Remember when ranking on Google was a set formula? Find a keyword, write a decent article, put the keyword in the title a few times, build some links and wait for Google to reward you. Now, marketers must contend with ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and other generative tools meaning traditional SEO remains foundational, but the definition of search visibility is much broader. So, how can finance brands rank higher on Google in 2027? Let’s dive in and see what’s changed, what’s stayed the same, and what you need to do more of.
Google Ranking Is An Ongoing Activity
The first thing to understand is that ranking is not something you “get” and then keep forever. Google continues to update its ranking systems, competitors improve their websites, search behaviour changes and previously useful content becomes stale. Google’s own guidance tells site owners to assess traffic drops in the context of ranking system changes, technical issues, changes in search demand and changes in their competitive landscape rather than assuming every decline is a penalty.
This is particularly relevant to financial services because information ages quickly. An article about interest rates, trading conditions, regulation, crypto, payments or investment trends can go from useful to questionable without anyone touching the page. That is why SEO for finance should be treated as an ongoing activity rather than a box to tick after a website launch. In fact, our recent guide to 10 Critical Issues Hurting Your Financial SEO identifies treating SEO as a one-off task as one of the most common problems we see.
Google’s Latest Updates Made The Point Painfully
If you needed a reminder that Google can move the furniture around without asking, 2026 has provided plenty of evidence with the March core update creating substantial volatility. Analysis from SE Ranking reported by Search Engine Land found that 79.5% of URLs in the top three changed position during the update, while 90.7% of URLs in the top ten shifted. More than 24% of pages that had previously occupied the top ten subsequently fell out of the top 100. Those numbers are a loud warning for finance marketers. You can be doing many things right and still find that your visibility changes because Google’s search landscape changed. Or because another website has become stronger.
That doesn’t necessarily that Google has “penalised” you. Sometimes, your content has simply stopped being the best answer. As long as you are doing your monthly SEO health checks, don’t waste too much time trying to figure out what went wrong, think about what changes you need to make to your content to get back on track.
What Does Google Actually Want?
If we had a dime every time we were asked this at the agency, we’d be retired in the Bahamas. Unfortunately, the answer is surprisingly dull, and hasn’t actually changed over the years: Useful content.
Google’s May 2026 guidance on optimising for generative AI features explicitly emphasises valuable, unique and non-commodity content, while also confirming that established SEO best practices remain foundational to success in AI-powered search. In other words, Google does not want another article that says exactly what the other 30 articles say, only with a different introduction.
This is particularly important in finance, where thousands of websites publish variations of the same beginner guides. “What is forex?” “What is leverage?” “How does compound interest work?” These subjects can be valuable, but if your version adds nothing new, there is little reason for Google to give it preferential treatment. The answer is not necessarily to stop writing about those subjects. It is to make your version demonstrably better.
Start With Search Intent Not Keywords
One of the biggest mistakes in SEO is starting with the keywords. Instead, think about the person you want to reach with your content. Someone searching “forex trading” could be a complete beginner, an experienced trader looking for a platform, a journalist researching an article or someone trying to understand what the term means. Those are four very different intentions hiding behind three words.
Now compare that with a search such as “how does forex leverage work for beginners?” The intent is much clearer, and the content required to satisfy it is different.
Modern SEO is therefore less about mechanically inserting keywords and more about understanding what is behind the search. That shift also makes sense for AI search, where users increasingly phrase queries conversationally and expect a complete answer rather than a page containing a collection of matching terms. Also, keep this in mind, where a person is based matters. Different regions and cultures have different needs and search intents. Don’t assume that just because they speak English is India means that their search will be the same as an English speaker in New Zealand.
Our Understanding SEO and GEO Content Marketing FAQ explores how search behaviour is evolving and why content needs to account for both traditional and generative search.
The Best Finance Content Answers Questions
This sounds obvious, but spend five minutes looking at financial search results and you will find plenty of articles that don’t. A user asks a question and the article spends three paragraphs explaining why the subject is important, another two paragraphs introducing the company and eventually gets around to answering it somewhere near the bottom. Meanwhile the user is looking for the ‘jump to recipe’ button. Joking aside, they’ll have bounced in seconds.
If someone searches “What is a forex spread?”, tell them what a forex spread is. Then explain how it works, why it matters, provide a relevant example and explain what they should consider next. Good content does not make the reader work unnecessarily hard. This matters for humans, Google and AI systems alike. Google’s guidance on AI features specifically highlights the importance of valuable content and explains that its generative systems use information retrieved from Google’s Search index to help construct responses.
And Yes, You Still Need Technical SEO
It is tempting to jump straight into content because content is much more fun than fixing canonical tags. Unfortunately, boring uncle Google does not care which task you find more fun. A technically healthy website gives search engines a much better chance of discovering, crawling, indexing and understanding your content. Site architecture, redirects, canonicalisation, indexation, mobile usability, page experience and internal linking all form part of the foundations on which the rest of your SEO strategy sits.
Technical SEO is particularly important for financial businesses because websites can become complicated. There may be multiple regional domains, language versions, trading platforms, product pages, educational centres, market news sections and hundreds or thousands of historical articles. If Google cannot work out which pages matter, your carefully written content simply won’t perform.
Ask Contentworks about a comprehensive technical SEO audit with a priority list of updates.
Don’t Build A Content Assembly Line, Build Authority
AI has made content production extraordinarily easy which is exactly why producing more content is no longer much of a competitive advantage. Google’s current spam policy specifically identifies “scaled content abuse” as the creation of many pages primarily to manipulate search rankings rather than help users. The policy applies regardless of whether the content was created by AI, humans or a combination of methods, and Google explicitly gives the example of using generative AI to generate many pages without adding value.
This does not mean Google has banned AI-assisted content. It means generating 400 articles this month is not necessarily an SEO strategy.
For finance brands, the stronger approach is to use AI where it genuinely improves the workflow, while retaining human writing, research, subject expertise, editing, fact-checking and compliance oversight. Your content should contain something that a machine working from the same five competitor articles could not easily reproduce. Your aim is to build authority and you can do that through an analyst’s perspective, proprietary data, first-hand experience, original research or a regional insight or point of view.
E-E-A-T Matters Even More In Finance
Finance is not a subject where readers should be encouraged to take anonymous advice from the internet. Google’s Search quality framework places particular emphasis on experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, commonly abbreviated to E-E-A-T. This is especially relevant to topics that can affect people’s financial stability or wellbeing.
Your website should therefore make expertise visible:
- Who wrote the article?
- What do they know about the subject?
- Is there an appropriate author or expert reviewer?
- Are claims sourced?
- Is the company transparent about who it is and what it does?
A page explaining derivatives written by a named financial professional, supported by authoritative sources and published by an identifiable financial company sends a very different set of signals from an anonymous article containing generic advice. And E-E-A-T is no longer just a Google tick box. Strong expertise and authority also help AI systems understand whether your brand is a credible source worth referencing.
For more on this, see our guide to What Is E-E-A-T and How Do You Write Content for It?.
Old Content Could Be Your Biggest SEO Win
There is another tactic that finance brands often overlook, and that is taking a look at your historical content. Your website may already contain 100, 500 or 2,000 articles. Some will be ranking well, others will be sitting on page two, a few will have accumulated backlinks. Others may have been written three years ago and forgotten.
Do not assume the answer is to publish something new and delete all your old content. An existing article with historical authority can often be a much better candidate for improvement. Updating outdated statistics, adding expert insight, improving the structure, answering new questions and strengthening internal links can turn an underperforming asset into a considerably stronger one.
This matters even more in finance because the information itself changes. Our guide to refreshing and upgrading financial services content looks specifically at how content can be updated for SEO, GEO and current financial relevance. Think of your existing content library as an investment portfolio. Some assets need pruning, some need more love (i.e. capital), while some are quietly doing very well. And some should probably have been put out to pasture years ago.
Internal Links Are The Trails Through Your Website
Internal linking may be one of the less exciting parts of SEO, but the data shows why it deserves attention. Pages with relevant internal links give users more opportunities to discover useful content while helping search engines understand the relationships between topics across your site.
Take a comprehensive guide to forex trading. Instead of treating it as a standalone article, you can connect it to related pages covering spreads, leverage, risk management, currency pairs and trading platforms. Each link strengthens the contextual relationship between these pages and helps establish a clear topical structure. The result is more than a collection of individual articles. You create a connected content network, where a pillar page acts as the central hub and supporting pages build depth around specific questions and high-value topics. This structure can also help distribute internal authority across commercially important pages rather than leaving valuable content isolated.
There is a UX benefit, too. Relevant internal links give visitors a logical next step based on what they are already reading. That can increase content discovery, page depth and the number of opportunities a visitor has to reach conversion-focused pages.
The key is relevance, not volume: every internal link should make the next step clearer for the reader while reinforcing the relationship between pages for search engines.
Backlinks Still Matter But Relevance Matters More
There is always someone offering 500 backlinks for a suspiciously low price. The problem is that 500 links from irrelevant or low-quality domains do not equal 500 units of authority. Google explicitly classifies paid links intended to manipulate rankings, automated link building and low-quality directory links as link spam.
The data also shows why quality matters. An Ahrefs study of almost 1 billion web pages found a general correlation between the number of unique referring domains and organic traffic, while noting that link quality matters too.
For financial brands, that makes relevance and editorial credibility more important than raw link volume. A handful of legitimate mentions from respected financial publications, research organisations or industry websites can build far more meaningful authority than hundreds of unrelated placements.
This is where SEO and PR overlap:
- Original research gives journalists statistics worth citing.
- Expert commentary creates opportunities for editorial mentions and links.
- Industry reports can become reference points that attract links over time.
- One strong asset can generate coverage across PR, search, email and social.
Our guide to creating a backlinking strategy for forex explores how this works in practice.
Now Let’s Talk About AI Search
For years your SEO strategy had one job – get to page one! Now imagine a user searches Google for “best forex broker for beginners” and receives an AI-generated response containing an explanation, comparisons and links to selected sources before the traditional organic listings.
Your website might still rank. But if it is not being surfaced in the AI-generated experience, you are missing another part of the search journey. This is why GEO, or Generative Engine Optimisation, has become part of the SEO conversation.
Google’s own May 2026 guidance is quite revealing here. Generative AI is changing how users discover information, but it is not replacing the fundamentals of SEO. Google explicitly states that SEO best practices remain “relevant and foundational” to success in its generative AI features, while its new guidance focuses on valuable, unique, non-commodity content rather than a separate set of “GEO” tricks.
The implication is don’t replace your SEO strategy—extend it. Technical accessibility, crawlability, strong information architecture, authoritative content and clear topical relevance still matter. The additional layer is creating content that can be easily understood, extracted and cited within increasingly AI-driven search experiences. In other words, AI search changes the surface, not the underlying discipline. Finance brands that continue investing in strong SEO foundations while producing genuinely useful, distinctive content will be better positioned across both traditional rankings and Google’s emerging AI experiences.
How Do You Rank In AI Overviews?
There is no “GEO fairy” that can wave a wand over your website, and there is no button that submits a site to ChatGPT or Google and guarantees citations. The data points in a different direction: AI visibility is still closely connected to strong search fundamentals.
A 2025 Ahrefs analysis of 1.9 million AI Overview citations across 1 million queries found that 76.1% of cited pages ranked in Google’s top 10, while another 9.5% ranked somewhere in positions 11 to 100. More recent Ahrefs data suggests that this relationship is becoming less direct, but traditional SEO remains an important part of the equation. There is another important shift. AI search is increasingly being used to answer longer, more complex questions. Pew Research found that AI Overviews appeared for 53% of searches containing 10 or more words, compared with just 8% of searches containing one or two words.
So the practical strategy is not to chase a new set of “AI ranking hacks”. It is to make your existing SEO stronger and more useful for complex queries: answer specific questions clearly, structure content with descriptive headings, cite credible sources, keep information current, demonstrate first-hand expertise and build genuine authority. The key insight is that GEO is less about optimising for a completely new search engine and more about becoming a source that search systems have a reason to trust, retrieve and reference.
AI Search Is Bigger Than Google
The search journey is now distributed across more platforms. A potential trader might search Google for a definition, ask ChatGPT to explain a concept, use Gemini to compare options, check YouTube for a tutorial and then visit Reddit or LinkedIn to see what other people are saying. The precise mechanics of how each AI system selects information differ, and there is no universal ranking formula for ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and other generative platforms. And if there was, it’s probably already outdated.
But credibility compounds over time. A strong website, identifiable experts, consistent brand information, authoritative media coverage and genuinely useful content create a stronger digital footprint than a site that exists only to capture a few keywords.
This is why modern SEO increasingly overlaps with content strategy, brand building, PR and reputation management.
You Can Now Measure AI Visibility
For years, marketers have been obsessing over rankings, clicks and impressions. Now Google is giving us another metric to obsess over.
In June 2026, Google launched new Search Console reports specifically for visibility in generative AI features. The reports show impressions from AI features in Search and Discover, including which pages appeared, the countries and devices involved and how visibility changes over time. Google says the new reports are initially being rolled out to a subset of websites. But what does it all mean?
It means AI visibility is moving from an interesting theory (ahem, guesswork) discussed by marketers into something Google itself is giving site owners tools to monitor.
What the Report Tracks
- Impressions: Measures how often your pages are surfaced within Google’s generative AI search experiences.
- AI Surfaces: Covers visibility across AI Overviews, AI Mode, and eligible generative AI experiences in Discover.
- Reporting Dimensions: Data can be segmented by page, country, device and date, giving you a clearer view of where AI visibility is coming from.
What the Report Does Not Show
The report is useful for measuring exposure, but it currently provides only a partial picture of performance.
- Clicks and CTR: It does not report clicks or click-through rates from these AI surfaces, so you cannot directly connect an AI impression to a visit.
- Queries: The underlying searches that generated the AI appearance are not disclosed, making it difficult to identify exactly which questions are driving visibility.
- Average Position: AI placements do not receive a conventional ranking position, so the report does not provide an average position metric for them.
This means the data is best viewed as a visibility indicator rather than a complete AI search performance report.
AI Content Controls
Google also provides a property-level control for publishers that do not want their content surfaced in its AI search features.
- Opt-out: Publishers can prevent their content from appearing in eligible AI features.
- Default: Pages are included unless a site chooses to restrict them.
- Organic Search: Google states that opting out of AI features does not negatively affect a site’s traditional organic search rankings.
For SEOs, the important distinction is that AI visibility is currently measured primarily through impressions. The report can tell you whether Google is surfacing your content, but not yet why it was selected, which queries triggered it, or whether that exposure generated a click.
Don’t Ignore AI Overviews
We’re getting this question asked more frequently. If Google answers the question itself, why would anyone click through to your website?
The answer is that not every search journey ends with a click, and the impact varies by query and search experience. A recent 2026 study of AI Overview behaviour found that visits containing AI Overviews were associated with fewer clicks and more browsing sessions ending, while clicks to cited sources were relatively uncommon in the study sample. That makes visibility inside the answer important in its own right. If your brand is consistently cited when people ask financial questions, you are still participating in the decision-making journey. The user may not click immediately, but the brand has been introduced in a context where the user is actively seeking information.
Our recent article, Are AI Summaries Killing Your SEO?, looks more closely at this shift.
Agency Takeaway
Don’t look for keywords to rank for, find the answers your audience have questions for. For brokers, that could mean questions about spreads, leverage, platforms, regulation, trading hours or market conditions. For a fintech, its questions about payments, open banking, security or onboarding. Once you understand those questions, you can build a content ecosystem around them. And that ecosystem can appear in traditional results, featured results, AI Overviews, AI Mode and wider AI discovery.
Hello! What About Voice Search?
Voice search is part of a broader shift from keyword-based search towards conversational discovery. Think with Google reported that 27% of the global online population was already using voice search on mobile, while more recent research shows that AI is accelerating the move towards natural-language information seeking. In 2026, 42% of US adults said they use AI chatbots to search for information, making conversational search relevant well beyond traditional voice assistants. 8.4 billion voice assistants are now active worldwide so voice is no longer an alternative search channel, it is the primary interface for a growing share of consumers.
For finance brands, this matters because financial searches are naturally question-led. Someone might type “forex broker UK” but ask a voice assistant or AI tool, “Which forex brokers are regulated in the UK?” or “What is the difference between a spread betting account and a CFD account?”
That changes how content should be structured. Instead of optimising exclusively around short commercial keywords, finance brands should build content around the complete questions users ask, with direct answers, clear headings, definitions, comparisons and supporting evidence. This also creates content that is easier for AI systems to interpret and use when generating answers. There is a particularly strong opportunity around informational finance queries.
The strategic overlap between voice SEO and GEO is therefore significant. Both reward content that is clearly structured, conversational, authoritative and easy to extract into a concise answer. For finance brands, that means moving beyond “What is forex?” towards specific questions such as “How does leverage work?”, “What fees does a forex broker charge?” and “How are CFDs regulated in the UK?”
Our Marketing Guide to Voice Search Optimisation explores how these conversational search behaviours increasingly overlap with broader SEO and GEO strategies.
So, how do you rank higher on Google in 2027?
- Publish content that is difficult to replicate. Generic information is increasingly easy for AI to produce, so focus on original research, proprietary data, expert analysis and genuine industry insight.
- Start with the foundations. Ensure your technical SEO is sound, your site architecture is logical, and search engines can crawl, understand and index your most important pages.
- Run a combined SEO + GEO audit. Assess technical health, content quality, search intent, keyword opportunities, internal linking, authority, E-E-A-T and visibility across emerging AI search experiences.
- Fix what already exists. Refresh outdated content, consolidate competing pages, address cannibalisation and identify gaps where competitors are building stronger topical coverage.
- Build around real search intent. Create content that answers the questions users actually ask rather than producing pages solely to target arbitrary keywords.
- Make every piece useful and distinctive. Keep financial information current, demonstrate expertise, cite credible sources and add insights that cannot easily be reproduced elsewhere.
Book a Contentworks SEO + GEO site audit and find out where your website is losing visibility, where Google sees opportunities and how ready your brand is for the next generation of search.