Shaun Melby, founder of Melby Wealth, may seem outwardly like an unlikely candidate as a pioneer among advisors in the use of artificial intelligence, but that’s exactly what he is.

Melby has lived in Nashville for more than 20 years, after moving from a small town in Wisconsin, where he grew up and attended college. He has long since passed beyond being a stranger in a strange land—and yet he still had a somewhat related problem he needed to solve.

“I wanted to show up on the first page of Google when someone searched ‘financial advisor in Nashville,’” Melby said.

That quest led him down a long path of study, specifically in search engine optimization, far afield from his work as an advisor with a CFP and a bachelor’s degree in business administration with an emphasis on the entertainment industry.

“I taught myself SEO principles when I first launched my RIA,” he said, noting that the journey began a little over seven years ago and had helped him grow his business, which specializes in serving those in the Nashville music scene. “I essentially took the entire process I built over those seven-plus years and turned it into a platform that any advisor can use on their own site.”

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The fruit of those efforts is called AdvisorSEO Max, an AI-driven SEO platform designed for financial advisors and RIAs. It provides tools for website audits, compliance-aware meta tag generation, and AI-search visibility tracking. AdvisorSEO Max also integrates directly with Google Search Console to provide data-driven recommendations. Melby, who has used organic search as a primary client acquisition channel strategy himself for years, developed the platform to address limitations he encountered with existing tools.

As Melby explained, he and many other advisors had tried to rewrite their title tags multiple times, written blog posts and done other things with the thought that they would improve how well they did in returned search results, but to little effect.

“I experienced it myself and heard from many other advisors that it just didn’t move the needle, and what I discovered was that the problem was that nobody had really explained what to fix first,” Melby said.

At the core of AdvisorSEO Max is Commander, an AI assistant powered by Anthropic’s Claude and incorporating all of Melby’s own learnings over the years. Commander generates strategy plans, tracks performance, monitors competitors and provides follow-up reminders. The platform’s “Fix This Next” engine prioritizes impactful changes, while an AI Visibility Checker evaluates brand presence in AI-generated search results, he said.

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“It is all me and all the vibe coding apps, and that’s why it has taken a while, a lot of trial and error to get it to do what I wanted it to do,” he said of developing the application, noting that he has been happy with the results.

“I’ve averaged 25 prospect meetings a year on Google and now coming in through AI searches,” he said.

AdvisorSEO Max offers a 14-day free trial, with plans starting at $199 per month or $1,990 annually. The platform is tailored to the compliance and marketing needs of financial advisors, including schema markup and blog optimization specific to the industry.

Melby continues to lead Melby Wealth Management while evolving AdvisorSEO Max based on his own experiences and challenges as a practicing state-registered advisor.