Firms and their buyers are not talking about the same things

Every firm believes it writes for its clients. We had two bodies of text sitting side by side that could test it: 654 pages professional firms publish about themselves, and 389 conversations their buyers were having in public while deciding whether to hire one.

Same market, same period, same country. One written by firms, one written by the people they want.

Six words that only one side uses

Not rare. Absent. Across 389 conversations in which people discussed their money, their pensions, their fears and what they were going to do about them, nobody said community, portal or sustainability once.

What the buyers said instead

The same clustering measured what did come up, and the list is short and consistent.

Look at the two lists together. One side is publishing a product range and a set of facilities. The other side is asking whether they need anybody at all, who they can trust, and what it is going to cost.

The gap is not tone

This is usually diagnosed as a tone problem, and the advice that follows is to write more warmly, or more simply, or more like a human. That is not what the data shows.

The words are not too formal. They are about different subjects. A firm writing about its client portal and its sustainability policy is not using difficult language to describe what a buyer wants to know. It is describing something else entirely, clearly.

That is a buyer reading a firm's own sentence and translating it into the question he actually has. The firm was describing its service model. He was working out the price.

Why this now matters more than it did

For twenty years this gap was survivable, because a buyer arrived at a website already looking for that firm, and would scroll until they found what they needed.

An AI does not scroll. It is asked a question in a buyer's words, and it goes looking for a page that answers that question in those words. A page about your portal cannot be the answer to a question about fees. It is not that the page is badly written. It is that nobody asked it anything.

• The questions your buyers ask are a short, stable list, and it is measurable.
• The pages most firms publish answer a different list.
• The fix is not a rewrite for tone. It is publishing answers to the first list.
• An engine can only quote a page that answers the question it was asked.

How we know, and what we left out

654 pages published by UK financial firms about themselves, against 389 public conversations about hiring one, collected from forums and review sites and clustered in August 2026. A word counts once per document, so 70 means seventy separate pages, not seventy mentions.

We left two things out on purpose. The same analysis produces a list of words buyers use that firms never do, and we are not publishing it: each of those terms appears in six to fifteen conversations, and at that size the list picks up words like “food” and “yesterday”, which are small-sample noise rather than buyer vocabulary. We also dropped two firm-side terms that turned out to be navigation-menu fragments scraped from page furniture rather than anything a person wrote.

And the usual caveat, which matters here as much as anywhere: this is one profession, it is what came up in public conversation rather than a survey, and the counts are not market shares.