Five things FS brands must do to stay visible in the age of AI search

Kate Mallett, Head of Fintech at Third City, a PR agency, offers a five-step guide to building an AI search strategy.

When a potential customer wants to know which savings account offers the best rate, or which payments provider other fintechs actually recommend, they are increasingly bypassing Google and going to an AI chatbot. And rather than a list of links, AI is giving them one single answer, drawing on whatever it considers credible, whether your brand features in that or not.

It’s something we’ve been thinking about a lot at Third City, and it’s more difficult to get a handle on than you’d expect. AI systems are probabilistic, which means you won’t get the same answer twice. Ask the same question on different days and you’ll get different responses, different sources cited, sometimes a different framing of who the key players even are. That’s what makes Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) so different from SEO, where at least the rules of the game were relatively stable. You can’t optimise your way to a fixed position.

There are, however, things you can do. And you can influence the direction of travel.

1. Find out what the AI says about you

This sounds obvious, but almost nobody has done it. Go and ask the major AI tools the questions your customers ask. See what comes back. Is your positioning accurate? Are your products described correctly? Do you appear at all? The catch is that because AI responses are probabilistic, a handful of searches won’t tell you much. You need scale and consistency to spot patterns. It’s exactly the problem our own GEOView tool was built to solve, running hundreds of searches across AI platforms to build a reliable picture of where a brand appears, how it compares against competitors, and which sources are shaping those answers.

2. Write content that is actually useful

For years, financial services brands produced content optimised for search algorithms. Lots of it. Volume was the strategy, and quality was sometimes the casualty in what many call ‘digital PR’. AI models aren’t interested in that. They’re looking for content that genuinely answers a question, written by someone who clearly knows what they’re talking about. In a sector where demonstrating expertise already matters, that should be a natural fit for FS brands. The brands that have been prioritising substance over output are going to find this transition considerably easier than those that haven’t.

3. Think about where your brand gets discussed

In the age of AI search, good PR matters more than it ever has. AI models treat press coverage as authoritative in a way that a brand’s own website simply isn’t. But it goes beyond press.

LinkedIn is now the number one cited domain for professional queries across all major AI platforms, and for financial services and fintech specifically, it consistently ranks in the top five for B2B AI citations. Most FS brands are on LinkedIn. What they’re not always thinking about is that around 75% of LinkedIn citations come from individual profiles rather than company pages – so it’s worth auditing who from your team is active, what they’re saying, and how you’re helping to make sure your brand messages are being amplified on their profiles.

4. Prioritise consistency across every channel

AI builds a picture of your brand by pulling from multiple sources at once. If your website, your press materials, and your LinkedIn are all saying slightly different things, the picture that emerges will reflect that. A messaging audit is less exciting than a PR campaign but it matters more than most teams realise right now.

5. Treat GEO as an ongoing discipline

AI models update continuously. The competitive landscape shifts. Whatever your visibility looks like today will be different in six months, and the brands that stay on top of it will be the ones that treat this as a standing priority rather than something they looked at once. It’s why we recommend six-monthly benchmarking audits to our clients: an initial audit with a full recommendations report, then a follow-up six months later to see what’s changed, how the models have developed, and whether the things you’ve done have actually worked.

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The way people find financial brands is changing faster than most marketing strategies are. What’s interesting is that none of this requires doing anything radically new. It requires doing the fundamentals properly: good content, consistent messaging, genuine earned media, a real presence on social platforms. The difference is that the stakes for getting it right, or wrong, are higher than they’ve ever been.