Are challenger banks (or neo banks, pick your poison) still cool?
It was all very exciting when they were the app-first, UX-heroes and you could pick up a flashy wrong-way-around bank card in a mad colour. These things are pretty standard now – when a 260-year-old bank does it, it’s pretty standard. When you have big call centres, and start selling mortgages rather than fun-money accounts, do you lose that “cool” edge?
It turns out no, because just in the nick of time – here comes AI. Challenger banks are better at appearing in LLM search results, getting a disproportionate share of that traffic. This is also from the audiences they have positioned themselves perfectly for.
Check out this chart from our recent Search and AI webinar with Similarweb:
Starling and Revolut earned three to four times more AI referrals per 10,000 visits compared to traditional banks Santander and Lloyds. You’d think that those challenger banks have, overall, smaller customer bases to the big banks and therefore should have a harder time getting found. But they’re not; they’re competitive, and they’re winning.
So is it because AI searches are coming from the same audiences their positioning seems to favour? That might play a part, though as technology becomes ubiquitous that advantage will disappear (your nanna uses Facebook more than you do after all) but AI is doing more than that – it’s using a huge amout on online trust signals, and which brands get shown, regardless of the audience, will depend on that.
Why is this even worth talking about?
Firstly, AI SEO, GEO, AEO – whatever we’re calling it, is still technically an emerging channel, but it’s not going anywhere, and with Google getting increasingly AI-ified, its usage is escalating rapidly. People are using AI for a range of things, from creating weird and wonderful pictures to seeking support on things like best savings accounts or how to start trading stocks.
Stat7 did a study looking into what kind of customers are using AI models to help with financial conversations. They found that around 55% of UK adults use AI platforms for financial service questions, and 45% of Millennials and Gen Z take most of their financial questions to AI.
At Balance, our teams are also seeing the effects of these changes play out. The rise of zero-click searches, but maybe more importantly, the decline in Google Searches and the rise in Gen AI searches, which was another finding from our talk with Similarweb. This dataset specifically looked at monthly indexed “Mortgage” prompts and searches (be wary of the scale here – it’s showing relative growth)
Just to push the importance one step further, traffic that can be attributed back to ChatGPT converts at a 7.1% rate. Second to paid search. The assumption here is that people are getting better answers to their questions, and by the time they land on the site, they are an easier sell.
In our sector, we are cursed with long buying cycles; trust plays a huge role in it. If more consumers are going to AI because they’re trusting what it has to say, and you don’t get mentioned, it’s a problem that will just keep getting bigger.
What AI visibility rewards
AI is looking for proof
If your business has understood the importance of SEO and spent years in pursuit of rankings, you’ll understand the importance of digital PR and outreach: chasing domain authority and backlinks. Luckily, those levers still matter. Studies, and the output from our own digital PR clients, show improvements in AI visibility scores from Semrush alongside gains in referral traffic.
LLMs lean on third-party validation. That means showing up in earned media, with publications talking about your brand around the web rather than only on your own website. There’s more to it than presence alone. You need to be spoken about in a specific way. If you’re a bank with strong savings rates, you want those publications to say so: “NatWest’s regular digital savings account offers 5% interest.” That’s what AI reads, remembers, and repeats when someone asks about the best interest rates.
AI weighs what customers, reviewers and communities say about your bank more heavily than anything you publish yourself.
Win reviews
So, getting talked about in publications is great for trust, but where is better? Reviews. Look at where the review volume sits, and the imbalance is obvious. Revolut carries 370,000 Trustpilot reviews at 4.7 out of 5, and Monzo 66,000 at 4.6. Barclays has around 22,000 and HSBC roughly 28,000 (Trustpilot, July 2026), despite serving many times the number of customers.
Starling Bank holds the highest overall score of any bank on Fairer Finance’s independent table at 77.8%, ahead of every high-street name (2026).
Scores alone don’t tell a tidy story, though; when you look at traditional banks like HSBC’s 4.4 and Barclays’ 4.1 comfortably beat Santander’s 2.9 and NatWest’s 1.4 (oooff), so this isn’t a straight divide. There is clearly a weighting combined with probability here – Natwest do better than Monzo for proportionate traffic, though their reviews are far worse, on Trustpilot at least.
But what does separate the challengers is the sheer weight of recent, specific, customer-written material sitting on platforms AI models routinely cite.
That volume is the asset. A model summarising the best UK current account has hundreds of thousands of Revolut data points to draw on and a fraction of that for most of the high street. The challengers built a habit of asking customers to talk about them publicly, and years later that habit is paying out in a channel nobody was optimising for at the time.
The social engagement gap
So, we have publications, we have reviews, now let’s look at socials. Our own analysis of challenger bank social output found engagement rates running four to eight times higher than the traditional bank. So despite older banks having had longer to build these audiences, it’s the same pattern: they’re not doing it as well as these newer players.
Traditional banks lead on Facebook, where years of accumulated followers (like your nanna) give them genuine scale. On Instagram, TikTok and X, the challengers publish more and earn considerably more interaction on what they publish.
But the real differentiator is how the channel gets used. Challenger banks treat social as a place to hold conversations. They reply to customers, join threads they weren’t tagged in, and answer criticism in public rather than routing it to a DM. The traditional banks more often use social to distribute announcements to an audience they don’t expect to hear back from.
One of those approaches generates a continuous supply of specific, brand-adjacent text on the open web. The other generates posts. Every reply, post and comment thread puts a brand’s name next to a concrete claim about what you do, written by someone with no commercial interest in saying it. That is the raw material AI models pull from when they assemble an answer, and it explains why a community-led approach to social translates into AI visibility while a broadcast approach doesn’t.
Being great at social and earning real engagement now feeds directly into whether AI tools trust you enough to name you.
What traditional finance brands can do about it
The encouraging part of this whole piece, if you’re a marketer at a traditional bank it that this isn’t a fixed advantage. Look back at the chart, and you’ll see HSBC scores 26.0 and NatWest 20.4, both ahead of Monzo at 19.6, which means an established bank can absolutely compete for AI visibility.
It’s all about the signals that earn it. And they can all be built.
Four levers do most of the work, which we have covered above:
- Review generation is the obvious starting point: make asking for reviews a routine part of the customer journey rather than an afterthought, and the volume compounds over time.
- Community-led social matters next, meaning genuine conversation rather than broadcast, because that’s what produces specific, brand-adjacent text across the open web.
- Consistent, practical content that answers the questions customers ask, in language a model can lift and reuse.
- Well-structured pages that content easy for AI tools to read and cite in the first place. We’ll delve into more detail on this but if you want to talk about it sooner, get in touch with our SEO team.
It’s worth remembering that no single one of these wins on its own. Different AI platforms weigh different signals, so a bank that leans entirely on one tactic leaves visibility on the table elsewhere.
The brands making progress treat this as a coordinated effort across content, social media, digital PR and on-site structure, rather than a single campaign. That is what challenger banks are doing, and it’s what we should all be building marketing strategies around.
