SEO in financial services & why SEO is a Consumer Duty factor

Read the recently updated guide to SEO in financial services

Episode transcript

Amelia Hi, I'm Amelia.

Paul I'm Paul.

Tonicha I'm Tonicha.

Mayna I'm Mayna.

Amelia And this is Fin the Week. Welcome back, everyone. We've got the full marketing team — this is nice. How is everyone?

Paul Good, yeah. Is this the first time the three of us have been on together? I suppose it will be, 'cause you're still relatively new, aren't you, Tonicha?

Mayna Very good, thank you.

Tonicha Good time. Yeah, this is my second podcast appearance.

Amelia Yeah, how far are you in now, Tonicha? How long have you been here for?

Tonicha I'm a month in today, actually — still pretty new.

Amelia How are you getting on?

Tonicha Good, I'm enjoying it. It's busy but it's good.

Amelia That's good, that's good — don't feel like you have to say that, but it's lovely to have you back on the podcast.

Paul Yeah.

Tonicha Thanks.

Amelia And this week we're going to be chatting about why SEO in financial services is a different beast. Paul, you've just published the latest version of your guide on the subject — so for us complete novices, when we talk about SEO in finance particularly, what are we actually talking about?

Paul Yeah, I mean, SEO — it stands for search engine optimisation. I imagine most people who will listen to this have heard of that and will be familiar. It's been something that people do since the advent of search engines. Really, the core aim is to try and optimise a website or a brand to appear in the search results, which usually means appearing in Google.

There are other search engines, of course, but Google is the most widely used, and if you achieve success in Google, you generally achieve success in other search engines — although there are caveats to that. Because we, as a company, focus on the financial services sector, I've spent a lot of time thinking about what makes the task of running an SEO campaign different in our industry to what it would be in any other industry. And there are definitely differences. So as part of that, we publish a guide that's just recently been updated on the subject. I thought it would also be a good thing for us to have an episode on and discuss, because there are some interesting things I think people can take from this.

Before we get into the weeds of that, I also wanted to talk about the fact that there have always been two different approaches to SEO. You get what I think of as the algorithm chasers — one kind of group — and then you get the kind of people who follow what I'd call the eternal truths of marketing. I probably sit on the eternal truths side, where there are good rules you should follow in marketing, and if you follow those rules you won't go far wrong — you just need to focus on what you're doing and how you're marketing yourself.

The algorithm chasers are a big part of the SEO world. They're the ones who watch closely what Google does all the time — testing things like what happens if you put a link here on a web page, or whether pages with a thousand words rank better than ones with five hundred words, and so on. That's an important part of SEO, definitely — there are things you can learn from that. But I think you can also go too far down that rabbit hole. If you spend too long focusing on the algorithm and getting obsessed over that, you become very tactical and forget strategy. Actually, the big picture here is that you're marketing a brand, and Google's job is to surface the most useful result in any given circumstance. So you should really think about that first, not about all the tricks that exist out there to try and game the system — because inevitably, if you find something you can trick the system with, it will get fixed eventually and you'll be penalised as a result. So that's worth keeping in mind: you'll read a lot of stuff from these so-called algorithm chasers, and some of it's really useful, some of it is just noise. Hopefully today we'll be talking about the general, smart, strategic things to think about.

Amelia So we're going to be looking, as I say, at what makes financial services SEO different. Let's start by diving into the core elements of SEO in our sector — why isn't financial services SEO like other SEO?

Paul So the really big standout thing is this concept of YMYL, which stands for "your money or your life" — it's something the major search engines talk about. It's the idea that information which impacts your money or your life, which basically means finance or health, needs to be held to a higher standard than pretty much any other area of search. There's a higher bar you have to reach. You can't just publish some so-called financial advice and expect it to work in the same way as any other type of content, where you have the right page title and people search for it and find you — Google will have a stricter policy to make sure they're not giving people access to clearly flawed information.

That leads to this concept of EEAT — the idea that accuracy matters as much as ranking. Experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. You could unpack each of those, but the key thing to understand is that Google and other search engines are looking for those four things in any piece of content. So, for example, if you publish something that makes a particular claim, they want to know it's been written by a genuine expert, that it's backed by proper research, that the brand behind it has authority in the space it's publishing in, and that it's trustworthy — backed by something official.

That's the kind of bar you need to reach. So what that means is, if I was to set up a blog tomorrow, and I'm not qualified in any particular area of finance, and I wanted to start writing about my views on how you should manage your money — for good reason, I won't be taken seriously in search results straight away. Whereas if somebody with a clear track record, who's maybe completed a master's degree in a certain subject and has information about them published online already, starts writing, they'll be taken more seriously — maybe they'll be published on a proper website. All of this stuff is important in finance, and it doesn't exist in the same way in other areas. So that's a key thing.

The other big thing about finance in SEO is that compliance teams are as much a part of the conversation as marketing teams. If you work in most other areas, chances are you'll be dealing mostly with a marketing or communications team — they'll have aims and things they want to achieve, and you'll set a strategy and go about doing it. SEO in our world is as much about working with a compliance team. SEO inevitably requires publishing content, and that content needs to be vetted and approved by compliance. Sometimes your hands are tied — you can't run certain campaigns you'd want to. That's the other big factor worth bearing in mind in our industry. Tonicha, you've worked in the industry for a while, and you've worked in a role where you were exposed to lots of different firms — have you seen that playing out, not necessarily with SEO, but in other areas of marketing?

Tonicha Yeah, definitely. I think, like you've touched on, Paul, one of the main differences I've seen in the finance sector compared to other sectors is that it's more about: is your content factual? Have you got a genuine expert speaking about the topic? Is it trustworthy? That's actually what Google rewards, and that's what gets you the better SEO results — compared to just trying to trick the algorithm, or be a bit cheeky with what you're doing in the background of the website. I think Google's looking at whether it would actually trust this if it were about its own pension or mortgage, because it quite obviously impacts someone's life quite seriously. So I think that's definitely really important in the finance sector compared to others.

Paul Yeah, yeah, for sure. Something else that always sticks in my mind — a long while ago I spoke to a person called Patrick Muir. He's had a long career in finance, and he was involved in launching the UK's first digital bank. The discussion I had with him was about what marketing in finance is in general, and what makes it different. The way he described it: you operate within a rigid box. There are rules which govern what you can and can't do, and for some brands that's more strict than others. So the key thing for any marketer in the space is to understand the scope of the box you're operating within, and then get creative within that space. Don't try to operate outside the walls of that box, because it will just get shut down by a compliance team. But once you understand the world you're operating in — which will differ from firm to firm — you can be creative within that. The examples he gave were things like, from day one, if you're running a content campaign, working with a compliance team to understand tone of voice and scope of what you can talk about, and then planning your content strategy in line with that.

The classic example is publishing anything that could be seen as advice. We regularly come up against that with clients, where maybe the word "advice" will accidentally slip into a piece of ad copy or website copy, and the client is very quick to say, "No, we can't say advice — we can't offer advice, we're not financial advisors." So it's about understanding that stuff and setting rules. Mayna, I imagine you do a lot of work briefing in bits of content — it's having a sort of tone-of-voice document, isn't it, and managing that actively?

Mayna Yeah, there's always a set of rules and guidelines when it comes to publishing content. And I think for businesses that do try to work outside the rigid box, it doesn't just put the consumer at risk — it can put your own reputation at risk too. It impacts both your business and consumers, so it's very important.

Amelia So this is something that you're all very aware of in your day-to-day work.

Paul Yeah, absolutely. And the better you get at documenting and understanding that rigid box you work within, the more effective you can become. You can then start to say, "Okay, now we know the limits — what can we do to maximise our chances?"

Amelia Let's talk specifically about sub-sectors in finance, how they differ and their own kind of challenges.

Paul So, as I was updating our guide, I did a bit of work thinking more deeply about different areas of finance, because "financial services" covers a huge range of subsectors, and they all have their own unique challenges. The easy one to start with is banking. When you think about banks, you're often thinking about established brands that have been around for a long time — they were around when the internet became a thing, and they had to build new systems to work with it. They invented internet banking, and so on.

As a result, the classic challenge with those types of brands is that they have legacy systems in place, which means you're often dealing with a lot of outdated information, or hamstrung by a system that isn't flexible. That's relevant from an SEO perspective because outdated systems tend to be bloated — they have a lot of superfluous information online. A brand that's been on the web since day one will probably have a lot of legacy information on their website; they might have a really old banking system online that still needs a lot of documentation. That's all noise that, from a search perspective, needs dealing with. For example, search engines might set a cap on how much of your website they crawl and discover. So you might be publishing amazing new information, but if the search engine is forced to constantly trawl through tons of legacy information to see if it's been updated, it might not discover your new content as efficiently. From a search perspective, that's a technical challenge — thinking about whether there are parts of a website's domain we need to guide a search engine away from, saying, "this stuff exists, but it's not important" — so you guide it towards the more important stuff instead.

Tonicha, you've been exposed to working with various different subsectors in finance — do you notice that legacy system thinking is common in some subsectors and not others?

Tonicha I think what I've seen across all sectors is that a lot of finance companies will be producing articles that, like you say, Paul, might be years old. What you'll find is that within those articles there'll be a reference to something that was correct at the time — like a regulation — but isn't anymore. Search engines are still picking up on those old articles, and they'll know that information isn't correct, so as a result you won't be ranked as high, or picked up in AI search results, because your site is still showing outdated regulations and information. So a lot of the work we do here is going through articles on our clients' websites and recommending updates where they're a bit out of date and could do with refreshing — that reference to a regulation which has changed since, and might be slightly different now to what it was five years ago. Just by updating that and having a refreshed article on your site, you're a lot more likely to get ranked highly.

I can't say I've noticed it being particularly different among different sectors, but I suppose some are more impacted than others by regulation. Obviously if you're a law firm, you have to make sure any reference to a regulation is up to date. So going through those old articles and making sure they are is a really good way of ensuring you're being picked up for the right information ahead of your competitors, who might have old articles on their site that just won't appear in the search results. So that's probably one trend I've definitely seen, and a way we can actually help — by giving that refreshed information to our clients.

Paul Yeah, that's a great point — any brand that's been around for long enough will probably have amassed a load of content online that, if unchecked, will just grow and grow and create noise. It's particularly prevalent in banking, because those brands tend to be longer established. I can think of examples where we've worked with brands who have outdated systems, and those systems create a lot of spurious URLs that need managing — that's common in banking.

Another subsector I looked at was wealth management. This is an area where a common challenge, relevant from a search perspective, is that you're often targeting quite different audiences via the same site. A wealth manager might need to communicate as clearly with high-net-worth individuals as they do with intermediaries — lawyers and people who refer work to them. They're two completely different audiences with very different needs from a web presence, but a single presence needs to serve both. It's a challenge we come up against time and again, and there are different ways to deal with it. There's the content element — what content does a high-net-worth individual need to see versus an intermediary? There's the challenge that what somebody types into Google might not indicate which of those two audiences they fall into. So there's also the technical aspect: do we need a single entry point for both, that then signposts people to the right place? And then there are other factors around how you promote the brand to those audiences beyond the search engine itself. I think it's a challenge we come up against commonly. Tonicha, Mayna, have you got any thoughts or observations on that — I know we see it from time to time, but it's definitely relevant in the wealth management space?

Tonicha Yeah, I've definitely seen it — you've got to think about your messaging, like you say, Paul, and where you might reach two different audience groups can be very different. I can't say I've run into it a lot on the SEO side, but for things like marketing campaigns, you might use a channel like Out of Home if you're targeting intermediaries on their commutes in and out of work, but you wouldn't if you're targeting a high-net-worth individual — so you can look at different channels to reach those people. But from an SEO side, it comes back to having really factual, trustworthy information on your website and basing your messaging off that, because that's what both target audience groups want to see, and it's what Google will reward too.

Mayna I guess in this scenario UX is a big player as well, because you've got two different audiences to analyse — figuring out their journeys, how to target those different journeys, and clearly signposting what's meant for one audience, what's meant for the other, and maybe what applies to both.

Paul Yeah, exactly — and I think that also helps to highlight that, for one of your target audiences, you're trying to build demand for what you do; you're trying to sell the vision. Whereas for the intermediary audience, you're trying to fulfil a demand that's already there — they're coming to you because they know they have a need for something. High-net-worth individuals might be exploring and need more selling to than an intermediary audience. So, again, UX is as relevant to search as it is to the general user experience on the web — that's an important factor.

Another area I looked at was insurers. Insurance is a really interesting area in search, particularly if you think of something like car insurance — that whole market was turned on its head when comparison sites came along, and the whole conversation in the consumer's mind became about price. You go to one of these sites when your car insurance renewal is coming up, put in your details, and more than likely select the cheapest price that comes back. It's something the insurance industry frets over, certainly from conferences I've been to, because price really isn't the only factor — the quality of the insurance is also a factor. So from a search perspective, you're battling on a couple of different fronts: trying to compete in these comparison-type journeys people go through, but also needing to be available to sell the other benefits of your flavour of insurance. I think I've mentioned on the podcast before that insurance brands like Direct Line actively avoid being on comparison sites, because they try to make that their unique thing. Then you've got brands like NFU Mutual, whose marketing messages tend to lead with the quality of their insurance — the fact that they pay out more frequently, which leads you to assume they're better at onboarding clients and understanding a client's needs.

From a search perspective, this is all important, because you need to figure out what people are searching for and where you can intercept them on the journey that would otherwise lead them straight to a comparison site. How can you be smart about that? How can you be available for people who dig a bit deeper and want to understand whether they're purchasing the right type of insurance? So there's an education piece to work on there.

Another area is fintechs. Fintech in its own right covers a huge range of different types of firms, but the thing a fintech has in common with any other fintech is that they tend to be new and have no existing search footprint or web footprint. So it's a completely different challenge to what a traditional banking brand might have, where you're dealing with legacy information and there's a lot of tidying to do — fintechs are starting from a standing start, and you need to ask: how do we get this unknown entity online to a position where it's known? That might be a content challenge — coming up with a strategy that says, here's our target audience, here's what they want to know about, and here's how we position ourselves to be available with the answers when they search for them. Fintechs are more agile than the incumbent brands they're up against, but they have a challenge to be trusted, and that's where EEAT comes in — how do they position themselves as authoritative and trustworthy? Are they part of the right regulatory frameworks? Do they follow the correct rules? Do they have their own rigid box of rules that they follow? All of that stuff is important.

There's one final stat I talk about from time to time: only 27% of people passed a UK financial literacy quiz run by an independent firm. You can find lots of these types of stats online, but essentially finance is a complicated subject, and the general population only has a passing knowledge of it. A lot of people are unfamiliar with the complexities of finance — what type of product they need to be buying, and how they need to be searching for it. So the other challenge from a search perspective is that you'll often be targeting an audience that's searching for the wrong question, and your job is almost to be available with an answer that directs them to the right question. I've done that before in search projects, where we've used keyword research to say to a client: we know this isn't the right question for you to be answering, but you need to be in the search results for when someone searches for it, so you can say, "that's not the right question — here's the right question, and here's the answer you're looking for."

Amelia You're almost working backwards.

Paul Yeah, exactly — and that's not something you'd necessarily need to think about in a search scenario for other sectors. So, those are all things worth bearing in mind. Tonicha, Mayna, have you thought of other things as we've been talking about these different subsectors?

Tonicha Yeah, I was just thinking — one thing I've found really interesting with the rise in AI search is looking at, like you said, Paul, what people are searching for and how brands can appear in the search results ahead of their competitors. A lot of the work we've been doing here is helping our clients answer those questions, and sometimes they're questions you wouldn't expect, or keywords you wouldn't expect to see. Gearing your website up to answer those unexpected questions — or even just having general content that answers commonly searched queries — really helps with appearing at the top of search results. I think a lot of finance companies, especially if they don't have marketing teams, aren't aware of that, so they don't write their content that way — instead they're just trying to be informational or educational on their website, without necessarily answering the questions that come up a lot in search results. So it's about changing that way of thinking, and the way you write your content, to get one up on your competitors. That works really well.

Mayna I think that's where frequently asked questions — FAQs — come into play. I've seen a lot more of them on websites now, because I think that helps with SEO and lets search engines quickly pick up direct answers to specific questions. And you can answer the wrong questions in the right way, too.

Tonicha Yeah, FAQs are a big one. A lot more finance clients are realising they need FAQs on their website, which, like Mayna said, maybe a few years ago wouldn't have been considered an important part of a website at all — but it's a lot more common now.

Paul Yeah. I've worked in the search industry for a long time, and I've always felt that keyword research is one of the most powerful things you can do for any form of marketing, because it's genuinely accessible, real user data. The stats you get can be patchy, but as long as you can get keywords that people are actually searching for, they reveal questions you'd otherwise not know about, and that influences your SEO strategy. Obviously it tells you what content you need and how it should be structured, but it also gives you a picture of the segments of your audience — and which part of your audience might be struggling with a particular thing.

Going back to the legacy systems thing — one of the most powerful things we've done with clients in the past is keyword research based on a brand name. You put the brand name in and see what people are searching for that mentions it, and it reveals all the challenges someone has. You'll get lots of things like "brand name phone number" and "brand name contact details", which tells you there's a huge number of people searching for your contact details. But there'll be other things too, like "brand name app not working" or "can't find app". Doing that periodically gives you a good benchmark of how your audience is doing, and whether they're finding what they need about your brand. For a legacy brand in particular, that reveals things like people struggling to find your internet banking app. I did a bit of research for a talk a while ago where I looked at — I think I picked on HSBC — and at the time I Googled "HSBC banking app", and the search results brought back three potentially useful results, but one was for the business banking app, one was for something else, and one was for the consumer banking app. Ultimately that could be a confusing scenario, depending on which audience is searching. So you almost need to think ahead of that: when someone searches for our banking app, we don't know whether they're a business user, an intermediary, or a consumer. What we probably need is the perfect landing page that caters to all of those and guides them to the right place, so Google is in no doubt about which page to show first — it just says, "looking for our banking app? We don't know which audience you are, so come to this page and we'll guide you."

That's a relevant factor for something we'll get into in a bit: consumer duty. You've got to think about consumer outcomes, and if you start to think about your search results as the first interaction somebody might have with your brand, I'd argue that search results are in scope of consumer duty — you need to actively manage them and tidy up cases like that where it might be confusing.

Amelia So, bearing all of that in mind, what do we think makes for a good strategy in our industry?

Paul So, from my perspective, this is where that eternal truths of marketing thing comes in, because ever since I started working in online marketing, there's always been a three-pillar approach. You can think of it like a pyramid: the base is technical integrity — making sure there's nothing happening on your website that's stopping a user or a search engine from accessing what they need, and equally, that they can't access what they don't need. If there's an error on your site that means a portion of your audience can't access something, you're never going to succeed, regardless of how good the rest of your marketing is.

The second level up is informational — basically content. Does your site have all the information it needs to describe what you do and how you do it? But does it also think about content from a marketing perspective — does it understand what people search for, and does it serve those answers to people in the right way?

The third layer is promotional activity. Search marketing doesn't exist in a vacuum — you could publish the best content and do a really good job, but you still need to push that content out further for a search engine to really take it seriously. All else being equal, with two competing pieces of content from different brands, the brand that's done a good job of getting that content featured via social media, maybe run ads to it, and built an audience for it, is always going to win over a brand that's just published something and hoped Google ranks it in first position.

Those three pillars have always been the golden rule for me, and a lot of our day-to-day work is structured around that. We check the technical health of a site — if you ask a company to do a technical SEO audit for you, they'll probably find tons of broken links and things like that, but you have to triage that and think about what's most important to deal with. Really, what we'd normally do is check that stuff monthly and look out for any clangers, and if there's nothing major, we move on. A lot of the focus goes into content strategy — thinking about what people search for and whether we're serving that audience accurately. In my experience, most brands are doing an okay job of that, but often leaving stuff on the table. Tonicha, Mayna, you've probably got thoughts on this — we do a lot of keyword research around particular topics, and I'd say every piece of content we review, there's always an improvement you can make structurally to make it better for search.

Tonicha Yeah, I think a huge part of strategy now — and maybe this is different to a few years ago — is all about your content, and whether you're answering the questions your audience is searching for. Whereas, like Paul said earlier, a few years ago maybe you could get away with focusing a bit more on the algorithm, or backlinking, keywords — all things which are still really important — but now it's also really important to be pushing out content that's genuinely useful, hopefully content your competitors aren't putting out, that answers the questions your audience are searching for and pulls you up in the search results, whether that's on Google or AI search. Either way, that's really what's going to get you traffic over the other competitors in your space. So for me, when I talk about SEO now, I'm thinking a lot more about the content people are publishing, rather than more traditional SEO where people focused a lot more on the algorithm and doing the right things in the back end.

Paul Yeah, sure. Another factor that's particularly important to the finance industry is that navigational search is really important — and what I mean by that is that example I went through before, where someone's searching for your brand name and looking for a particular thing. For example, I worked on a project a couple of years ago with a brand where people were searching for customer support — they wanted the phone number or the form they needed to contact customer support. Because of the way the site was structured, they had contact details for various different audience types — consumers, intermediaries, businesses — and Google was really struggling to know where to send customer support searches on the site, and which phone number to display. The result was a real impact on the brand, because they were getting a lot of calls to their London headquarters instead of their support centre, which was in the Midlands. That's a real challenge to overcome, because it costs a lot of money, but it also creates unhappy customers who get pushed from pillar to post. That was a relatively simple SEO challenge, because it was about structuring the site to reduce the chances of Google serving up the wrong information — so when somebody searches "brand name customer support" and you don't know which customer type they are, you need a search result that can hook onto that and guide people to the right place. So navigational search is something you need to think about, and I'd argue it's relevant from a consumer duty perspective too — if you're making it more difficult than it needs to be for customers to get in touch, that has a meaningful impact.

The other thing is, in SEO for any other industry, you're predominantly tracking rankings — do we rank number one in Google for XYZ? But in finance you need to track accuracy as well, especially now that AI search results are a thing. Chances are people won't even click through to your website — they'll just find an answer in Gemini, or AI Overviews, or whatever they're using. You need to make sure that if Google is quoting an interest rate in relation to your brand, it's the correct one — and not accidentally pulled from a slightly different product. That's really important stuff that most brands don't need to think about, but finance brands definitely do. So accuracy tracking is becoming big business as well.

Amelia So shall we talk about how things are looking in 2026? We've talked a lot about AI, and how that impacts and works alongside SEO — how are things looking? What's changing, considering GEO and consumer duty as well?

Paul Yeah — Tonicha or Mayna, do you want to give your view first? You've probably seen changes over the last however long — what's your general take on the direction of travel in the industry at the moment?

Mayna I think — and it's something we touched on in our last episode, though that was on a different topic, about bias in AI — that GEO is just expanding on the issues already in place in normal search. Inaccuracy, misinformation... I feel like AI is only... what's the word... exasperating that. I don't know if that's the right word.

Paul Hm, yeah.

Mayna I don't know.

Paul Yeah — it's... 'cause GEO, generative engine optimisation, is about ChatGPT and things like that providing answers. The same is true for accuracy of information — if the AI gets the wrong end of the stick, that can spread far and wide if it goes unchecked. So that's definitely a theme.

Tonicha One thing I've found quite interesting about the GEO side — and Paul, you touched on this a little before — is that clients need to focus maybe a bit less on traffic actually landing on their website, and look instead at the traffic they're getting where people aren't clicking through but they're being cited in AI search results. That's really interesting, and it's something you never would have looked at a few years ago. Now, if you're appearing at the top of AI search results and your site has all the information someone would need to answer a question, they might not even click through to your website, but they're still going to use your brand. So it's a completely different way of looking at the information on your website and how you want it to be pulled up — if it's getting pulled up in the right way, they shouldn't even need to click through. It's almost, in a way, a good thing if people aren't clicking through, because they've got everything they need just by searching on Gemini or ChatGPT or whatever it might be. I think that's a really interesting trend, because historically all brands wanted as much traffic on their website as possible, but now there's a slight shift — yes, we still want traffic to our website, but we also want to see our brand appearing in search results with all the information, without someone necessarily needing to click through.

Paul Yeah, exactly. The way I've learnt to think about it is that before LLMs and AI tools became prevalent, you'd focus on optimising web pages — the job of an SEO person was to pick a web page and get it to rank for a particular thing. Whereas now the job is to rank for ideas and pieces of information. It's about making sure your brand is synonymous with a particular subject, so that when somebody searches around that subject and asks a particular question, the search engine or AI tool might use the information you publish to form an answer, and cite you as a source. People will argue about how good or bad that is — some see it as stealing information, and it definitely impacts publishers — but brands can work with it, because you can make sure you're known in a particular space. So positioning and branding are as much a factor in search nowadays as they've ever been.

There's a concept called entity mapping that's a big thing at the moment. Rather than thinking of your site as a collection of pages, you think of it as entities and pieces of information — Brand X is known for this thing, Insurer X provides this type of car insurance to this type of customer — and they're all entities an LLM would understand. So when somebody comes along and says "I'm this type of person, looking for this type of thing," the entity mapping behind the scenes understands that's Brand XYZ that can serve this information. So you need to really think about who we are, what we do, and how we represent the information we can serve up.

Tonicha I think that also comes back to your point about looking at what people are searching for and basing your content strategy on that. Like you said, Paul, if you want to position yourself as a top brand in certain areas — especially for smaller, newer brands — you could focus a lot more on one specific area of your sector and become the expert in that space, much more easily than trying to take over the whole space or beat all the big players. That's a bit of what we've been looking at for clients too — looking at what people are searching for on maybe a less commonly searched topic where we're appearing or being cited in the search results, and then building a content strategy or campaign based on that. You're tapping into an audience that other competitors in your space aren't tapping into as much, and becoming the industry expert in that small area, rather than trying to tackle the whole area at once.

Paul Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Mayna I think in the age of AI search, a lot of clients and businesses in general are finding it difficult to track searches. I'm sure there are tools out there, and if they're not that sophisticated yet, I'm sure they will be in the next few years. But with traditional search, you've got keyword data, landing page data, ranking data — we don't have those tools for AI search yet, so it's harder to track the accuracy of the results people are being given. I don't know if we want to shamelessly plug the tool we've built internally?

Amelia Absolutely.

Paul Yeah. It's a challenge we've come up against. There are tools out there that let you track — or supposedly let you track — results in large language models, but the challenge with all of them is that it's all so personalised, which has been the case with classic search too. If I search for "best restaurant" from where I'm sitting right now, the results I see will be completely different to what everyone else sees. So the concept of ranking number one for a particular thing has always been a bit flawed, I think. But what you can do is set up an "all else being equal" scenario — if you consistently use the same method to search for the same thing at regular intervals, at the very least you'll get a good benchmark of the state of play for that scenario.

So we've built a tool called Coric, which isn't yet publicly available but will be shortly. What that does is let us set up that kind of "all else being equal" scenario — we search for various prompts on a particular subject, at regular intervals, always using the same method, and see what the LLMs bring back in as vanilla a form as possible. That lets us benchmark how frequently a particular brand appears. Crucially, we can also test what comes back against a source of truth, to check whether the information is accurate. Examples we're looking at include mortgage interest rates or savings account interest rates — if somebody searches for information on a particular savings product, does the brand we're looking at get mentioned, and if so, does the correct interest rate get quoted? It's a common challenge, because a brand offering a savings product has to change interest rates quite frequently, and having a large language model quote an out-of-date rate is problematic — potentially a compliance issue.

We're not for one minute thinking you can accurately see what every single person's LLM sends back to them, but you can get a general state of play for how frequently different brands appear when you run this test at regular intervals. That's definitely going to be important. You'll see a lot of people online talking about this — some say it's impossible to track, some say you definitely can. The truth, as usual, sits in the middle. It's about being pragmatic and using it as one source of information, alongside things like how frequently people search on Google for your brand name — if that's going up, it suggests you're being cited more frequently and more people know about you. Looking at how many people arrive at your website directly is another indicator that more people know of you.

You also shouldn't necessarily expect people to arrive at your website at the top of the marketing funnel when they're doing their research anymore — they probably do that research via a large language model now, and arrive at your website when they're more qualified and ready to sign up. So it's worth looking out for that too — it's all factors.

That leads me back to the point I made about consumer duty. I've always considered a search result, in any form, to be the first point of interaction a person has with a brand, and for me that makes it relevant from a consumer duty point of view too. It's important that somebody sees accurate information and is sent to the correct place. You can't directly control it, but through SEO you can definitely influence it. And if you do a good job, SEO isn't always about ranking number one — it's about tidying up the user journey and making sure consumers and business users alike are reaching the point on your site that they need to.

Amelia Well, I'm sure this is — as always with these topics, there are things we'll come back to. But as always, a really interesting chat. Before we go, shall we play a bit of Jargon Busters?

Paul Yep. Last week we had no idea, did we?

Tonicha Yeah.

Mayna Let's do it.

Amelia No, no, we didn't. Once again, if anyone hasn't caught this before — I've got a list of industry terms, and each week I'll put the guys to the test to see if they know what it means. Today's term is AUM. Does anyone have any clue?

Mayna I feel like I recognise it.

Paul God, yeah — I should know this.

Tonicha Yeah, I feel like I do as well. I felt like I should know it when you said it, but I can't — I don't.

Paul Yeah, I definitely feel like I should know it. It's almost certainly like AER and that sort of thing, isn't it? Is it one of those things that's quoted when you're signing up for a loan or a mortgage?... Annual — no, actually, I know what it is: assets under management.

Mayna Now you've said it, it seems so obvious.

Amelia Very, very good. How would you describe that? How would you define that?

Paul It's in the asset management space — it's a measure of a firm's portfolio, I suppose. It's how much they manage. So, you know, they manage two billion pounds worth of investments, and... yeah, that's it.

Amelia Very good — does anyone have anything to add to that?

Tonicha Impressive... I don't think so, but it definitely sounds right.

Amelia That was very good, Paul, because you didn't seem that confident to start with. Yeah — assets under management: the official definition is the total market value of all funds managed. So yeah, you got that bang on. Well done.

Paul Yes — that was lucky. It was deep in there somewhere.

Mayna I could see the cogs turning in your head.

Amelia It's a process.

Paul Yeah, it kind of jumped out of my subconscious.

Amelia Well done, well done. We'll have more Jargon Busters next week. We'll be back next week with another episode. Thank you so much for listening, and have a great weekend.

Tonicha Thank you.

Paul Yes.