As Kaitlyn Dummitt and her team in the marketing department at Waterford Bank N.A. in Toledo, Ohio, prepare content for the bank’s website, they keep an important question in mind: Will this content show up in AI search engines and AI-generated answers?
“Before, SEO [search engine optimization] involved thinking about people searching things like, ‘checking account in my city,’” says Dummitt, vice president of marketing for the $1.8 billion-asset community bank. “Now, it’s more about answering questions in a native way that people would be asking them, and answering them in a clear, useful way so that these AI search engines understand what kind of expertise Waterford Bank brings to the table.”
“I think it is very important for bankers to think about AI as they plan their websites and all the content that they generate,” says Jana Jurukovska, ICBA’s senior vice president of marketing. “The nature of how consumers are asking questions about financial products and services is increasingly turning to AI, and as that becomes more prevalent, banks need to be in that space.”
In the era of AI, two ways you can optimize your website’s findability is answer engine optimization (AEO) and generative engine optimization (GEO). What’s the difference? If you do AEO effectively, your bank is more likely to show up in the AI overview at the top of a traditional search. If your GEO is effective, your bank’s content is more likely to show up in AI-generated answers when people ask questions about banking topics.
“AEO is really important, because it helps search engines find the direct answer to questions,” Jurukovska says. “But in some ways, GEO is a bigger long-term opportunity, because consumers are turning more toward AI-generated content.”
AI-driven SEO for community banks: Content quality still wins
Marketers doing SEO have long been told that content quality is important, and that’s still true in the AI search era. Both AEO and GEO are improved when the content on a site is fresh, authoritative and original.
Community Savings Bank in Edgewood, Iowa, aims for AEO authority by featuring its loan officers on its website and including a brief comment from each about how they can help potential borrowers.
“I have focused on including the names of our loan officers and a little bit of information about them, giving them some credibility,” says Kirstie Schares, marketing director of the $613 million-asset community bank.
At Pennian Bank in Mifflintown, Pennsylvania, a 2025 article its marketing team wrote about financial apps for kids is an example of GEO.
“In that post, we did a deep dive into what are the most popular financial apps out there,” explains Heather Miltenberger, senior vice president and director of marketing and business services at the $668 million-asset community bank. “We look at that every couple of months to make sure it’s still relevant and refresh it if we need to.”
The Pennian Bank blog post meets all the criteria for good GEO: The bank team wrote the post, so it’s original; the information is accurate; and they update it as needed, so it remains timely. The post also includes easy-to-read bullet points and isn’t “salesy”: It helps parents understand their options without promoting the bank’s own products.
Credibility can be built off a bank’s own site, too. “[AI search engines] are also looking at YouTube and social networks like Reddit to pick up other signals,” says Norm Plumstead, president and CEO of $453 million-asset Honor Bank in Honor, Michigan. “If a bank or a CEO is quoted or referenced, that all kind of builds trust.”
How AI is changing SEO for banks: SEO, AEO and GEO explained
- SEO (search engine optimization) helps content to rank in traditional search results, such as Google. One piece of this is using high-value keywords naturally in your content, especially headlines (H1s) and subheads (H2s, H3s, H4s).
- AEO (answer engine optimization) helps content show up in snippets at the top of a traditional, AI-enabled search. Writing subheads as the questions, then answering them in the first sentence or two, is an effective AEO tactic.
- GEO (generative engine optimization) helps content show up in AI-generated responses from tools like ChatGPT or Google Gemini. Aim for high-quality content that is authoritative and current.
How to optimize a bank website for AI search: structure, FAQs and header hierarchy
How your site’s content is structured influences how well it is noticed by AI. Content formatted as questions and answers, or bullet-pointed lists is easier for AI to pull from, because it can grab “snippets” of information to put in the search overview.
Similarly, framing content with questions helps AI-driven SEO. Pennian Bank’s March blog post about health savings accounts includes two question-based headers: “What is an HSA?” and “Who is eligible for an HSA?” Concise answers to these questions follow, encouraging AI to recognize the post as a convenient source of information on that topic.
Well-arranged content should be paired with deeper structural elements, such as the proper use of different levels of HTML headers (H1, H2, H3), says Hannah Pawlak, senior digital strategist for The Agency at MSP in St. Paul, Minnesota, publisher of Independent Banker.
“It’s important to make sure that you’re following a logical header or HTML sequence on your pages,” Pawlak says. “These machines crawling your pages don’t read the pages the same as we do, so you should make sure you have one H1 per page and that you then follow through to H2s and H3s.” Following a logical header sequence also helps screen readers used by visually impaired people navigate a webpage in the way it was intended to be read.
Dummitt notes that improving your site to please AI engines can get complicated, but the basics of good user experience are the same.
“I wouldn’t chase AI search as a completely separate tactic,” she says. “Make sure your website is technically sound. Make sure it’s structured appropriately. Keep that information current. Understand the questions that your customers are asking, and turn the expertise you already have inside your bank into genuinely useful content.”