Your Customers Have Stopped Clicking Links. What's a Fintech Company to Do? Let's Talk GEO — and 11 Agencies Worth a Look

A while back, a friend of mine who runs payments sat down with me for a chat.

He looked miserable. "Our site traffic is down almost thirty percent," he said. "The content team hasn't slacked off — we still publish, we still do keywords. We're spending just as much money, and reaching fewer and fewer people."

I asked him one question: when you want to buy something yourself, do you open Google first — or ask ChatGPT first?

He paused. Then he laughed.

Exactly. Even he doesn't click links anymore.

The Click Is Disappearing

SparkToro did a study: 60% of Google searches now end without a single click on any result.

What does that mean?

A user searches "best bank for small businesses," and Google's AI summary writes the answer right on the results page. They never enter your website, never see your landing page, never leave a phone number.

Answer read, and the person is gone.

Every click that doesn't happen is an opportunity that doesn't happen. No chance to introduce your product, no chance to build trust, no chance to convert.

Old-school SEO was about winning rankings. GEO is about winning "cited by AI."

What is GEO?

Generative Engine Optimization. Some people call it AEO, AI SEO, or LLM optimization — plenty of names, one goal: when users ask AI a question, are you in the answer?

Traditional SEO stares at ten blue links on a results page and fights for clicks. GEO stares at the answers coming out of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity, and fights to get mentioned.

6sense's 2025 buyer experience report has a number in it: 94% of B2B buyers used generative AI during their purchase process.

94%.

Which means your customer very likely asked AI before deciding whether to buy from you. What AI says reaches them before your sales pitch does.

This is a fight you have no choice but to take.

Finance Has It Even Harder

Fintech comes with a special complication, though.

Financial services are the textbook YMYL domain — Your Money or Your Life, where the user's wallet and life are on the line. Heavy regulation, dense jargon, zero tolerance for error. And AI has a bad habit: when a question gets complicated, it likes to oversimplify.

Oversimplify "the compliance boundaries of a payments license," and things go wrong.

So doing GEO in finance means your content has to clear three gates at once: compliance, expertise, and the machine gate. It's not enough for humans to understand it — the LLM also has to be able to retrieve it, cite it accurately, and not distort what you meant.

That's why so many financial companies go looking for help. The trouble is, the field is brand new. How new? So new that plenty of shops edit "SEO" to "GEO" on their website copy and start calling themselves AI search experts.

How do you tell them apart? I'll break it into three things: how AI actually differs from search engines, which agencies out there are doing the work seriously, and how you run acceptance on them.

First, Understand This: AI and Search Engines Are Two Different Animals

This is where a lot of agencies stumble. They do GEO with an old SEO playbook, and the direction is wrong from the start.

Where's the difference? Four points.

First, AI loves fresh content; search engines love old content. Ahrefs' research found that LLMs prefer citing recently published content, while search engines favor older pages that have accumulated authority. Your content strategy has to serve both masters.

Second, search engines read whole pages; LLMs take "chunks." AI answers questions through passage retrieval — it grabs the small, self-contained chunk of content that answers one specific question, not your entire article. So rewriting a paragraph into a direct question-and-answer format might be all it takes to go from invisible to cited.

Third, LLMs are lazy. Hand them a chunk of content and they mostly take it at face value — whatever the text says, they believe. That's actually an opportunity: the cleaner and more structured your writing, the more accurately AI will paraphrase you.

Fourth, LLMs have conversational memory. Search engines treat every query as an isolated event; AI remembers what the user asked a moment ago and follows the thread of the conversation. That opens a window for bottom-of-funnel content — after the user asks "which one is best" and then "how much does it cost," you need to be in the answer at the exact moment they're ready to buy.

Once you understand these four points, you can look at any agency's proposal and tell who genuinely gets it and who's reciting a script.

11 Agencies, Laid Out at Once

The list below covers every flavor, from finance specialists to full-service generalists. There's no perfect choice — only a good match or a bad one.

Mint Studios. A content marketing shop focused exclusively on financial services and fintech, with a "revenue-first" pitch: figure out what an opportunity is worth before any work starts. Their method leans toward bottom-of-funnel content — not "what is payments," but "which small business banking solution is best." The content they built for Fintel Connect grew inbound inquiries on the site by 58%. A good fit for finance teams that explicitly want leads and revenue.

NoGood. A full-service growth marketing agency in New York, with AEO as one piece of the puzzle. Serves SaaS, healthcare, B2C, and B2B. Their client roster includes Johnson & Johnson, Amazon, and Intuit. Suited to startups in growth mode and companies at scale.

Intero Digital. Founded in 1996, headquartered in Colorado, deep reserves of experience. They built their own crawler simulator, InteroBOT, which can predict search results and test strategies. Industries span travel, e-commerce, SaaS, fashion, and healthcare.

Victorious. An SEO agency headquartered in San Francisco, offering AI audits, prompt research, and technical SEO. Clients include GE Digital, SoFi, and Wayfair. Suited to mid-size and large brands expanding internationally.

Clarity Global. A global communications agency headquartered in London, whose strong suit is using PR to drive AI visibility. Clients include SurveyMonkey, Airbus, GitHub, and Oracle. If your strategy is "get the brand mentioned by authoritative media first, and let AI follow along citing it," they're worth a look.

WebFX. A performance-oriented agency in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, with clients like Hilton, Fujifilm, and Verizon. Suited to companies expanding state by state across the US.

The SEO Works. They build entity authority with a homegrown framework called UII (Universal Information Infrastructure) — organizing brand information into structures both humans and AI can read. The track record is solid: 287% growth in AI citations for a global logistics provider, a 121% lift in ChatGPT referral traffic; and 78% AI-driven sales growth for an e-commerce brand. Suited to mid-size and large enterprises.

Siege Media. A content-driven agency in Austin that builds AI visibility with high-quality, linkable content assets rather than pure technical optimization. Clients include Asana, HubSpot, and Zillow. Content-born SaaS companies will like them.

Omniscient Digital. Started in B2B SaaS content and SEO, later added GEO. Solid methodology, a fit for B2B SaaS companies that need content production at scale. Clients include Jasper and Loom.

Single Grain. A full-service agency led by Eric Siu, covering paid media and SEO with AI optimization layered on top. Clients include Amazon, Uber, and Salesforce. Suited to buyers who want a multi-channel bundled service.

Straight North. Chicago-based, focused on B2B lead generation for mid-market manufacturers, healthcare, and finance. Their approach ties AI visibility directly to the sales pipeline and makes it prove itself in pipeline numbers.

See the pattern? For some, industry depth is the bread and butter; for others it's content assets, or technical infrastructure. Wherever your weakness lies decides who you should hire.

How to Choose? Ask Four Questions

A list is just a list — you still have to run the interviews yourself. Four questions are enough to screen out most of the field.

Question one: how do you measure success? Can you show case data from AI search? A credible agency will show you citation rates, visibility, and lead attribution; a shaky one starts talking to you about vibes.

Question two: when you write for AI platforms versus for traditional SEO, what's the difference in your approach? Anyone who can't articulate details like passage retrieval and structured data gets an immediate pass.

Question three: when the AI search algorithms change, how do you keep up? This industry reshuffles every six months. What works today may be dead next year. You want a team running controlled tests and speaking in data.

Question four: what experiments are you running right now? A real expert will light up telling you about them; someone half-informed will dodge.

Then there are the red flags. Three of them — any single one should put you on alert.

Agencies that only chase broad-traffic topics with no conversion path; agencies that can't articulate their own methodology; agencies that pound the table promising to "rank you #1 in AI" — that's simply not how AI works. There is no "ranking" in the traditional sense.

One more thing — a mindset issue. Like SEO, GEO can't be rushed. Most mid-size and large companies need three to six months before they see measurable citation growth. Today, nobody anywhere can guarantee your brand will show up in AI answers. That's the honest answer for the whole industry. Anyone who gives you a guarantee is overpromising.

Finally, the Most Expensive Lesson: How to Do the Accounting

Traffic drops, so you do GEO. You've done GEO — how do you know it's working?

Stop looking at impressions. Look at three things.

First, your brand's position and sentiment inside AI answers. Showing up isn't enough — you need to see where you show up, what the surrounding text says about you, praise or criticism. Tools like Peec and Profound can do this.

Second, citations. When AI treats your website as a source, it means your content is authoritative and well-structured enough.

Third, leads. This is the hardest, and the most valuable. Almost nobody clicks links inside AI tools, so traditional attribution goes completely blind. What do you do? Add one field to your form: "How did you hear about us?"

A real case: one company added that field, built a custom report in HubSpot, and found that 20% of inbound leads came from LLMs. That's a number click analytics will never see. Another company, after setting up attribution and lead-quality tracking, found inbound leads from AI channels up 150%.

A channel you can't see is not a channel that doesn't exist. The most expensive line item is the one you can't account for.

Back to my friend from the beginning.

Losing thirty percent of your traffic isn't the scary part. The scary part is that your customer has already finished deciding inside an AI answer — and you were never in that answer at all.

GEO is still early, and the rules are still shifting. But one thing won't change: build content that's authoritative enough, structured enough, and backed by experts — content machines can find, understand, and trust.

That's worth starting today.

May your brand show up in the next answer.