The way your clients, prospects, and stakeholders discover and evaluate your firm has shifted fundamentally. A prospective client researching professional services firms no longer relies solely on Google Page 1, industry directories, or word of mouth. They're asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews, and Microsoft Copilot. They're reading what those platforms say and they're forming an opinion before they ever visit your website.
The question for marketing and communications leaders in financial and professional services is: do you know what those platforms are saying about you? And if the answer is no, how confident can you really be in your brand strategy?
What is brand tracking in financial and professional services?
Brand tracking in financial and professional services is the ongoing measurement of how a firm is perceived, found, and represented across the channels that matter to its corporate stakeholders. Traditionally this has meant media monitoring, survey-based reputation measurement, and search visibility. In 2025 and beyond, it must also include AI platform visibility: how your firm appears when stakeholders query AI tools about your category, your competitors, and your firm directly.
Effective brand tracking for a professional services firm today covers four interconnected areas: AI platform visibility, search engine visibility, media and PR share of voice, and competitive benchmarking. Firms that track only one or two of these are working with an incomplete picture.
Why brand perception matters more than ever in financial and professional services
In sectors where trust, credibility, and expertise are the primary differentiators such as law, accountancy, financial services, consulting, asset management, brand perception is not a soft metric. It directly influences new business, talent attraction, regulatory relationships, and the ability to command premium fees.
Firms that don't measure their brand systematically are making strategy decisions in the dark. They may be losing ground to competitors in AI-generated answers without knowing it. They may be ranked poorly for non-branded sector terms that their target clients are actively searching. They may have inaccurate or incomplete information surfacing in AI responses and have no mechanism to detect or correct it.
The firms gaining an edge in this environment are those treating brand measurement as a strategic discipline.
What questions should financial and professional services firms be asking about their brand?
Marketing and communications leaders should be able to answer the following questions with data, not instinct:
On AI visibility:
When a prospective client asks an AI platform about firms in your category, does your firm appear and if so, how prominently and with what sentiment?
Are AI platforms accurately representing your firm's capabilities, leadership, and track record?
Which sources are shaping what AI platforms say about you and are those sources working in your favour?
How does your AI visibility compare to your direct competitors?
On search visibility:
What does Google Page 1 show when stakeholders search your firm's name, your key leadership figures, or the sector terms you want to be associated with?
Are competitors outranking you for the non-branded terms your target clients are searching?
What questions does Google surface about your firm in People Also Ask and are the answers accurate and favourable?
Is your Knowledge Panel claimed, complete, and correct?
On media and share of voice:
What is your firm's share of voice in relevant trade, national business, and financial press and is it growing or declining?
Are your spokespeople generating coverage, and is that coverage being picked up as a source by AI platforms?
What themes and topics are driving coverage for your competitors that you are not yet part of?
On competitive position:
Are you gaining or losing ground relative to named competitors across AI, search, and media?
Where are the gaps in your visibility that competitors are filling?
If your firm cannot answer these questions with confidence, you have a strategic blind spot.
How Rostrum's Brand Barometer approach works
Rostrum has developed a brand tracking methodology specifically for financial and professional services firms called The Brand Barometer that combines AI platform monitoring, search visibility analysis, media share of voice, and competitive benchmarking into a single, integrated programme.
The approach works in two phases.
Phase one: establishing the baseline
Rostrum conducts a comprehensive audit of a firm's current external brand across AI platforms and search, delivering a written report, presentation deck, and composite reputation scorecard. This covers:
A systematic audit of Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot across branded and sector-specific prompts, with each response scored for presence, prominence, sentiment, and factual accuracy
A full search engine results page analysis for branded and non-branded terms, including People Also Ask, Related Searches, Knowledge Panel status, and the review and ratings landscape
Media and LinkedIn coverage analysis, benchmarked against an agreed set of three to four direct competitors
A prioritised set of recommendations and actions the firm can take immediately, or brief Rostrum to deliver
The baseline is completed within three to four weeks of kick-off and provides the reference point against which all future tracking is measured.
Phase two: quarterly monitoring
Every quarter, Rostrum re-runs the full audit against the established baseline, measuring movement across all workstreams and producing an updated scorecard with red, amber, and green flags for areas requiring attention. Each cycle includes a briefing call to review trends and agree recommended actions.
The result is a continuous, structured view of brand health as opposed to a snapshot taken once a year and filed away.
What makes this approach different
Most brand tracking tools in the market were built before AI platforms became a primary discovery channel. They measure traditional media coverage, survey-based brand metrics, or basic search rankings in isolation from each other, and with no mechanism for monitoring what AI is saying about your firm.
Rostrum's Brand Barometer is built for the current landscape. It combines AI platform monitoring with search and media analysis, benchmarks every metric against named competitors, and produces prioritised recommendations rather than raw data. It is also designed to be proportionate a fraction of the cost of enterprise reputation platforms, focused specifically on the channels that matter most to corporate stakeholders in financial and professional services.
Critically, because Rostrum operates at the intersection of PR, content, and digital strategy, the findings feed directly into action. If AI platforms are misrepresenting your firm, that informs a content strategy response. If competitors are outperforming you in media share of voice, that informs a PR strategy response. Brand tracking, in this model, becomes a strategic input.
The cost of not measuring
The professional services firms that will lose ground over the next three to five years are not those that fail to innovate in their service delivery. They are those that fail to notice and respond to the shift in how their brand is being formed and discovered.
AI platforms are already shaping first impressions. Search results are already influencing which firms make a shortlist. Media share of voice is already affecting how your firm is perceived by the journalists, analysts, and influencers who shape sector opinion. If you are not measuring these things systematically, you cannot manage them.
The cost of measurement is known. The cost of not measuring in terms of lost mandates, slower growth, and brand positions ceded to competitors is not visible until it is too late.
Five things marketing and communications leaders in financial and professional services should do now
Run a basic AI audit - query ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews with your firm name, your key partners or executives, and three to five non-branded terms in your category. What you find will be instructive.
Check your Google Knowledge Panel - is it claimed? Is it accurate? Does it surface the right information about your firm's leadership and capabilities?
Ask your PR team for your share of voice data - not just coverage volume, but how you compare to named competitors in the publications that matter to your target clients.
Identify your three to four most important competitors and run the same AI and search checks on them. The gaps between their visibility and yours are your strategic priorities.
Put a structured tracking programme in place before your next planning cycle so that your brand and communications strategy is built on data and real insights
Rostrum is a PR and communications agency specialising in financial and professional services. The Brand Barometer is Rostrum's proprietary brand tracking programme, combining AI visibility monitoring, search analysis, media share of voice, and competitive benchmarking into a single quarterly reporting framework. To find out more or discuss how the programme could work for your firm, contact the Rostrum team.
