New research shows the extent to which AI overviews (AIOs) are likely to impact broker marketing in the near future.
According to marketing consulting firm Be Franc, who based their results on data from Pi-Datametrics, searches for trading-related terms, products, and services in Google were covered by AIOs in just 1.4% of cases at the start of this year.
That had risen to 48.9% by mid-June.
“We’ve seen a significant rise in AI Overviews (AIOs) in Google search results following the March core update,” said Andy Francos, Be Franc’s Founder. “And This shift has accelerated sharply over the past six weeks, with AIOs now appearing for nearly 50% of query terms in the leveraged trading space.
“These results are highly volatile – source attribution can change daily – and this instability is reshaping how users interact with search.”
“This is just a glimpse of what’s coming”
As reported on TradeInformer earlier this week, AI-based search has the potential to radically shift broker marketing.
Over the last decade, lots of brokers have spent heavily on review sites and other high-ranking SEO-optimised affiliates, who could send more high-intent traffic to broker websites.
AI turns that on its head in a couple of ways. Firstly, no one really knows how to rank highly in AI search yet. On top of that, AI platforms are incentivised not to give click throughs to other pages.
One plausible outcome may be that we see fewer affiliates and a rise in paid ad spend on AI platforms, if and when that becomes an option for firms.
“We’re now witnessing what could be described as the ‘great decoupling’: impressions are rising, but clicks are falling,” noted Francos. “The reason? AIOs are fuelling a surge in zero-click searches. This makes it more important than ever for marketers to look beyond traditional traffic metrics. Traffic has never been the full picture. Visibility in AI search — and its role in driving conversion – must now be front and centre.
“This is just a glimpse of what’s coming. For fintech marketers in particular, this is a preview of the new normal – once AI Mode becomes the default search experience, as it already has in the US in certain verticals.”
