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Industry · Q3 2026 · 10 brokerages

US Brokerage Industry — Marketing, PR & Creator Rollup

Cross-cohort audit of 10 US brokerages. Compares PR coverage, marketing surface, and creator footprint to surface whitespace for the developer-trader position.

Cohort
10
As of
2026-09-19
Subject
Aries
Mode
full
00 / Executive summary

US Brokerage Industry — Marketing, PR & Creator Rollup

An industry-level rollup audit aggregating Google News RSS coverage, marketing-surface probes, and creator/SERP signals across ten US brokerages — retail giants (Robinhood, Schwab, Fidelity), institutional pros (IBKR), developer APIs (Alpaca), active traders (TradeStation, Webull, tastytrade), and modern retail (Public.com, SoFi) — with Aries as the subject benchmark. Identifies where the cohort leads, where it under-serves, and the three cross-OS actions that close the gap.

Industry composite (PR + surface)
10 / 49
Mean of observed per-brokerage scores. Creator column pending in smoke mode.
Best-in-class (PR)
Aries
Tier-1 weighted sample · 10
Best-in-class (Surface)
Alpaca
Education/press/referral heuristics · 85

What this audit answers. Across 10 US brokerages, where is the marketing whitespace for an open-source, MCP-native trading terminal — and what do peer brands already do well? This page is the industry rollup that the brand-level Aries audit cites.

What it does not cover. X impressions, Reddit thread metrics, and TikTok completion — these are platform-paid reads and are excluded per the AuditOS source feasibility rules. Missing reads are shown as n/m, never as zero.

01 / Scope

Scope and methodology

Public-source review. No client-authorized first-party data was accessed.

Cohort (10)

Methodology

  • Proxies: Webshare rotating pool (105 endpoints, residential) routed via KOLIntelligence credentials. Home IP is never exposed.
  • PR: one Google News RSS query per brokerage; titles + source host parsed. Tier-1 outlets weighted 5x, tier-2 2x, tier-3 0.5x; capped 100.
  • Surface: probe /, /learn, /newsroom; detect referral/education/press signals via keyword presence.
  • Creator (full mode): three SERP / News queries per brokerage for sponsored partnership mentions, FinTwit sponsorships, and creator promo codes. Public observation only.
  • Caveats: smoke mode = 5 brokerages, PR + surface only. SPA-rendered pages (Robinhood, Webull) under-detect on keyword heuristics; treat low surface scores as "not measured", not "absent".
US Brokerage Industry — Marketing, PR & Creator Rollup — Manifesto