As we look into 2026, fintech SEO is changing – and most businesses haven’t kept pace.
AI-driven search and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) are transforming discovery, as customers now expect long-form answers that increase zero-click searches. Content must be precise, actionable, and instantly useful.
Yet, getting fintech search engine optimization right isn’t easy. As a fintech business owner or marketing lead, you may find that:
- Your business’s current SEO efforts are failing to land the customers you need
- You’re not sure how to change your approach to get more results, especially in the GEO era
- You feel like you’re throwing money away trying to find strategies that work for you.
The stakes are high. Poorly planned content can erode trust, repel potential customers, and leave serious revenue on the table.
Yet in the age of GEO, the fintech companies that do get it right are seeing stronger engagement, higher-quality traffic, and customers who actually convert.
To find out what they’re doing differently, Mint Position spoke with top SEO experts who have helped dozens of fintech and SaaS brands build lasting organic growth.
Here’s what they shared — the 8 fintech SEO strategies that can turn your content from a guessing game into a growth engine for 2026 and beyond.
- How is fintech SEO changing as we head into 2026?
- 8 top fintech SEO strategies for 2026
- Turn fintech SEO into a long-term growth engine with Mint Position
Want to get ahead on Generative Engine Optimization, the next stage of fintech SEO? Book a no-cost consultation with the Mint Position team, and we’ll explain how our GEO Audit can improve your AI search performance.
How is fintech SEO changing as we head into 2026?
Fintech SEO has entered a new era. Now, your brand’s visibility depends on new AI requirements, as well as traditional SEO components like a well-formed keyword strategy and the ability of your (hopefully unique) content to meet search intent.
AI-driven search and the rise of GEO are rewriting how customers discover businesses, forcing fintech marketing teams to rethink what effective SEO really means.
According to Ahrefs’ AI SEO Statistics 2025 report, AI Overviews now appear in 16% of U.S. Google searches and have cut clicks to websites by 34.5%. That means less organic traffic as your potential customers get their answers directly from the results page instead of clicking on your site.
How Click-Through Rates (CTR) are Falling Thanks to AI Search
Source: Ahrefs
The result?
Competition for visibility has surged across all industries. Ahrefs found that the top 50 global brands capture nearly 29% of all AI Overview mentions, while one in four brands has no presence at all.
This makes it much harder for smaller financial services companies and fintech firms to rank.
A new SEO marketing strategy to adapt to this shift should be a priority for these businesses – one focused built around specific keywords (which lean towards the bottom of the funnel), solid on-page SEO, and distinctive content.
In the world of AI search, brand mentions now weigh more heavily than backlink volume, while content uniqueness and UX have become even more decisive ranking factors.
In short: what worked in 2022 won’t cut it now.
To stay visible, fintech brands must build authority through high-value, structured content that both humans and AI trust.
The following eight fintech SEO strategies show you exactly how to do it.
8 fintech SEO strategies for 2026
1. Target high-buyer-intent, product-focused keywords (BoFu Content)
In fintech SEO, the most effective traffic has always come from high-intent, solution-oriented keywords leaning towards the bottom-of-the-funnel (BoFu). These directly address specific problems your audience is trying to solve.
AI-driven search has taken this a step further.
Your target customers are using large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT to ask very specific questions. In these, they describe their business, their goals, and their pain points – and AI recommends companies that mirror them via clear and relevant content.
If your content doesn’t speak to these, such as what your company does, who you help, and how your products help them, then you’re not going to show up.
Identifying niche, conversational, and product-specific keywords/prompts is your vehicle towards achieving this.
There are a variety of tools now available to help you research AI prompts related to your top-converting SEO keywords.
Below are some examples of product-specific prompts worth monitoring on ChatGPT for a global payment tool. (The more specific, the better):
- “What are the best cross-border payment tools for small eCommerce brands?”
- “What’s the cheapest app to send business payments in Europe?”
- “Which corporate card solution helps US tech startups manage expense reporting?”
These BoFu product-focused phrases match how people naturally speak to AI assistants and LLMs like ChatGPT.
They also capture your target audience further down the buyer’s journey, where conversion rates are higher and trust is easier to build.
“The top of the funnel is being decimated by zero-click searches in the age of AI.”, says Justin Calderon, founder of Mint Position. “That makes middle- and bottom-of-funnel keywords even more critical – they target users ready to engage, try tools, or make decisions, rather than just browse.”
TLDR actions for fintechs to take
- Map your keyword strategy to specific customer pain points and product use cases, particularly queries your highly qualified customers are most likely to ask generative AI.
- Build BoFu content that best answers these keyword queries, like case studies, comparison tables, and calculators (more about those shortly).
- When creating it, make it clear exactly who you help, how you help them, and what results your products deliver.
2. Build authority with data and consistency
Once you’ve captured search intent, the next step is to earn trust. In fintech, the quickest path is through clarity and consistency.
Clarity shows audiences – and AI – exactly what you do and who you serve.
Consistency reinforces that story across every platform, so it becomes recognizable and reliable.
We now live in an era where AI pulls information from countless sources, so mixed messaging can easily dilute your authority. Every blog, bio, and partner listing should tell the same story: what you do, who you help, and why you’re trusted to do it.
“If you can only focus on one thing next year, make it brand consistency across every platform,” says Mike Khorev, growth marketing consultant and managing director at Nine Peaks Media.
“Google and AI tools are pulling data from everywhere. When your company name, leadership, and products are described the same way online, search engines can actually understand who you are. That’s what improves visibility, both in AI search and in traditional results.”
You can then strengthen your brand message with data-driven, problem-solving content.
To do this, prioritize topics AI can’t summarize in a snippet and make them actionable with real-world examples. For example, if you offer an embedded finance API that enables faster checkout times, create detailed guides showing how to use it across industries — backed by original data, visuals, and quotes.
In short, don’t write just for search engines – write for people who need actionable answers.
TLDR actions for fintechs to take
- Audit your brand presence across all digital channels, including your site, LinkedIn, partner pages, and press mentions.
- Unify messaging so you describe your company, leadership, and products consistently.
- Align every piece of content to that same narrative to strengthen both brand trust and AI search visibility.
3. Optimize content for AI and Predictive Search
We’ve already covered how AI is reshaping keyword and content creation. Now, it’s time to optimize for how that content appears in AI-generated SERPs (search engine results pages).
Effective SEO and AI optimization now go hand-in-hand.
Structure matters more than ever — clear headings, short definitions, relevant links, and data-backed insights help AI extract and summarize your content accurately. Tools like Mint Position’s GEO Audit make it easy to see how your current setup measures up.
“Fintech and financial services brands should double down on trust signals in structured data — author credentials, compliance badges, and verifiable sources,” says Grant Simon, AI search expert and founder of Kimura Digital. “AI engines such as ChatGPT and Perplexity increasingly pull ‘safe’ content that demonstrates authority and transparency. Start by optimizing your schema and citations — that’s how you show an AI platform you’re a credible answer, not just another opinion.”
Grant also notes the growing importance of clarity and summaries: “In the AI era, clarity, context, and structured markup matter more than keyword density. If your content can be confidently summarized by an AI platform without losing accuracy or intent, you’ve already optimized for generative engines.”
And don’t overlook social validation.
“I am still bullish on Reddit,” Grant adds. “The platform has quietly become one of the most powerful GEO channels in 2025. AI models treat Reddit like a live focus group — if your brand is mentioned positively in relevant subreddits, you’re more likely to show up in AI answers.”
TLDR actions for fintechs to take
- Add structured data and schema markup to highlight credentials, compliance, and citations.
- Write concise, AI-ready summaries for every key page.
- Track brand sentiment on Reddit and similar platforms — your next SEO lead might come from a subreddit, not a search bar.
4. Lead with expert interviews: Show real people behind your insights
Finance is a YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) topic, meaning every word you publish can influence real financial decisions. That’s why fintech brands cannot neglect putting extra resources into creating content that reflects expertise, experience, authority, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T).
The goal is simple: show readers they can rely on your insights. When they trust your expertise, they’re far more likely to buy from you.
Start with the basics. Here’s a simple process you can carry out right away:
- Add author bios that highlight credentials.
- Reference primary sources and regulatory guidance.
- Link to your expert’s website or social media to add value, especially if they have a large web presence.
These are small but powerful signals that your content is current and credible.
Expert interviews take this a step further, like we’re doing in this very article.
“For fintech startups, trust comes from showing there’s a real expert behind the advice,” says Mike Khorev. “Add bylines with job titles or credentials, link to LinkedIn profiles, and show who’s reviewing your content. Even a short ‘fact-checked by’ note signals authority. I’ve seen smaller teams gain faster traction just by being transparent about who’s speaking and why they’re qualified.”
Combine those interviews with AI analysis and strong editorial review, and you get a hybrid approach that builds trust and ranking power.
TLDR actions for fintechs to take
- Add clear author bios, reviewer notes, and credible references to all long-form content.
- Conduct expert interviews, either with leaders within your company or external figures in your field.
- Mix AI keyword research with human insight to create content that both performs and persuades.
5. Integrate interactive tools and calculators
Your potential customers value practical, data-driven insights — so turn that knowledge into interactive tools. Loan calculators, scenario simulators, and AI advisors turn readers into active users.
For example, instead of reading about cost savings, a customer could enter their monthly spend into an expense automation calculator and see their potential savings instantly.
These tools help you satisfy intent faster, increase dwell time, and send all the right engagement signals to search engines. Even better, they naturally attract backlinks from other fintech websites referencing your tool — giving your domain authority a steady lift.
The trick is to keep them effortless to use.
Pre-fill common inputs, personalize outputs for different segments, and guide users through clear next steps. The easier it is for someone to get value, the more likely they are to stay, share, and return.
Interactive features also prove expertise in action.
A compliance quiz or a dynamic cash flow model shows you understand your customers’ challenges and can help them solve them instantly. It’s credibility people can interact with, not just read about.
Integrating these tools into your content strategy makes your site more search-friendly and experience-led. When readers can calculate, compare, or simulate outcomes, they remember your brand as the one that helped them make a smarter decision.
That’s what builds both trust and traction – with both visitors and with AI-driven search.
TLDR actions for fintechs to take
- Identify one or two high-value problems your audience faces and design a simple tool to solve them. Make sure they come with clear CTAs and structured data.
- Create a dedicated URL for the tool, then link or embed it throughout your content ecosystem, not just your homepage. Link to the tool from blog posts and product pages.
- Track engagement metrics and backlink growth — they’ll show you just how powerful interactive content can be.
6. Prioritize brand mentions and use backlinks to amplify them
Backlinks still matter for traditional SEO and for getting humans to your site, but they’re not how generative engines (like ChatGPT) directly measure authority.
AI models and AI-driven search systems don’t “count” link volume the way search engines do. Instead, they use metrics like brand mentions, context, and source credibility — i.e., how often your brand is talked about across authoritative industry sites, media, forums, and expert posts relevant to your business.
This means two things:
1. Backlinks are indirectly still valuable. High-quality backlinks drive referral traffic and exposure, which leads to brand mentions – the signals AI uses
This is why 72% of SEO professionals believe backlinks still improve your chances of appearing in ChatGPT and LLMs, according to linkbuilding agency Editorial.Link – even if backlinks are not the specific metrics used by OpenAI.
SEO Professionals Value Backlinks Highly In AI Search
Source: Editorial.link
2. Brand mentions are a direct signal for GEO/LLMs. Modern AI systems treat brands as primary units. Frequent, consistent mentions across the web strengthen your brand’s recognition and credibility in generative engines, making digital PR and guest post publishing more important than ever.
Fintechs can act on this by targeting the right sources with press releases and content to generate brand mentions. Here are some useful stats that we gleaned from Otterly.AI:
- About 30% of citation links in LLMs come from news and media sites.
- OpenAI has partnerships with over 100 media outlets, making press releases and industry-focused blogs especially valuable.
- Wikipedia links account for 6% of citations, so accurate, updated pages can really boost visibility.
- Reddit is influential: 19% of citation links on ChatGPT are drawn from there, where positive mentions help shape positive algorithmic sentiment.
Fintechs should also use high-quality backlinks strategically by including them in the newsworthy data and research reports that attract citations and mentions. Not just links for links’ sake, in other words.
It also pays to make mentions easy to validate: adding schema, clear bylines, author credentials, and citations makes it more likely that AI surfaces your content as a trustworthy source.
TLDR actions for fintechs to take
- Run PR campaigns designed to boost brand mentions across authoritative sites and publish guest posts on valuable industry blogs.
- Audit and identify where your competitors’ brands are being mentioned, then conduct outreach to get your brand also mentioned on the top URLs LLMs use to generate AI answers.
- Use backlinks to increase visibility and referral traffic, seeing as their main value for AI is the mentions and coverage they generate.
- Monitor brand mentions and sentiment — those metrics now matter at least as much as raw link counts.
7. Upgrade UX, mobile performance, and speed
User experience is a core ranking factor, particularly on mobile devices. For fintech companies competing in crowded SERPs, this is even more important.
It makes sense. Who wants to use a site with slow load times and confusing navigation? Recent data from UX specialists Tenet backs this up: 73% of visitors abandon websites that aren’t mobile-friendly.
The Number of Visitors That Ditch Websites for Poor Mobile Optimization
Source: Tenet
Mobile-first design is essential, which means fast-loading pages, responsive layouts, and intuitive navigation – all of these reduce bounce rates and increase engagement.
The key thing to do is to optimize every element — images, video, interactive tools — for speed and accessibility. Core web vitals are critical for those loading issues that kill trust and conversions, particularly for financial technology sites where users expect precision and reliability.
Great UX also supports customer acquisition and retention.
Clear calls-to-action, easy forms, and a frictionless, user-friendly website experience show that you know what you’re doing and increase the chance of sign-ups.
For fintech firms, every second shaved off load times can translate into measurable improvements in organic traffic and search engine rankings.
TLDR actions for fintechs to take
- Audit your web pages for speed, mobile responsiveness, and navigation flow.
- Optimize technical SEO components, like images, videos, and interactive features, for performance.
- Test UX across devices regularly — small improvements in page experience drive better SEO performance and increased engagement.
8. Target listicles and “how-to” guides
We’ve already said that AI-driven search has squeezed much of the top of the funnel.
“What is…” articles that once brought steady traffic now struggle now bring in much less, if any. Users now get these kinds of answers directly from AI-generated summaries.
But not all ToFu content is lost.
Listicles and how-to guides remain the exception – and the opportunity. These formats are proving resilient because they serve a clear purpose for both SEO and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): they give AI models structure, clarity, and scannable data to reference when producing summaries.
Think of it this way: list posts and step-by-step guides tell AI exactly what to include in its answer, while also demonstrating your expertise to human readers and – most importantly – mentioning your brand in this context.
That’s why listicles are fast becoming one of the most frequently cited content types in ChatGPT and other generative search responses.
Examples include:
- “10 best payment automation tools for small fintech teams”
- “How to simplify KYC onboarding for cross-border clients”
- “7 best embedded payment providers in the US”
This kind of structured, instructional content feeds GEO systems the information they need to understand your expertise and associate your brand with specific solutions.
It also bridges users from early awareness to engagement, driving them toward your middle- and bottom-funnel assets.
To structure well, place definitions high on the page, follow with short, clear paragraphs, and include FAQ schema and meta descriptions for on-page SEO. This helps AI models — and humans — understand your content instantly.
“What I’ve seen is that when content is machine-readable, it shows up more often in AI summaries and voice responses,” says Mike Khorev.
Fintech SEO services that ignore this layer risk losing the informational trust that fuels the rest of the buyer journey.
TLDR actions for fintechs to take
- Prioritize listicles and “how-to” guides over “what is”, glossary-style articles: they’re the ToFu formats that still earn visibility in AI and SEO.
- Structure them with numbered sections, subheadings, and summaries that AI systems can easily interpret.
- Use internal linking to guide readers toward BoFu content, including product comparisons, demos, and case studies that convert.
- Update older “what is” pages into how-to or list-based formats to preserve their ranking potential in AI-driven search.
Turn fintech SEO into a long-term growth engine with Mint Position
Adapting to this new SEO reality can feel like a full-time job, with even the most experienced marketing teams struggling to keep up.
That’s where partnering with a fintech content marketing agency can make a huge difference.
At Mint Position, we specialize in SEO for fintech service providers that help build business across both Google and LLM search results.
Our approach blends expert interviews, data-led storytelling, AI-driven keyword research, and brand mentions to deliver real results, not just rankings.
We recently helped Duckfund, a US-based commercial real estate lending platform, appear as a #1 cited resource on ChatGPT for a top search term in their industry.
Our AI-focused content strategy used third-party platforms to increase Duckfund’s brand mentions, resulting in ChatGPT regularly citing Duckfund, as well as making their domain the top-cited source for generating answers in their industry (see screenshots below).
Sample of How Duckfund is Featured in ChatGPT Responses
Duckfund is the Top Source Used by ChatGPT in its Industry
Here’s what sets Mint Position’s fintech content marketing strategy apart:
- Product-focused content: We prioritize making product-focused content that is most likely to bring in leads.
- Multi-keyword SEO: We optimize some URLs for 10+ keywords to increase potential channels of traffic.
- Multi-engine optimization: Our strategies are built to simultaneously optimize your site on both LLMs and search engines, focusing on building valuable backlinks and brand mentions.
- Expert-led content: Every piece is grounded in journalistic-quality research and interviews with real financial professionals.
- On-page SEO excellence: Structured, AI-readable content that earns authority in both Google and AI-driven organic search.
- Proven fintech results: Our clients see faster ranking times, higher conversion rates, and lower CPAs.
The fintech sector is moving fast — but with the right SEO partner, you don’t have to chase the algorithm. You can lead it.
Ready to improve your fintech brand’s online visibility? Find out how our GEO Audit will get you noticed by AI search engines.
