Financials Industry: 2026 AEO / GEO Benchmarks

*This data comes from the 2026 AEO / GEO Benchmarks Report. To explore insights across all 10 industries, access the full report here.

Executive summary

There’s a new search experience for brands to prioritize: AI answer engines.

The rise of AI answer engines and Google’s integration of AI Overview (AIO) results directly on traditional SERPs means users are increasingly getting answers from AI-generated summaries directly rather than clicking a link, leading to a surge in zero-click searches.

While organic search still fuels the majority of discovery, AI has introduced what we’re calling a parallel surface of visibility—an invisible layer that determines which brands are seen before anyone clicks.

The data shows that AI referral traffic currently represents just over 1% of total web visits and is growing by roughly 1% each month, on average. It will never rival traditional organic search traffic—but that’s not the point. In this new model, visibility no longer begins on your website; it starts within the AI experiences that answer questions, guide intent, and shape perception in real time. If your brand isn’t cited, mentioned, or referenced in these AI answers, it’s effectively absent from the modern customer journey.

AI visibility is becoming its own performance channel, one that signals which brands are trusted enough to enter the answer. Winning in this space isn’t about clicks; it’s about credibility.

The following findings provide the first layer of industry-specific benchmark data essential for navigating the new search landscape and ensuring credibility (and visibility) of your brand. It moves beyond traditional website analytics to provide key context for evaluating your total search performance, identifying accurate KPIs for both organic and AIO, and implementing the right strategies to drive results.

Top takeaways for Financials

• AEO, GEO & AI Search benchmarks:
  • The financial services subindustry, which includes advice and investment firms, received the highest share of AI referral traffic (0.61%).
  • ChatGPT is the dominant answer engine in this sector, driving 89.7% of all AI referral traffic.
  • Financial media and advice platforms win the most market share. Nerdwallet.com (10.14%) and bankrate.com (8.47%) are the most-cited domains in the high-traffic financial services subindustry.
• AIO benchmarks:
  • AI Overviews (AIOs) appear on 25.8% of the analyzed Google queries for the Financials industry.
  • Each of the three subindustries, financial services (27.3%), banks (26.2%), and insurance (21.7%) saw a similar share of voice in AIO visibility.
  • Article content was by far the most cited page source in AI Overviews, with over 110,000 pages being cited in the result.

Methodology

Using Conductor, we analyzed 13,770 domains from leading brands. Each domain was categorized into 10 industries and then further segmented into 22 subindustries to provide additional insights, which map directly to the Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS) framework. This research identifies emerging traffic trends, separating traditional organic traffic from new AI referral patterns and zero-click visibility at a granular level.

For the purposes of this industry-specific report, the Financials industry was split into three subindustries:

• Banks
• Financial services
• Insurance

AI search methodology

The AI search market share and brand leaders are sourced from our analysis of 13,770 domains being cited against our index of 3.5 million unique prompts between May and September 2025. We focused on these domains as they aligned with the 10 GICS industry categories we are reporting on. The analysis included 17 million AI-generated responses and over 100 million citations sourced from our AI Search Performance (AISP) and AIO reporting index.

The findings on AI search traffic, organic Google traffic, and referral traffic by answer engine type were sourced by analyzing anonymized and aggregated traffic patterns across 1,215 of our enterprise customer domains to assess how users of answer engines are reaching websites.

Ultimately, we analyzed more than 3.3 billion sessions across all of our data sources. Of that traffic, AI traffic from LLMs and chatbots accounted for more than 35.7 million sessions across the 10 industries analyzed.

The following benchmarks are averages sourced from an analysis of monthly AI search traffic data in the U.S. over a five-month period (May 2025-September 2025) in Conductor.

AI Overview methodology

We analyzed AI Overview data in the U.S. over a four-week period from September 15 to October 12, 2025, to gain insight into how AI-powered search is affecting Google’s traditional search experience. To do so, we analyzed approximately 21.9 million unique Google searches from Conductor’s traditional search index. Of those Google searches, nearly 5.5 million generated an AIO result.

AEO & AI search visibility analysis for Financials

This analysis provides a granular, data-driven benchmark for true visibility in the AI search landscape.

This section focuses on:

• AI referral traffic by subindustry
• Month-over-month (MoM) growth
• AI referral traffic by answer engine
• AI vs. Traditional channels
• AI market share

AI referral traffic for the Financials industry

The results:

• AI referral traffic accounts for .48% of all website traffic for the Financials industry, the second largest amount of AI referral traffic out of the 10 analyzed industries.
  • AI referral traffic usually has high intent and is more likely to convert than traffic from traditional channels. That shift means that AI search visibility is becoming the new key currency for enterprise AEO.

AI referral traffic by Financials subindustries

The results:

• .61% of traffic from queries related to financial services comes from AI, the highest of the analyzed Financials subindustries.
• The insurance subindustry(.44%) was right around the AI referral traffic we analyzed for the Financials industry at large (.48%).
• The banks (.16%) subindustry had the lowest amount of AI referral traffic in the Financials industry.

This could be due to the fact that when searching for financial services, a user isn't typically looking for a single login page; they are in a deep research phase, which AI is well-positioned to help with. Insurance queries are in a bit of a middle ground, as there are likely informational queries comparing providers and insurance types, as well as navigational queries like account logins. Banking queries are usually navigational or localized, meaning users want a link to their desired page, and an AI summary or direct answer isn’t as aligned to search intent.

Month-over-month growth in AI referral traffic change

The results:

• AI referral traffic in the Financials industry fell slightly, .03% from May to September 2025.
• Month-over-month growth decreased over the last two months after more significant growth earlier in the summer.
  • July to September 2025 (-.06%) saw decreases in referral traffic compared to significant increases from May to July (+.03%).

AI referral traffic vs. Traditional SEO traffic benchmarks for Financials

The results:

• Established channels like organic search, paid, direct, social, and any other referral traffic aside from AI still drive the vast majority of website visits across all industries.
  • AI referral traffic made up just .48% of all traffic in the Financials industry.
• On average, Organic Google makes up 17.42%, and other traffic sources contribute over 82.1%.

This data underscores the increased adoption of AI search in some industries and highlights the need to expand your search strategies to include AI. The data also illustrates the continued importance of a strong traditional SEO strategy. Even as AI search emerges, optimizing for visibility in standard Google results is essential for improving brand visibility and relevance. This potential overlap reinforces the need for a dual approach of traditional SEO and AEO / GEO strategies.

AI referral traffic by answer engine source: Financials industry

The results:

• On average, ChatGPT drives 89.7% of all AI referral traffic in the Financials industry.
• Copilot drove more than 5% of AI traffic to the Financials industry.
  • This highlights why focusing on ChatGPT isn’t enough to own AI search visibility. Financials brands should focus on optimizing for ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Copilot—the top three answer engines for their industry.

That said, while ChatGPT is the engine you should prioritize, it’s not the only answer engine you should pay attention to. Copilot and Perplexity specifically are driving notable traffic and could continue to expand their influence. Prepare for future volatility by tracking your brand presence across all of these answer engines and then optimizing as needed if your mentions and citations drop.

Financials market share: Domain citations and brand mention leaders

This section is an analysis of the brands and domains that won the most market share in the Financials industry. Our analysis was based on AI citations and brand mentions for May through September 2025. The results are split across three key financial subindustries:

• Banks
• Financial services
• Insurance

Financials industry: Top 5 domains by AI citation market share

1. nerdwallet.com
2. bankrate.com
3. kiplinger.com
4. vanguard.com
5. experian.com

Financial education and comparison engines, not traditional banks, are the clear winners of AI citations. Nerdwallet.com and bankrate.com lead this trend because their entire business model is built on answering complex "Your Money or Your Life" (YMYL) questions. Interestingly, for complex financial topics, AI models are favoring these trusted, third-party explainers over the banks themselves.

Financials industry: Top 5 brand leaders by AI brand mention market share

1. Nerd Wallet
2. PayPal
3. Bankrate
4. Vanguard
5. Fidelity

Brand authority mirrors domain authority, with NerdWallet and Bankrate again appearing at the top. The presence of PayPal highlights the importance of payment services in the AI conversation, while Vanguard and Fidelity prove that users are asking high-intent, brand-specific questions about investment and retirement.

Banks subindustry market share leaders by domain citations

Below, we have the top five domains in the banking subindustry based on their share of domain citations in AI search.

None of the top 5 domains (like nerdwallet.com or bankrate.com) is present as a leader in this subindustry. Instead, this subindustry is composed entirely of traditional banks, led by td.com (8.15%) and chase.com (7.26%). This clearly signals that while AI models trust publishers for general financial advice, they go directly to the primary bank domains as the "source of truth" for specific banking-related queries.

Financial services subindustry market share leaders by domain citations

This subindustry list is identical to the overall Financials industry leaders, with nerdwallet.com (10.14%) and bankrate.com (8.47%) holding the top spots in both. This confirms that the financial services subindustry is the primary force shaping the AI citation market for the entire category. It shows that for broad YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) queries about investing, credit, and financial advice, AI models overwhelmingly prioritize these high-authority educational publishers and comparison sites.

Insurance subindustry market share leaders by domain citations

All five domains here are new, led by specialized carriers and brokers like chubb.com (5.54%) and insureon.com (4.99%). This indicates that when users ask specific questions about insurance policies or risk, AI models bypass general financial guides and cite the primary insurance providers and specialized brokerages as the most authoritative sources.

AI Overview benchmarks for Financials

Despite the rise of AI answer engines, billions of searches still happen on Google, and every day, AI Overviews are appearing for more of those searches. That means it’s essential for brands to optimize their site to rank on page 1 in Google and increase their chances of winning an AIO result.

Below is our analysis of the AIO visibility in the Financials industry.

AIO visibility analysis: Financials industry

The results:

• AIO results appeared for 25.79% of the analyzed Google queries in the Financials industry.
• Financials had the second-highest AI Overview visibility of all 10 industries.

Our analysis shows that the Financials industry queries produce above-average AIO results, with 25.79% of all financial queries triggering an AI Overview in Google. This makes sense since financial queries are usually complex, multifaceted, and informational, which is the exact use case AIO was made for: synthesizing complex information into a digestible summary.

AIO visibility analysis: Financials subindustries

The results:

• More than 25% of all Financials queries trigger an AI Overview in Google.
  • If you’re in the Financials industry, you need to find a way to win AIO results or risk disappearing from almost 25% of queries.
• Each of the three subindustries, financial services (27.3%), banks (26.2%), and insurance (21.7%) saw a similar share of voice in AIO visibility.

Page types cited most often in AIO results for Financials

The results:

• Article content was by far the most cited page source in AI Overviews, with over 110,000 pages being cited in the result.
• The next page type cited most often in AIO results was a blog page with just over 75,000 citations.

The key takeaway here is that your content is much more likely to appear in AIO results for financial queries if it’s structured as a long-form article or blog. AIO tends to provide summaries to answer more complex queries. Also, users with financial queries usually want to understand complex financial concepts, compare offerings, and generally educate themselves. This kind of informational content is great for AIO summaries.

Financials AIO share of voice winners by subindustry

The following tables show the top 5 domains in each subindustry that were cited most often in an AI overview.

Banks subindustry: Winning domains for AIO share of voice

The results:

• Chase (0.53%) holds the top AIO market share for the Banks subindustry.
• Bank of America (0.32%) and Intuit (0.31%) follow closely, with U.S. Bank (0.29%) and Navy Federal (0.24%) rounding out the top five.

The key insight here is the presence of Intuit (maker of QuickBooks and TurboTax) ranking alongside the nation's largest banks. This signals that many banking AIO queries are not just about consumer accounts but are heavily focused on financial management, taxes, and small business accounting. For these complex, how-to questions, Google's AIOs are citing Intuit's extensive educational content as a primary authority.

Financial services subindustry: Winning domains for AIO share of voice

The results:

• Nerdwallet (1.40%) and Bankrate (1.31%) are in a tight race for the top AIO share of voice.
• Experian (0.70%) takes the third spot, followed by SmartAsset (0.49%) and Fidelity (0.48%).

As a critical YMYL category, AIOs are clearly trained to prioritize Nerdwallet and Bankrate for their vast libraries of trusted, long-form educational content that explains complex topics. The high rank of Experian also shows that queries about credit scores are a major driver of AIOs.

Insurance subindustry: Winning domains for AIO share of voice

The results:

• Progressive (0.28%) leads the AIO share of voice for the Insurance subindustry.
• AAA (0.16%) follows, with Guardian (0.15%), United Healthcare (0.15%), and Humana (0.15%) in a three-way tie.

Progressive and AAA are being cited for consumer-facing auto and home insurance queries. The strong, combined presence of UnitedHealthcare and Humana demonstrates that a large volume of insurance AIOs is also addressing complex YMYL questions about health plans, for which Google cites these primary carriers as the authority.

Summary

The future of digital discovery belongs to the Financials brands that understand that AI visibility isn’t a nice-to-have metric—it’s the next frontier of search performance. Having informed, data-driven KPIs for both SEO and AEO / GEO enables digital teams to measure their total search visibility and adapt their strategies from clicks to zero-click citations.

Leverage the Financials industry benchmarks featured here to understand how your brand performs and where there are opportunities to improve.

Remember, the shift to AI is accelerating. While AI referral traffic is a small (but high-intent) channel today, now is the time to secure your market share in these new, answer-driven results to ensure you show up first—and keep showing up first.