Melbourne Financial Planners Are Missing from AI Category Recommendations in 2026: The Visibility Index

Quick take: LogitRank ran Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) category-query audits on eight Melbourne financial planning practices in March 2026 — across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, and Google AI Overviews. Every firm had genuine brand recognition when queried by name. Not one appeared unprompted when a prospect asked "who is the best financial planner in Melbourne?" The same audit runs also captured which firms do appear on those category queries — and the data shows that a small group of Melbourne practices are absorbing the majority of AI-generated referral traffic.

• Eight Melbourne financial planning firms were audited across four AI platforms in March 2026. All eight had strong brand recognition on direct queries. None appeared on category-level discovery queries.
• Verse Wealth and Rising Tide Financial Services appear on all four platforms when a prospect asks for Melbourne's best financial planner — the only firms in the audit set to achieve full category visibility.
• Thabojan Rasiah (Rasiah Private Wealth Management) and Cameron Howlett (Independent Wealth Partners) each appear on three of four platforms on category queries.
• Hedging language — phrases like "markets itself as," "positions itself as," or "reportedly" — was detected on at least one platform for four of the five audited firms, signalling incomplete third-party corroboration in AI training data.
• Owner entity recognition failed completely for five of the eight audited firms: queries for the principal adviser's name returned unrelated public figures, not financial planning results.
• The gap between the visible and invisible tiers is a structured data and citation problem, not a website quality or service quality problem.

How This Index Was Compiled

Between 12 and 24 March 2026, LogitRank ran a structured AI visibility audit on eight Melbourne financial planning practices as part of an AI Visibility Snapshot programme. Each audit included a consistent set of queries on ChatGPT (OpenAI), Perplexity, Gemini (Google), and Google AI Overviews. The queries covered: category discovery ("Who is the best financial planner in Melbourne?"), brand recognition ("Who is [firm]?"), owner entity ("Who is [principal]?"), reputation assessment, and service description.

The category-query results — the responses each platform gave when asked for Melbourne's best financial planner, with no firm name provided — are the basis for this index. A firm is scored as AI-Visible on a given platform if it appeared unprompted in a category response. It is scored as Brand-Present if it appeared only when queried by name. It is scored as Invisible if it did not appear on any query type.

The firms that appear in the "AI-Visible" tier below were not directly audited as subjects — they are competitors who appeared in category responses during the five audits. Their category scores reflect how consistently they were named across the five audit runs, not a single point-in-time query.

The AI Visibility Index: Which Melbourne Financial Planning Firms AI Recommends

The following table shows which firms appeared unprompted on category queries across the four platforms. A checkmark indicates the firm appeared in category responses during the March 2026 audit period. A dash indicates it did not appear in the responses captured. Google AI Overviews did not generate a category response for every audit run — where it did, those results are recorded.

Firm	ChatGPT	Perplexity	Gemini	Google AI	Score
Verse Wealth	✓	✓	✓	✓	4 / 4
Rising Tide Financial Services	✓	✓	✓	✓	4 / 4
Thabojan Rasiah / Rasiah Private Wealth	—	✓	✓	✓	3 / 4
Cameron Howlett / Independent Wealth Partners	—	✓	✓	✓	3 / 4
Index Wealth	✓	✓	—	—	2 / 4
FMD Financial	✓	✓	—	—	2 / 4
CCA Financial Planners	✓	✓	—	—	2 / 4
Hewison Private Wealth	—	✓	✓	—	2 / 4
ActOn Wealth	—	—	✓	✓	2 / 4
Empower Wealth Advisory	✓	—	—	—	1 / 4

Scores reflect category-query appearances across March 2026 audit runs. Gemini also named individual advisers including Michael Abrahamsson (Flinders Wealth), Andrew Dunbar, Paul Kearney (Kearney Group), Chris Morcom (Hewison Private Wealth), and Stevie-Jade Turner (Verse Wealth) — where a platform names an individual adviser rather than a firm, the firm is credited.

The Brand-Present Tier: Eight Audited Firms with Strong Credentials and Zero Category Visibility

Eight Melbourne financial planning practices were audited as subjects in this research. Each had genuine, accurate brand recognition across all four platforms on direct queries. Each had a score of zero on category queries. The table below summarises their AI visibility profile.

Firm	Brand Recognition	Category Visibility	Hedging Detected	Owner Entity
Collins Street boutique — principal listed in a national annual adviser influence publication for two consecutive years	3 / 4 platforms	0 / 4 platforms	Perplexity ("markets itself as")	Partial — one platform returned the wrong founder name entirely
Moonee Ponds multi-service group (financial planning, mortgage broking, SMSF, property)	4 / 4 platforms	0 / 4 platforms	ChatGPT ("describes itself as") + Gemini	Partial — principal connected on Perplexity; disambiguation risk on ChatGPT; business name shared with South African and US firms
Camberwell diversified advice and accounting firm (financial planning, SMSF, insurance, business advisory)	4 / 4 platforms	0 / 4 platforms	None detected	None — principal name resolves to a prominent American healthcare executive on ChatGPT
Boutique HNW finance broker, CBD-based — national industry trade media profile	4 / 4 platforms	0 / 4 platforms	ChatGPT + Gemini ("positions itself as")	None — principal name resolves to an Australian actor and a Navy captain across all platforms
South Melbourne boutique — multiple national practice award recognitions in 2024	4 / 4 platforms	0 / 4 platforms	Perplexity ("claims to be ASIC-regulated")	Strong — principal well-cited and accurately attributed across platforms
Inner-east Melbourne multi-location boutique — top-tier Adviser Ratings status, national practice growth award	4 / 4 platforms	0 / 4 platforms	ChatGPT ("reportedly") + Gemini ("positions itself as")	None — principal name resolves to athletes, musicians, and fictional characters
Inner-north Melbourne boutique — 25+ years principal experience, registered specialist in disability-related financial planning	4 / 4 platforms	0 / 4 platforms	ChatGPT + Perplexity ("positions itself as")	Partial — principal name has minor spelling disambiguation risk; business name conflicts with 4 global entities including an African fintech app
South-east Melbourne boutique — 18+ years principal experience, SMSF and specialist-niche financial planning	Partial — 4/4 recognise the name, but 2 platforms return an unrelated European R&D consultancy as the primary result	0 / 4 platforms	ChatGPT ("the firm portrays itself as offering")	None — principal name claimed in Google's Knowledge Graph by an unrelated public figure; dual disambiguation failure (firm name + owner name)

These are not obscure practices. The eight firms audited include a principal listed in a national adviser influence publication, a practice with multiple 2024 national award recognitions, a CFP with 25+ years of industry experience, a multi-location boutique with top-tier Adviser Ratings status, a multi-service advisory with national office presence, a diversified advice and accounting firm, a boutique HNW finance broker with a national trade media profile, and a principal with 18+ years of experience in a specialist niche. On direct queries, their AI presence largely reflects those credentials. The category-query absence — and in one case, active entity confusion with an unrelated firm on a different continent — reflects something else entirely: structural gaps in how AI platforms have indexed and weighted the external citation signals that drive recommendation inclusion.

Three Patterns That Separate the Visible from the Invisible

1. Category visibility is driven by third-party citation density, not firm quality

The firms that appear consistently on category queries share a common characteristic: they are cited by name across multiple independent third-party sources that AI platforms treat as authoritative. Verse Wealth, Rising Tide Financial Services, and the individual advisers named by Gemini all have substantial third-party citation footprints — award announcement pages, editorial profiles in industry media, high-volume review aggregator entries, and directory features with consistent NAP data. AI platforms sourcing their category recommendations are pulling from these citation layers. A well-credentialed boutique practice with strong Adviser Ratings profiles but thin media coverage is structurally absent from these sources, regardless of actual quality. The Camberwell diversified advice firm in this dataset is the clearest example: zero hedging across all platforms, accurate brand descriptions, principal named by Perplexity and Google AI Overview — but zero category appearances. The structured entity signals are present; the citation density needed to trigger category inclusion is not.

2. Hedging language is a diagnostic signal, not an editorial opinion

Phrases like "markets itself as," "positions itself as," "describes itself as," and "reportedly" are not AI platforms expressing doubt about a firm's character. They are mechanistic signals that the platform found a claim in a first-party source (typically the firm's own website) but could not locate independent corroboration to state the claim as established fact. Seven of the eight audited firms triggered hedging on at least one platform — the single exception being the Camberwell diversified practice, which had no hedging detected but also had a significant owner entity failure. The firms in the AI-visible tier do not trigger hedging on category or reputation queries — because independent sources confirm their positioning and credentials without them needing to assert it themselves.

3. Owner entity recognition is an underused authority lever

For five of the eight audited firms, the principal adviser's name did not resolve to financial planning on any platform — returning actors, rappers, athletes, and healthcare executives instead. Two firms sit in a partial state, with the principal connected on some platforms but not others. One firm in this dataset has a compounding problem: the principal name is claimed in Google's Knowledge Graph by an unrelated public figure, and separately, two platforms return a European consultancy when asked about the business itself. That is a dual disambiguation failure — the firm name and the owner name both resolve to wrong entities simultaneously. By contrast, the one firm in the audited group with strong owner entity recognition — whose principal has television appearances, a business podcast, and industry award recognition in AI-indexed sources — demonstrates exactly why personal entity building is the highest-leverage intervention available to boutique practice owners: it is the mechanism Gemini uses to include individual advisers in category-level results. By contrast, two of the eight audited practices had strong or accurate owner entity responses. On the one platform where Gemini names individual advisers in category results rather than just firms — which it did on all five audit runs — having a well-established owner entity is the mechanism by which a boutique practice achieves category-level inclusion. Thabojan Rasiah's consistent category presence across three platforms is driven primarily by his individual entity recognition, not his firm's brand recognition.

What This Means for Melbourne Financial Planning Practices

The data from this audit set suggests that AI-generated recommendation traffic for Melbourne financial planning services is currently concentrating into a small group of firms — primarily those with the highest review volumes, the most consistent third-party citation patterns, and in Gemini's case, well-established individual adviser entities. A practice that does not appear in this group is not losing clients to those firms through inferior service. It is losing discovery opportunities because the structured data signals AI platforms use to construct category answers do not yet include the practice at the required confidence threshold.

The fix is not more website content. It is entity establishment — building the structured, corroborated, third-party-verified record that AI platforms need to classify a Melbourne financial planning practice as a citation-worthy answer to cold-prospect discovery queries. The sequence is: entity foundation (Wikidata entry, schema markup) → citation breadth (directory consistency, industry association profiles, editorial mentions) → category-level authority (appearing unprompted when prospects ask AI for a recommendation).

This research was conducted in March 2026. The AI landscape is not static — training cycles update, platform behaviours shift, and early movers who establish entity authority now are building an advantage that compounds over time. The firms currently dominating Melbourne financial planning category queries are not there by accident: they got there because the structured signals AI platforms use to make recommendations have been building in their favour, whether intentionally or not.

If you want to know where your practice currently stands, LogitRank offers a free AI Visibility Snapshot — ten to fifteen minutes of research that shows exactly how each platform describes your firm, where you appear, and where you don't. Request a free Snapshot here.