This article is independent editorial analysis based on AdvisorFinder’s August 2026 AI Visibility research, generated August 9, 2026. It reflects how firms appeared in standardized, non-personalized AI queries at that time; assistant responses and rankings can change. Inclusion, omission, rank, or discussion of any firm is not an endorsement or recommendation and does not assess its competence, credentials, performance, advice, or suitability for any client. Firms cannot pay for placement or improved rankings, and purchasing an AdvisorFinder report does not affect the data. Nothing here is investment, legal, or financial advice.