The news: As AI search becomes a more popular discovery channel, financial brands need to craft their marketing budgets and financial products for dual GEO and SEO optimization.

How we got here: AI is changing how consumers discover financial products.

Traditional strategies rely on paid search and advertising to amplify their main pages when consumers query Google for financial product recommendations.

Affiliate marketing platforms like ThePointsGuy and NerdWallet are an important component of these strategies—boosting financial brands and their products through their coverage and rankings. 

But under AI-driven discovery, financial providers can’t rely on similar marketing tactics driving the same results. LLMs compile their recommendations by ranking brands’ authority, expertise, reviews, citations, third-party validation, publisher coverage, and digital reputation—potentially reordering  brand mention rates.

However, affiliate marketing doesn’t get cited as often in AI answers. Chatbots primarily pull from brand-based content compared to affiliate platforms: When surfacing recommendations for financial services providers, our Financial Services AI Visibility Index shows that brand content made up more than 83% of all domain citations within ChatGPT answers for financial services—versus 6.6% for publishers, which includes affiliate marketing sites like NerdWallet. 

Implications for financial providers: The playbook for visibility is getting rewritten as consumers begin to shift from traditional search toward AI discovery.

Financial brands need to focus on updating and curating their own web pages so they’re included in chatbot answers. This includes writing and formatting web pages that chatbots can easily read and deem trustworthy. Content based on search phrases used by high-intent consumers can help AI platforms quickly digest important product attributes and surface key details to potential customers, per Bain & Company.

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