Financial Services

GCC Financial Services Group

Item: Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
Rating: 5
Author: Head of Digital

Zero AI Overview citations to 34 percent citation rate on 120 target queries in six months.

Services

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), Enterprise SEO, Content Marketing

Timeline

6 months, ongoing

Led by

Nazir Abbas

Work with us

The numbers

34%

AI Overview citation rate

on 120 target queries, from 0%

41%

Perplexity source appearance

on regulated financial queries

+62%

Branded search volume

six-month rolling window

Stabilised

Organic click-through rate

after 4-quarter erosion

Overview

A GCC-headquartered financial services group with strong organic rankings watched click-through rate erode as Google AI Overviews rolled out across YMYL financial queries. They needed an AEO programme fast, run against the full compliance frame that regulated financial content demands.

The challenge

Where they started

!
Strong organic rankings but zero AI Overview citations on 120 monitored queries.
!
YMYL category with high AI Overview trigger rate and strict compliance constraints.
!
Content library of 800-plus pages with no schema strategy and inconsistent author attribution.
!
No visibility into AI citation performance across ChatGPT, Perplexity, or AI Overviews.

Our approach

What we did

AEO content audit

Query-by-query audit of top 120 informational URLs against AI Overview citation patterns, competitor citation rates, and direct-answer structure gaps.

Direct-answer rewrite

Priority page rewrites to question-format H2s and one-to-three sentence direct answers under each heading. Compliance review baked into the workflow.

Entity SEO and schema

Named author bylines with Person schema and sameAs credentials, Organization schema deployment across the domain, and FAQPage plus Article schema on every priority URL.