Vested came together for a webinar on AI visibility as a driver of competitive advantage with Geneva Loader, Chief Marketing Officer at Gresham, and Chris Andrews, CEO & Co-founder from Scrunch. You can watch the replay here:

Paul Dalton-Borge shares his key takeaways:

As more and more people are consuming information, discovering and surfacing data using AI tools – what do brands in financial services need to be aware of, and what should they be doing to better influence how they are being represented in LLM answers?

A shift in how brands are found and understood

We opened by looking at the broader landscape. People are increasingly turning to ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews to research products and providers. For financial brands, this means your narrative is being shaped by sources you don’t control. The good news: early adopters are already gaining competitive advantage by taking this seriously.

The problem with outdated information

While AI hallucinations are becoming less frequent, a more persistent issue emerged in our discussion: third-party sources containing outdated or incorrect information. Old press releases, stale Wikipedia pages and legacy data listings continue to appear in AI-generated responses. Auditing your third-party footprint – and reaching out to correct outdated content – has become laborious but essential brand maintenance.

Technical foundations for AI access

We spent time on the practical basics. Before worrying about optimising third party brand mentions, brands need to confirm AI systems can actually crawl their content. That means reviewing robots.txt files to ensure AI bots aren’t inadvertently blocked, favouring structured HTML text over PDFs and keeping website content current. FAQ sections perform particularly well with AI models, as does keeping language clear and easy to understand. JavaScript-heavy pages and video without text alternatives often get overlooked.

Why third-party authority matters more than ever

AI systems weigh source credibility heavily when assembling responses. Wikipedia, trusted review sites, Reddit discussions and earned media all contribute to how a brand is represented. This is giving digital PR renewed importance – content and stories that build authority with journalists also signals trustworthiness to AI.

Measuring AI visibility

We closed with a demonstration of how brands can now track their AI visibility using tools like Scrunch. For the first time, communications teams can see which competitors appear in AI responses, identify the citation sources driving those results and measure brand presence across prompts and models over time.

For anyone looking to get started, the advice is simple: test manually with incognito browsers and category-level questions, audit existing content before creating anything new and prioritise plain English over marketing jargon.