How we became accidental trailblazers of AI SEO
The rise of generative AI has completely reshaped how people discover financial products. Instead of typing short keywords into Google, users now ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot and Gemini full questions, and those AI tools respond with direct, personalised, conversational answers.
Increasingly, those answers influence which brands people trust long before they ever click through to a website.
While this shift has felt sudden for many businesses, it didn’t catch us off guard. We’ve spent years building high‑performing SEO and Digital PR strategies for major financial brands across insurance, lending and fintech. Long before AI‑powered search became mainstream, our work was already generating the exact signals these models now rely on credible, expert‑driven content backed by strong authority across the wider web.
So, when large language models started recommending brands inside their answers, our clients naturally began showing up. The combination of authoritative content, clear explanations and strong digital PR was already perfectly aligned with what AI engines reward.
From 2022 onwards, we deepened our approach. We analysed how these systems pull information, what influences which brands they cite, and how financial services businesses can appear more frequently, all while staying compliant and maintaining their visibility on traditional search engines like Google and Bing.
Today, those insights form the backbone of our AI SEO framework: helping financial brands become trusted, citable, compliant sources inside the fastest‑growing discovery channels in the world.
What AI Search optimisation really means
When we’ve worked with clients on this our north star is simple: let’s make you highly visible on ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Copilot and Perplexity. Those four are where most of the AI‑assisted discovery now happens. (Grok… still the wild card.)
When people ask these tools questions about financial products or services, only a handful of brands tend to be mentioned. Being one of those brands is the entire game here.
Financial services adds its own layer of complexity, though. Your content needs to be compliant, accurate, risk‑appropriate yet still written in the conversational, clear style that AI tools favour. Because we work exclusively with regulated industries, we’re fluent in that balancing act, useful, citable content that remains safely within compliance boundaries.
What “visibility” in LLMs actually looks like
There are two kinds of AI visibility you should care about, and they each matter in different ways.
Direct recommendations when users want to buy
These are high‑intent moments. Someone might ask, “Where can I get a good mortgage for first‑time buyers?” and an LLM responds with a recommendation. If the model highlights a competitor instead of you, you’ve lost that early influence.
Citations when users are asking broader questions
This is where Google’s AI Overviews and Perplexity show their value. A user asks something like, “How does tax work on Vinted sales?” and the answer includes a link back to your site as a credible source.
You want both: the recommendation and the citation.
Why this matters now
If you’re seeing organic traffic drop, AI is one of the reasons. Zero‑click behaviour is growing — more users get what they need directly from AI answers. They may only visit later, or not at all. If the information powering these answers isn’t coming from your brand, it’s coming from someone else’s.
This shift from traditional search to AI‑driven discovery isn’t theoretical. It’s already happening. The leading financial brands aren’t waiting; they’re adapting now.
Is AI SEO just another version of SEO?
It’s tempting to think AI SEO is just SEO with a shiny new acronym. And yes, some core principles do overlap, which is why brands with strong SEO foundations often see early success in AI environments.
But there are key differences.
AI engines don’t operate like search engines. They don’t simply rank pages, they synthesise, summarise and recommend. They weigh credibility, authority, clarity and uniqueness in different ways.
A simple example: comparison sites dominate Google. But ask ChatGPT for advice, and direct financial brands frequently outrank them. AI plays by different rules, and we’ve spent years learning what those rules actually are.
Where we focus our efforts for AI visibility
AI content optimisation
Most financial content simply isn’t structured in a way AI tools like. It often softens direct answers for compliance reasons, leaving it unclear whether a brand truly answers the user’s question.
Our methodology is to work through your content and reshape it so it becomes the kind of clear, authoritative material AI systems want to cite, without crossing regulatory boundaries.
LLM citation strategy
LLMs can draw on the entire internet. We make sure your brand stands out through expert commentary, strong first‑party insights and high‑authority appearances in the media — publications like the Financial Times and MoneySavingExpert. When AI systems look for trusted sources, these signals matter enormously.
Building EEAT for AI
AI wants confidence. It wants to know content is created by real experts, backed by credible authorship and informed by genuine expertise. Ironically, letting AI write your content directly weakens those signals. We don’t do that. Instead, we strengthen your authority in ways AI systems recognise and trust.
Visibility across multiple AI platforms
Every platform has its quirks. Google’s AI Overviews reward authority and structured clarity; ChatGPT prefers conversational, accessible explanations; Perplexity leans into depth and unique insights.
Great AI SEO means writing in a way that works across all three without diluting your brand.
Technical AI crawler configuration
Technical optimisation is becoming just as important for AI as it always was for search engines. We ensure your site is structured in a way AI crawlers can navigate effectively — schema, content hierarchy, accessibility for bots like GPTBot, and more. Many agencies skip this entirely. We don’t.
Entity and brand optimisation
Sometimes you are being cited — but without a link, or with little traffic attached. That almost always ties back to how your brand and its entities are understood by AI systems. We diagnose those gaps and fix the underlying issues, improving not just appearances but outcomes.
AIO/GEO measurement and reporting
Measurement in AI SEO is still evolving, and we are open about that. We manually track citations across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, supplementing with specialist tools where needed.
Even where the picture isn’t perfect, we give clients a clear understanding of what’s happening and how to respond.
Get in touch with us today
We don’t just understand marketing. We understand financial services — the FCA regulations, the compliance requirements, the risk boundaries, the nuance across lending, banking, insurance and fintech. We know how to be authoritative without giving regulated advice, and how to position brands in a way AI trusts and rewards.
Financial services is still early in its AI SEO journey. There is a genuine window to get ahead before the rest of the industry catches up.
You still have time to position your brand as an early mover in AI discovery — and the brands that act now will be the ones everyone else tries to catch up with. Let’s talk about what an AI SEO strategy looks like for you.
