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Happy Wednesday, Fintech Listeners!
Are you traveling for Thanksgiving? Or, perhaps, cleaning your house in preparation for hosting Thanksgiving (like me)?
If so, and you need a couple of podcast recommendations, I’ve got you covered
This week’s episode of the Fintech Takes podcast is the second in our new Facing Credit series, and I couldn’t think of a better guest than Carlos Caro (author of The Free Toaster newsletter and host of The Free Toaster podcast) to join me for a geek-out session on the most unsung and overlooked starting point for every loan: marketing.
Everything in lending sits downstream from marketing. Yet, in my opinion, the industry doesn’t spend nearly enough time talking about what lenders are doing when it comes to marketing and customer acquisition.
Carlos, through his excellent newsletter and podcast, is the exception. And I wanted to have him on to talk about one of the biggest and most disruptive changes ever to hit the marketing world: generative AI.
In this episode, Carlos and I explored how the old rules of digital acquisition are unraveling fast, as generative AI redraws the map for search, discovery, and distribution.
Most lenders built their acquisition math around Google being stable. And for two decades, it was. That consistency in turn shaped how affiliates operated, how marketplaces showed up in the search results, and how lenders calibrated their budgets.
This stability has bred complacency. Most folks working in lending don’t think much about search engine optimization, which is the practice of getting a website to show up high in organic search results.
However, that started to change in late 2023 when Google disrupted itself with something it called the Helpful Content Update.
The purpose of the update was to reward content that is genuinely useful (and downgrade content created mainly to manipulate search rankings, basically the search engine equivalent of hacking a credit score), which is very reasonable.
Yet, in practice, it nuked the entire landscape, creating what Carlos describes as the “SEO Apocalypse”, a collapse that wiped out 50–90% of organic traffic and forced publishers, affiliates, and lenders to rewrite their playbooks (and note: these weren’t marginal players! They were the engines of credit card and personal loan acquisition for over a decade).
But that’s not all.
Just as the dust was settling, Google rolled out its AI Overviews, compressing the already compressed search experience. Now the whole experience collapses into a single summary at the top of the page, and as Carlos pointed out, most people stop right there.
Before, publishers like Bankrate and NerdWallet could spend heavily on SEO because the ROI was knowable (they knew what ranking well on Google could produce, and they were willing to fund organic content creation to make it happen!)
Now they’re leaning on paid search to make up the gap.
Before, lenders could spend on paid search because the auction stayed within a range they understood. Now, even lenders who didn’t rely on SEO feel the shift through higher costs and different traffic composition.
This is less a story about search rankings and more about how a long-standing assumption inside lending has broken. Acquisition is the first step in every loan. When the channel that feeds the top of the funnel becomes unpredictable, every downstream model needs to be rethought.
🎬 DIRECTOR'S COMMENTARY
This was a particularly enjoyable discussion for me because my first job in fintech, one million years ago, was search engine optimization. My knowledge of SEO is radically outdated (even before these most recent algorithm changes from Google), but still. It was fun to revisit a topic that is still near and dear to my heart!
#2: From Arbitrage to Alignment
Fintech lenders grew by optimizing their funnel. They lived in a world of paid acquisition, predictable traffic, and platform-led discovery. What mattered was their CAC-to-LTV math, their underwriting model, and their loss-adjusted returns.
They optimized for arbitrage, not trust.
Now they’re entering a market that rewards the opposite.
As acquisition shifts from auction-based mechanisms to attention-based mechanisms, discovery is no longer something you can rent from Google, but something you earn … slowly.
Carlos described what content creators like Vivian Tu inherently understand: Show up daily. Repeat the same message. Offer value without asking. Not because it converts, but because over time, it earns permission.
Partnering with content creators is, according to Carlos, becoming an increasingly popular strategic response to the SEO apocalypse that we were just discussing.
However, winning in that game requires more than just having the biggest checkbook. Content creators are in the business of trust, and they protect the trust they have built with their audiences ferociously.
They will only work with sponsors with whom they feel a strong sense of alignment, and that alignment doesn’t develop overnight.
#3: Source, Partner, or Placeholder?
Now that we’ve meditated (briefly) on the collapse of Google-driven traffic in our post-arbitrage world, let’s hold up discovery to the light.
Discovery has moved away from SEO towards Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). Instead of optimizing for Google’s search rankings, GEO optimizes for getting featured in AI-generated answers and summaries (be it chatbots, zero-click search results, or whatever comes next).
Carlos was clear that if he were building a company today, he’d start with a GEO strategy before anything else, to become the kind of brand users remember and search out on their own.
GEO is a strategy, yes, but it’s also a sign that distribution has slipped outside of the industry’s hands.
The ground beneath every lender and publisher is shifting because platforms like Google and OpenAI get to decide which brands, products, or advice ever see daylight. They control the entire path from question to answer.
In this environment, affiliates, publishers, and even lenders are being compressed into anonymous “sources.” The difference between a partner and a placeholder comes down to what the platform decides is useful for its own products and economics.
Regulation might slow this process, but what protection can it truly offer? Success in the GEO era will come from building something that the platform cannot easily replicate or ignore: unique data or a product so valuable that the AI chatbot needs you to improve its own answers.
Small business lending lives and dies on data. In Episode 3 of our miniseries with Fundbox (co-hosted by CEO Prashant Fuloria), SoFi’s Bernardo Martinez joins to talkunderwriting and why the future of SMB lending is a 360 degree view of the data (that feed insights back into the business itself). Listen here!
*this rec is brought to you by one of our fantastic brand partners
Thanks for the read! Let me know what you thought by replying back to this email.
— Alex
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