If you asked ten financial services marketers what their SEO strategy is, you’d probably get ten fairly similar answers.
Ask them how often their brand appears when a potential customer asks ChatGPT, Gemini or another AI tool for a recommendation, and the answers are likely to be very different.
That’s because there’s a new layer to search visibility that many brands are only just starting to think about.
People aren’t always looking for a list of websites anymore. Increasingly, they’re asking AI to do the research for them: compare providers, explain complicated topics, recommend products and summarise what they need to know.
For financial services brands, that’s a significant opportunity – and a significant risk.
If your brand isn’t part of the information AI systems are drawing from, you may be invisible at exactly the moment a potential customer is deciding who to consider.
This is where Generative Engine Optimisation, or GEO, comes in.
So, what exactly is GEO?
GEO is the practice of increasing the likelihood that your brand, products and content are referenced in AI-generated answers.
The principle is similar to SEO, but the outcome is different.
Traditional SEO is largely about helping search engines understand and rank a webpage for a particular query. GEO is about making your brand and content useful, credible and understandable enough to be included when an AI system generates an answer.
An AI tool isn’t simply looking for the page with the highest keyword density. It can draw on a combination of sources, including websites, publications, research, reviews and other publicly available information.
For financial services brands, that means visibility increasingly depends on what the wider digital ecosystem says about you – not just what you say about yourself.
Why does GEO matter for financial services?
Financial services is particularly suited to AI-driven search because customers have complex questions and often compare multiple options before making a decision.
Think about the questions a potential customer might ask:
“What’s the best accounting software for a growing fintech?”
“Which business bank account is best for a UK startup?”
“What should a financial services company consider when choosing a payment provider?”
“Which investment platform has the lowest fees?”
These aren’t simple searches. They require context, comparison and explanation.
That’s exactly the type of task people are increasingly asking AI to help with.
The opportunity for financial services brands isn’t simply to rank for more keywords. It’s to become one of the brands that AI systems consider when answering commercially relevant questions.
Is GEO replacing SEO?
No. GEO should be treated as an extension of your search strategy rather than a replacement for SEO.
Google remains an enormous source of discovery, and the fundamentals of SEO still matter.
But the customer journey is becoming less linear.
Someone might discover your brand through Google, ask ChatGPT to compare you with competitors, read a third-party review and then return to Google to search for your pricing.
These experiences overlap.
The smartest approach isn’t to create a completely separate “GEO strategy”. It’s to build a digital presence that works across traditional and generative search.
What makes a financial services brand visible in AI search?
AI systems need enough credible, relevant information about your brand to understand what you do, who you serve and why you’re worth mentioning.
This is where many brands have a problem.
A company website might describe itself as “a leading provider of innovative financial solutions”. That’s marketing language, but it doesn’t provide much useful information.
Compare that with a company that publishes detailed information about the markets it serves, the problems it solves, its areas of expertise, the customers it works with and the questions those customers are asking.
The second brand gives search engines and AI systems far more to work with.
This is why being a recognised brand matters.
If your company exists primarily on its own website, there’s relatively little independent evidence for an AI system to draw upon. If your brand is mentioned across reputable publications, industry websites, events, research and other relevant sources, the picture becomes much richer.
GEO is therefore partly a content challenge and partly a brand authority challenge.
Does creating more content improve GEO?
Not necessarily. Useful, specific content is more valuable than simply publishing more of it.
The temptation with any new marketing discipline is to respond by producing more content.
But financial services doesn’t need another wave of generic articles about “the future of finance”.
The content with the greatest potential value answers specific questions and demonstrates genuine expertise.
Instead of writing another broad article about payment trends, for example, a payments business could explain how a particular regulatory change affects merchants, what they need to do about it and what mistakes to avoid.
That content has a clear audience, a defined problem and useful information.
It also gives AI systems something substantive to reference.
The same applies to data. If your business has proprietary research, customer data or original insights, publish them.
In research we’ve looked at, Wise appeared in more than 92,000 AI citations compared with around 16,800 for Revolut. Whatever the reasons for that difference, it illustrates an important point: AI visibility isn’t simply about being a well-known financial brand. It’s also about how much relevant information exists for AI systems to draw upon.
How important are third-party mentions for GEO?
Very important, because AI visibility isn’t built entirely on your own website.
You can publish the best possible article on your website, but that doesn’t automatically make your company an authority.
Think about how you’d research a financial services provider yourself. You might look at its website, but you’d probably also look for reviews, industry coverage, analyst commentary, customer experiences and independent comparisons.
AI systems can similarly draw on information from across the web.
That makes PR, partnerships, events, thought leadership, research and industry coverage increasingly relevant to search visibility.
The goal is to create a digital footprint that consistently reinforces what your brand is known for.
What should financial services brands do to improve their GEO?
Start by making the brand easier to understand, then build the evidence that supports its expertise.
I’d focus on five areas.
- Establish what you want to be known for.
If you want AI systems to associate your brand with a particular category or problem, consistently demonstrate expertise in that area.
- Create content around real customer questions.
Don’t start with keywords. Start with the questions your customers, prospects and sales teams are actually hearing.
- Publish original data and insight.
Research, benchmarks, statistics and genuine expert opinions give AI systems something more valuable to reference than generic commentary.
- Build third-party authority.
Look beyond your own website. Industry publications, podcasts, events, research partnerships, reviews and credible mentions all contribute to your wider digital presence.
- Measure AI visibility.
Test the questions your target customers might ask AI tools. See which brands appear, what sources are referenced and where your own brand is missing.
You don’t need to track hundreds of prompts. Start with the questions that matter commercially.
How should financial services marketers measure GEO?
Measure whether your brand is becoming more visible in the AI answers that matter to your audience.
GEO is still relatively new, so there isn’t one universally accepted metric that tells you whether you’re “winning”.
I’d look at a combination of measures: how often your brand appears in relevant answers, which competitors appear, which sources are being cited and whether your own content is being referenced.
Then connect that visibility back to more familiar metrics such as branded search, website traffic, enquiries and pipeline.
The objective isn’t to appear in an AI answer for the sake of it.
It’s to appear when potential customers are asking questions that are commercially relevant to your business.
So, is GEO worth investing in now?
Yes, but the opportunity isn’t trying to “hack” AI search. It’s becoming the brand that AI has a good reason to recommend.
There will inevitably be plenty of tactics promising to manipulate AI results. I’d be cautious about them.
The long-term opportunity is much more fundamental: build genuine expertise, publish information people actually find useful, make your positioning clear and develop authority beyond your own website.
That’s good marketing regardless of how search evolves.
SEO helped brands become visible in search results.
GEO is about becoming visible in the answers.
For financial services marketers, that’s a shift worth paying attention to now – before AI becomes another place where your competitors are consistently being discovered and you’re not.
