How to Prepare for SGE in Financial Services and Insurance

Update: As of May 2024, SGE is now AI Overviews. Here's what marketers need to know about AI Overviews.

At Google I/O in May 2023, Google first announced the integration of generative AI into Google Search — and their Search Generative Experience has been a hot topic ever since. On that day, Google described it as "a powerful new technology [that allows us to] unlock entirely new types of questions you never thought Search engines could answer."

More recently, Google confirmed the use of its Gemini model to generate answers to questions in search. Sundar Pichai, Google's CEO, said, "People are finding it particularly useful for more complex questions, like comparisons or longer queries. It's also helpful in areas where people are looking for deeper understanding, such as education or even gift ideas."

In financial services and insurance in particular, this shift creates new opportunities to attract and engage with potential customers — but it might also present new challenges. Below, we'll discuss how Google's search generative experience (SGE) could impact your organization, and what you can do to get ahead of the game.

Generative AI certainly has its risks, which include copyright infringement, emerging regulations, and accuracy concerns. Yet the big concern for financial services brands and marketers is how it will impact organic traffic for financial institutions and professionals.

There have been several studies on the impact of Gemini and SGE to search across industries, but within financial services and insurance, we see 51% of all search results will be AI generated.

There are three main reasons why this could have a more significant impact on your financial services and insurance business:

1. Consumers are accustomed to starting their search journey on Google.

Google currently dominates the search market with 93% market share. Searching on Google is already an ingrained habit for consumers — whether that's searching for a financial professional, learning how to apply for a mortgage, or looking up a bank directly. The use of Gemini in SGE simply presents another customer journey landscape to understand.

2. Google uses a variety of sources – not just your Google Business Profile listings and website – to power its SGE.

Gemini will pull from a variety of data sources and publishers, including your Google Business Profile listings, user suggestions, and even the justifications they find in your reviews. That means if you are not actively managing your business information everywhere, Google could present consumers with inaccurate information about your business — which can lead to a bad customer experience and broken brand trust.

3. Google has started to expand its generated search experience into conversational chat. This is much like what Bing has done with built-in support for OpenAI's ChatGPT. This is yet another shift in the customer journey to keep an eye on as it plays out.

Let's look at three different financial services search intents to understand the difference between Google Search today and SGE tomorrow — and how customers may interact with these results.

In the first image, we searched with the intent to find "a bank branch near me," which is a common question for banking consumers. In the search results, consumers might expect to find listings. But with SGE, the search results explain how to find a bank's closest branch, and the nearby bank branches and ATMs are listed as AI-generated results rather than listings.

In the next image, we created a query with the intent to find a financial professional nearby. In both traditional and AI search experiences, the results return as listings.

And finally, when we searched with the intent to find information about a financial services product line (in this case, how to apply for a mortgage), the information that would normally be presented as sitelinks is instead AI-generated.

In each of the queries above, there's little likelihood that a searcher would click a sitelink that would take them to your website.

Based on the intent of the query, Google will decide to generate answers either using generative AI — or default to their standard search today with clicks.

While there are still unknowns around Google's use of Gemini in its SGE, there are concrete steps your business can take now to make sure your information is "intelligible" to AI models — so that customers ultimately get the right answers in search results.

1. Manage your listings across as many publishers as possible.

Prominent search engines – including Google – look at how brand information is consistently shown across many publishers to help determine their rankings and recommendations. Yext analyzed global data across 620K+ locations and major industries (including healthcare, financial services, retail, restaurants, hospitality, and more) to determine the value of a broad digital presence beyond only major publishers like Google, Bing, Apple, etc. The research found that enterprise brands syncing locations across more than 75% of the network saw more organic traffic, with a stunning average increase of +186% in Google website clicks. In financial services specifically, brands in the study saw an average 91% increase in Google website clicks.*

Dive into the research to learn more.

2. Double down on reputation management.

Now that generative AI is able to contextually understand the content of reviews, we've seen this as an increased ranking factor. An estimated 57% of listings use local justifications (like keywords in your reviews) to rank their local pack. Be sure to manage reviews for your financial professionals, branches, products, and jobs.

3. Structure your website data.

Organize your digital information as structured data so your answers can be syndicated across your website, mobile app, chat, and search. In the search world, search engines rely on structured data (based on schema.org) to provide additional context about the content such as offers, products, branches, FAQs, reviews and financial professionals. Make sure those webpages are up-to-date.

4. Create fresh content.

In order to provide the right information in generative AI snapshots, there is a critical need for Google to have up-to-date, accurate information about all businesses. For example, if you have a financial professional webpage and it hasn't been updated in a year, chances are your competitors will show up before you. (Google values "freshness" in search ranking.) And be sure to create content that helps you rank well in AI search.

We've seen this narrative before within financial services and insurance: change is the only constant. And this change, while it might seem intimidating, is something you can start to address head-on today. With these tips, you'll be well-positioned to improve your search ranking — and you'll be prepared for the future of AI search.

*As the largest listings vendor, Yext helps thousands of multi-location brands manage their digital presence. This offers Yext the unique ability to conduct a study of this caliber using such a large, diverse data set. To ensure we took an unbiased approach, Yext analyzed more than 620k locations – across all geographies and brand types – that have been live on Listings for at least one year. Reference the full study for more details.