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Pepperstone is targeting AI-generated broker recommendations alongside conventional search, with Growth Consultant at Pepperstone Andy Francos describing a strategy spanning ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini and Claude. The account, published on 3 November 2026, draws on broker data tracked by Wordflow, whose Founder & CEO of Wordflow Zay Yang says firms need to pay attention to how assistants retrieve and present information, not only to their own websites.
The scale cited in the report helps explain the shift: the reported estimate puts ChatGPT at about 1.2 billion weekly active users; its share of AI search is over 50%. Google's AI Mode has more than a billion monthly active users. Google's AI Overviews reach over 2.5 billion monthly users, according to the figures reported. For broker operators, these interfaces introduce another route to customer acquisition, but the sources behind an answer may sit outside the broker's own web estate.
AI answers draw on varied sources
The information an assistant retrieves depends on what a prospective client asks. A query about a broker's authorisation or safety may lead to a regulator's material, while questions about account types or deposit bonuses may send the system to the broker's site. Yang cautions that a regulator being cited should not be read as an endorsement. The distinction matters for compliance teams checking how an AI-generated description frames a firm's status.
There is also a publishing and rendering issue. The report says assistants need core information in readable page text, rather than material available only through interactive elements or PDF files, and may struggle with JavaScript.
Fees, available accounts and regulatory details therefore need to be accessible to crawlers. Yang also says FAQ and entity markup can help systems identify a broker and reproduce its information accurately.
Broker-owned pages are only part of the source mix. Francos says third-party material makes up a significant share of Pepperstone's citations, including regulators, comparison and review sites, finance publications and local personal-finance outlets. Wordflow's tracking indicates that independent sources often appear ahead of the broker's own site in AI citations. Incorrect information about fees or licensing can therefore become a risk to manage, rather than simply a content-ranking problem.
Local sources shape recommendations
AI answers can vary by language and market because the sources used for training and retrieval are not evenly distributed. The report describes different citation groups across Australia, the UK and Singapore: ASIC, MoneySmart and local comparison sites in Australia; the FCA, Trustpilot and BrokerChooser in the UK; and MAS, the local exchange, broadsheets and local personal-finance sites in Singapore. A broker may consequently receive a confident recommendation in one country and a more qualified assessment nearby.
That variation is what Yang calls a hedging tax: recommendations can still carry caveats about a firm being relatively new or having higher fees. Local coverage may offer a route to improve recognition, since Yang says those sources are less contested than in a crowded US market. The practical work is not limited to global search optimisation; teams need to know which sources shape answers in each target jurisdiction.
Reddit is a less dependable citation channel in Pepperstone's experience. The platform signed deals with Google and OpenAI in 2024, and a Reddit comparison thread is among the leading sources cited by Google's AI answers and Perplexity for brokerage questions in one market tracked by Wordflow.
But Francos says Reddit disappeared from Pepperstone's citation list after GPT-5.6 reached general users, even as the firm's total citations quadrupled. The company runs r/PepperstoneCrypto, but its presence there has not guaranteed consistent AI referrals.
In UK broker prompts, Reddit ranks 32nd in Obsero citation tracking, behind the FCA, gov.uk and several competitor sites, according to Francos. He says Pepperstone's paid Reddit activity did not produce a return and that its budget for the channel is shrinking. Community participation and clear answers to practical questions are presented as more useful than treating Reddit as an advertising placement. James Buckley-Thorp, founder and CEO of UK-based AI company Atlian, warns that planted discussions intended to influence AI recommendations can amount to financial promotion. The Finance Magnates report also notes his concern that the FCA says 80% of customers lose money on the products in question.
What an operations team should check
Operations, web and compliance teams can start by checking whether a crawler can retrieve current fees, account terms and licence information without relying on scripts or downloads. They should also compare the broker's own details with the regulator and independent sites that assistants cite in each market. Where answers differ, the question is which source is stale or incomplete, and who owns correcting it.
Teams should also ask how AI referrals appear in attribution reports. The report describes journeys that end as organic brand searches even when a chatbot or forum helped shape the decision. Looking ahead, it says brokers have begun experimenting with Model Context Protocol (MCP) integrations that connect accounts to AI agents; current safeguards prevent those bots from executing trades autonomously. Operators should establish what data an integration can access, what actions it permits and how those actions are logged before expanding its use.
