AI crawlers are likely citing fund pages more than marketers think, but can get out-of-control if they start to promote outdated information.
TL;DR: audit fund pages bots can reach.
There are new AI visibility features in Microsoft Clarity – its free behaviour analytics tool – and Brainlabs has been on hand to test it.
Over four weeks in September, Clarity logged around 27,000 AI bot requests to the agency’s site (roughly 13% of measured traffic). These were split into training crawlers, real-time search bots and assistants for individual users, and a wide gulf was discovered between crawls and visits. On average there were around 90 bot fetches for every referral visit, a ratio that varied sharply depending on the AI provider.
A beta “Topic Insights” feature shows where a brand is cited in AI answers, useful for exposing gaps on non-branded queries. The caveats being that you must write the prompts yourself, it caps the number per topic, and works to show where you appear rather than where you are missing.
Search Engine Roundtable has also cited three related, separate studies that AI assistants still only drive a small fraction of traffic compared to organic search.
So, what does this mean for fund marketers?
Despite LPs reportedly using AI assistants for their due diligence more and more, fund groups have had little insight into whether that is actually happening to their own firms, and therefore the claimed success of generative engine optimisation remains dubious.
This test, though, showcases that AI bots are clearly consuming fund content, and a lot more than a marketer may realise. Not that this translates to meaningful traffic, as a handful of AI referrals is not suggestive of a single mandate that could be worth millions.
What an assistant says about a fund is also effectively an unapproved summary of your materials: outdated performance figures, closed share classes or retail-inappropriate pages which you have no control over once the crawler has found it.
Here’s some actionable steps that can enhance the use of these AI bots in the fund space.
Find out who is crawling your site
Install Clarity or review server logs to see which AI operators are hitting fund pages, factsheets and literature libraries, and how often.
Test meaningful queries
Draft a set of short, non-branded prompts that mirror what fund selectors will search for, and track whether your fund gets cited.
Clean the areas that bots can reach
Remove or clearly date stale performance data and closed products, keeping institutional investor-only content behind gates.
Keep budgets proportionate
Monitor AI visibility as one marketing strategy until referrals start to show up in pipeline data, where it could become a more valuable area for marketing spend down the line.
Brief the compliance team
Come up with an action plan for how the firm responds if an assistant starts to circulate inaccurate performance or product information.
Sources
Brainlabs, “We Tested Microsoft Clarity to Understand Bot Traffic and Citations”
Search Engine Roundtable, “3 New Studies Suggest AI Visibility & Search Not Worth Investing In”
(via TLDR Marketing)
