Trust, Visibility, and Risk in the Age of AI Search
Last month, Vested hosted a fireside chat at its New York headquarters with Chris Andrew, CEO and Co-Founder of Scrunch. The conversation drew senior marketing leaders from across the financial services industry for an evening focused on a topic that has become impossible to ignore: how AI is reshaping search, visibility, and brand risk. You can watch the full conversation here:
It was a rich discussion. However, what stayed with me afterward wasn’t any single data point or platform recommendation, but rather how consistently the conversation challenged the assumptions that most of the profession is still relying on. Everyone in marketing is talking about AI search. Conference panels are devoted to it. LinkedIn feeds are saturated with takes on what it means for SEO, content, and the website’s future. Most of that conversation is useful. Some of it is noise. But there are a few things it keeps missing, and for financial services marketers, those gaps matter.
1. Your website isn’t dying. It’s being misunderstood.
The idea that AI search is making websites obsolete is misguided. Your website has never been more important, just not for the reasons you’ve spent the last decade optimizing it.
Your existing site was built for humans: visual, experiential, engineered to hold attention and drive action. Large language models don’t browse. They consume language, extract intent, and synthesize answers. A homepage with a cinematic hero image and fifteen words tells a compelling story to a person. To an AI model, it says almost nothing.
The website’s new job — in addition to its old one — is to educate the LLMs, ensuring that when AI responds to a question, your brand owns the answer. That’s a different design challenge than the one most marketers are currently solving.
2. You’re probably being cited without getting credit.
There’s a real, underreported phenomenon in which AI surfaces your content to answer a user’s question but never mentions your brand by name. Your content did the work. Someone else got the authority — aka the credit.
It happens because the model found your page informative, but didn’t connect it to your expertise. The fix requires editorial intent, not just technical optimization. Your brand has to develop content that demonstrates not just what you know, but who you are and why you’re the right source. That’s a distinction most financial brands haven’t made yet.
3. Earned media is having a quiet renaissance.
The AI search era hasn’t diminished the value of PR — it’s elevated it. Large language models do not assess your brand in isolation. Instead, they consider it alongside a myriad of other factors. They look at your owned content alongside press coverage, third-party references, and industry commentary to determine whether your brand is credible on a given topic.
A clear, well-researched narrative across your channels passionately shares your story with others while also enriching the model’s understanding of it. That’s a meaningful shift in how communications strategy should be resourced and prioritized.
The stakes are higher for financial brands
AI-driven search is accelerating fastest in high-consideration categories, and financial services sits at the top of that list. When someone is evaluating a fund, selecting an advisor, or navigating a complex financial decision, they’re not making an impulse purchase. They’re doing research. Increasingly, they’re starting that research with a series of questions within one or more LLMs.
If your brand isn’t showing up in those answers (or is appearing with outdated, incomplete, or misattributed information), the impact is real and compounds over time.
Marketers who treat AI search as a technology problem to be delegated to will fall behind. The ones who recognize it as a new dimension of brand and content strategy are already pulling ahead.
