The advice practice website has always had a modest role in the business development process. The referral arrives already convinced, having been sent by an accountant, a mortgage broker, or a client who vouched for the practice at dinner. The website’s job was confirmation, not persuasion. A professional design, a credible biography, a clear phone number. It passed the test and got out of the way.

That dynamic has not disappeared. Referred prospects still check before they call, and a well-presented site still clears that bar comfortably. What has changed is the environment around it, and the emergence of a second job the website could now be doing.

Search behaviour is shifting faster than most practices have noticed

Organic search traffic, meaning visitors who arrived by typing a query into Google and clicking a result, was never the engine of new business for most advice practices. Trust-based professional services do not generate clients through search rankings the way a product business might, and the investment required to rank competitively for financial advice terms in a specific geographic market is substantial.

But the broader traffic picture has deteriorated sharply regardless. Google AI Overviews now appear for more than 13% of all queries, and when they appear, click-through rates to external websites drop by 61%. Websites ranking in the first position on Google are receiving 34.5% fewer clicks than a year ago. Gartner projected a 25% decline in traditional search traffic by 2026, and early data suggests that forecast is being met or exceeded in some sectors.

For practices that were not generating meaningful search traffic to begin with, this matters less than it does for publishers and e-commerce businesses. The more significant shift is happening somewhere else.

A website with nothing specific to say has no surface area for an AI system to work with.

How AI systems make recommendations

ChatGPT’s share of total internet traffic doubled between January and April 2025. Prospective clients researching financial advice, particularly those earlier in the process who have not yet received a personal referral, are increasingly asking AI systems for guidance rather than running a Google search. The question might be as direct as asking for a recommended adviser in a particular suburb, or as broad as asking what fee-for-service financial advice actually involves.

When an AI system answers those questions, it draws on indexed written content. A practice website that consists of a services page, a team biography, and a contact form has almost nothing for the system to work with. It describes what the practice offers without saying anything specific about how it thinks, what it knows, or what a client engaging it might actually experience.

The practices that appear in AI-generated recommendations are the ones that wrote something. A plain explanation of how advice fees are structured under the current regulatory framework. An honest description of what happens between an initial meeting and a completed Statement of Advice. A considered piece on how superannuation strategy changes for a client within ten years of retirement. These are questions advisers answer verbally dozens of times a year. Written down, they become content an AI system can find, assess, and cite.

Where the website budget goes

The standard advice practice website investment goes primarily to design and build: photography, brand, layout, and the technical work of putting it online. These are not wasted costs. A professionally presented site remains necessary for the credibility check that referred prospects still perform.

The gap is in what comes after the build. Most practice websites are updated infrequently after launch. The content reflects the practice as it existed on the day the site was built, written in the language of a brochure: general, warm, and carefully inoffensive.

Shifting some of that budget toward written content, specific, expert, and genuinely useful to a prospective client doing research, serves both jobs simultaneously. The site remains credible for the referred prospect. It also becomes findable for the prospective client who has not yet been referred, and citable by the AI system they asked for a recommendation.

The website has not become less important. The definition of a good one has changed.

H1 This is Header 1

H2 This is Header 2

H3 This is Header 3

H4 This is Header 4

H5 This is Header 5

H6 This is Header 6

This is paragraph text