State of B2B Content
Before we get into the specifics of AI Optimization, we wanted to use our AI to get a sense of the B2B Fintech Content Marketing Landscape more broadly, and how the key tactics and talking points are evolving as we enter the AI era.
Topics: What are Fintechs talking about
Unsurprisingly, since 2019 AI has dominated the conversation. While our study detected it as a topic of conversation as early as 2012, the chart above plots AI’s emergence from a key topic to the talking point, starting in 2019 and unsurprisingly accelerating in 2021 as ChatGPT begins to get more publicity.
Beyond AI, there’s a reasonable uptick in the share of conversation around Risk / Compliance over the last 5 years, reflecting post-pandemic trust and governance pressures.
The Era of Autonomous Finance
Another notable finding is the share of conversation Payments and Infrastructure has captured, and the extent to which this mirrors the growing interest in AI and Automation.
This correlation gives an interesting hint as to the direction of travel for the Fintech sector as a whole, and the downstream impact of AI on day-to-day use cases, which we wanted to dig into further.
Deeper analysis shows an emerging cluster of topics around automation, orchestration and integration of financial systems – growing from 10% in 2018 to 31% thus far in 2025 – and an interesting evolution in the terminology and framing of content within those topic clusters. From 2023 onward, the infrastructure narrative shifts from payment infrastructure (building rails) to payment orchestration (connecting and automating them). This marks the rise of Autonomous Finance.
It’s interesting to note the sharp increase 2025 has seen in Cyber / Fraud related content, reflecting growing concerns around AI security; the market clearly wants to be on the front foot, proactively addressing those concerns and taking steps to reassure customers.
Content Types: What kinds of Content are Fintechs prioritising?
Between 2021 and 2025, the share of short-form, high-frequency content (Blogs, Press Releases, Product Updates) has grown from ~25% to 65% of all FinTech content. At the same time, structured “educational” content (Guides, White Papers, Webinars) dropped from 70% to less than 30%.
“Always-on” publishing now dominates. AI has enabled fast, scalable production of top-of-funnel content, Fintechs have leant into that efficiency gain to produce large volumes of visibility-focused content; at times, at the expense of deeper, more thoughtful content formats.
This is a concerning trend for fans of quality, thoughtful content. Deeper study does provide hope though; our AI’s analysis of the content itself shows that content features like information density and data-driven content are increasing. In simple terms, while velocity is increasing and formats are shifting towards consumable, bitesize pieces, it is not necessarily at the expense of content depth and quality.
The bigger concern, as we will study later, is whether Fintechs are fully aware of the maintenance overhead they are taking on with this increase in velocity. High content velocity is a way to hack AI visibility short term, but it increases the overall surface area of content to be maintained. If this stretches too far, it can start to have a negative long term impact.
Audiences: Who are Fintechs targeting, and how does this vary for key narratives and themes?
Looking at the dominant audience personas from Content over the last decade tells a story of Fintech’s maturation as a category, from targeting Financial Professionals (Accountants, Financial Advisors, etc) to Business Decision Makers and more recently, Technology Professionals (Product Managers, Developers, AI Engineers). In fact, the share of content targeting technical personas in 2025 is 4x vs. 2020.
When we break this analysis down by the different topic clusters, we can start to understand how industry narratives and commercial strategies are changing.
In 2025, there is a clear shift – FinTech content no longer speaks to those using finance tools — it speaks to the engineers embedding finance into business operations. The exception to this is in Core Financial Operations where content has shifted towards business owners and decision makers, speaking to the productisation of core financial operations to the point that they require less specialised expertise to run.
The trend towards Autonomous Finance also seen clearly. In 2020, this topic sat with innovation personas. In 2025, it sits with Developers and Product Managers. Autonomous Finance has graduated from an idea to a reality.
Funnel Distribution: How has Content’s role evolved?
In 2025, mid-funnel content dominates, comprising 66% of all content (vs. 25% top-of-funnel, and just 9% bottom-of-funnel). Interestingly, this is in stark contrast to data Demand-Genius holds in other industries, which leans heavily towards top-of-funnel. This speaks to a mature industry leaning on content to engage, educate and nurture potential buyers, not just generate awareness.
When we analyse the evolution of this split over the last five years, we can see a gradual but meaningful shift towards bottom-of-funnel content.
While 9% is still a relatively small “market share”, BOFU content has grown 3x between 2020 – 2025, speaking to a growing role in sales enablement and conversion as go-to-market efficiency has come into focus in recent years; businesses are leaning more on content, and less on reps, when it comes to progressing and closing deals.
AI Optimization in Fintech Content
How do you optimize content for the AI Era?
I feel like I should start this section with the only honest answer one can give: I don’t know.
Nobody, to my knowledge, can definitively answer this question, and I would encourage you to treat anyone claiming to be able to do so with a healthy dose of scepticism. AI optimization is a fast-moving target that is not well defined in the first place. That said, as we begin to lift the lid on some elements of the black box of AI optimization, some key components are becoming clear and are likely to be lasting factors.
AI Optimization is a cross-disciplinary objective
One big difference between SEO and AI Optimization is that the latter cannot be done in a silo. It requires a consistent thread from your positioning through your brand, content, PR, socials, and every other touchpoint that is digitally visible.
Your Entire Library matters, not just the new stuff.
Building that thread starts with consistency throughout your content library – that old piece of content buried on your site may only get 3 human visits a month, but LLMs are reading it every day. Yes, they apply a measure of nuance – they will not give it equal weight with your product page – but it is important to avoid giving mixed messages that reduce its confidence as to when, how and whether to talk about you.
This is a huge shift that Marketers need to be aware of as they scale content production, especially in light of the trend towards short-form, always on content production. While content velocity can yield short-term benefits, brands are quietly accruing content debt.
Each piece of content you publish carries with it an overhead. This is a big challenge as many brands have built up huge libraries over decades, through multiple pivots, acquisitions and market changes. If every piece of content is influencing the AI’s understanding of who you are, who you’re for, and when and how to recommend you, it becomes critical to maintain your library in its entirety to avoid giving LLMs mixed signals.
There are controllables within your content that influence AI’s likelihood to cite and recommend your brand.
Your website is one of the primary sources that an LLM will consider in order to form an opinion about you. You can influence this through technical fundamentals and through the content itself.
One thing that struck us in conducting this study is the number of sites that have not established the technical fundamentals that should be considered table stakes for AI optimization. The data below shows the majority (56%) of brands studied still do not have a Structured Data Schema that makes it easy for LLMs to learn from its content.
To summarise the industry’s current understanding of what content performs well, we group these into four key areas that your content needs to excel:
- Clarity – is your content simple, straightforward and clear?
- Transparency – is the information clear, credible and transparent?
- Confidence – do you display clear knowledge and authority?
- Currency – is content up-to-date and credible?
So, beyond the technical basics, we wanted to take a deeper look at Fintech content. We used our AI agents to do a deep, qualitative study of all the content in our sample to understand the current state of play in each of those four categories (clarity, transparency, confidence, currency), the direction of travel and where the most work remains for Fintech brands.
State of Play: How well adapted are Fintech sites to the AI Era?
Currency scores are generally excellent. This is reassuring, and reflects the high volume of content that has been published in the last 18 months as well as the increase in content maintenance activity. Still, this is something brands must keep a sharp eye on; as we said earlier, every new piece of content carries a maintenance overhead in the AI era.
Transparency shows up as the biggest opportunity for Fintech brands to achieve better results in terms of AI optimization. In 2025, +50% of content was data-driven. This is fantastic to see but does highlight a need to be more transparent with methodology in order to fully assert the brand’s authority through this rich, research-led content.
Overall, content performs well in terms of Confidence. This isn’t a surprise, this is probably the category where there is most direct continuity from SEO to GEO best practices. Improvements in Google’s search algorithm have led SEO professionals to prioritise Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness (EEAT) for a while now.
Content scores highly in terms of Clarity, suggesting that the majority of content is clearly written and functional. The opportunity – or challenge – appears to lie in retaining this clarity whilst making content more engaging.
Direction of Travel: Is the industry moving in the right direction?
Confidence
Despite confidence being a critical SEO priority, the dataset still shows a big improvement in 2025, as AI brings it even more into focus. 94% of content contains clear Industry Expertise signals, compared with just 70% all time.
Citation Friendliness has seen a major improvement in 2025 – Marketers are switching on to critical requirements of AI optimization, as FAQs and other “answer-oriented” features are being integrated into content.
Clearly, Marketers are placing an emphasis on building and signalling their credibility and authority, though there is still work to be done. While a 2.15 average score is solid, and a big improvement on 1.80 all-time, less than 20% of content scores “high” for Authority Signals.
Currency
Comparing currency over time is difficult – unsurprisingly, more recent content performs better in this category. What the data does reveal is the extent to which brands are taking on Content Debt.
Just 20% of content is considered Evergreen. When we look at just content published in the last 3 years this drops to 7%, hinting at one of the negative impacts of the shift towards higher short-form content velocity.
Brands publishing “current” content at high velocity are accruing content debt. While high output can be an effective short term AI visibility hack, if it isn’t maintained then that content will gradually devolve into outdated content that can harm authority and confuse positioning.
While evaluating content maintenance is challenging – the tiniest metadata updates may show up as a modification. Still, tracking content modification as a percentage of total content shows that while Marketers are switching on to the need to maintain content, there is a lot of work to be done. Just 11% of content is updated, and this is almost certainly an overestimation given that many of these changes would not have been material.
Transparency
While transparency as a whole represents an opportunity with the lowest all time score (2.07), Fintech brands are switching on to this requirement of the AI era – there is clear improvement in 2025.
- Definition Clarity is significantly better in content published in 2025, with an overall index score of 2.93. Could it be that the industry is finally becoming jargon-free?!
- Content scores “high” for Context Completeness 66% of the time, up from 34%.
- Methodology Transparency remains the biggest area for improvement. 83% of content scores as average. Encouragingly, “low” scores have fallen from 27% to 10% in 2025.
- Source Attribution has shown huge improvement in 2025. Still, just 3% of all content scores “excellent” in this category – brands have a lot of work to do to bring their overall library in line with current standards.
Overall, transparency is improving, but remains only average. There is a lot of opportunity for brands to be truly open about methodology and source attribution and reap authority benefits.
Clarity
The majority of Fintech content is clear, comprehensible and relatively easy to understand, and when we view the trend over time this appears to have been a focus area for Marketers over the last 5 years.
When we dig into the underlying data in more detail, it’s particularly pleasing to see Information Satisfaction scoring highly in 2025, again indicating that while formats are becoming more digestible this is not at the expense of quality. Content scores lowest in terms of Cognitive Load and Speed to Understanding, suggesting that while the quality of information is high there is still work to be done to make it easy for readers to digest and act on that information.
As part of this study, we wanted to take a deeper look at Clarity. As we see content taking on a more critical bottom-of-funnel role in B2B buyer journeys, it’s critical that we are balancing AI visibility with the need to engage, educate and convert humans. We partnered with Sticky Content, leveraging our AI agents to assess content against their Curiosity Framework to help us understand the Human persuasiveness of content – particularly to the growing cohort of Clarity Seekers® – in more detail.
Curiosity Styles
Creating content tailored to people’s curiosity
There are so many factors that determine the success of a piece of content. But a crucial one to consider is does it pique and satisfy your audiences’ curiosity?
Curiosity isn’t just a feeling. It’s a neurological trigger. When we’re curious, the brain seeks a cognitive reward – new information – activating dopamine receptors linked to motivation and action. Spark curiosity well, and you don’t just gain attention; you drive decision-making.
At Sticky, our research into how people pursue that cognitive reward has led to the Curious Consumer Cohorts®: a framework of six distinct curiosity types. Each explores content differently and requires different signals to feel “rewarded” enough to keep reading, trust a brand, or take action.
Most audiences are a mix, but today, Clarity Seekers® dominate – and they’re reshaping expectations for content.
The rise of the Clarity Seeker®
Our latest Curiosity Consumer Cohorts® research data shows that Clarity Seekers® have grown to make up 44% of the UK population. That’s the highest share we’ve ever had for any cohort, and the only one still growing.
It represents a mainstream change in behaviour and a real desire for clear, practical information. Brands that recognise this and act on it can get a clear advantage in winning attention, trust and customers.
Are fintech brands appealing to Clarity Seekers®?
A glance at Demand-Genius’s data shows that fintech brands may be ahead of the curve when it comes to targeting Clarity Seekers®. Over 96% of content pieces analysed were identified as being aimed at this cohort.
But the real question is, are they doing it well?
A deeper dive suggests that there are still some areas for improvement – and real opportunities for the brands that are swift to take action to improve the clarity of their content. For example, over half of content was rated ‘moderate’ rather than the ‘simple’ Clarity Seekers® crave. There’s also room for improvement when it comes to speed of understanding. 36.4% of content examined earned an “instant” understanding rating, but that leaves a significant proportion which could see users clicking off page if they don’t have their curiosity satisfied as quickly as they’d like.
How to Win Clarity Seekers®
Focusing on repeatable and easy-to-understand formats, slick user journeys that reduce cognitive load and jargon-free language are all easy wins. But it’s also worth thinking about how you can go that extra step to make life as simple as possible for your audience.
Can you add a TL;DR summary? Or reduce CTAs down to one priority link to avoid overwhelm?
As clarity becomes the baseline, it’s also worth exploring how to go beyond mere simplification of information. Dial up trust signals with expert-led content that builds authority and makes life simple for your audience because they don’t have to visit multiple sources.
Don’t forget the other cohorts
While Clarity Seekers® are rising, they’re not the whole market. For example, founders and C-suite decision-makers are often Exhilaration Hunters®, meaning some content still needs to challenge assumptions, take a stance, or push boundaries.
Learn more about the Curious Consumer Cohorts® and take our quick quiz to discover your own Curiosity type.
