Editor’s note (July 2026): the numbers in this post reflect the dataset at the time it was written. The living version, updated as the dataset grows, is at AI Visibility in Financial Services: Benchmarks. Most financial institution websites are not ready for AI-driven discovery. Across 420 AI visibility audits of 181 financial institution and brand
Almost 1 in 4 financial institution websites are invisible to AI answer engines. I ran 420 audits to measure the gap, and brand size did not predict the score.
TL;DR Brand voice used to be a document the agency wrote and the marketing team referenced once a quarter. In an AI-native marketing function, the voice guide is something different. It is a technical document, used dozens of times a day by AI tools that are generating first drafts on your behalf. The voice guide
TL;DR The prompt library is the marketing asset most teams are accidentally building and almost no team is intentionally managing. In the teams that have done it well, the library is the difference between AI feeling like a productivity tool and AI feeling like a member of the team. Below is the framework I use
TL;DR Marketing attribution is having its quiet collapse moment. The dashboards still show numbers. The numbers still get reported up. The numbers are increasingly disconnected from what is actually happening upstream of the funnel. I stopped trusting my attribution reports about eighteen months ago, and I have been refining the replacement portfolio ever since. Below
TL;DR Every marketing leader is being asked some version of the same question this year. Which roles on my team are most exposed to AI, and what do I do about it? I have spent the last twelve months inside marketing teams that are working this question in real time. The disruption is not evenly
TL;DR An AI citation audit is the new quarterly review every marketing leader should be running. It is not a brand audit. It is not a search audit. It is the practice of asking AI tools the questions your prospects are already asking them, recording what comes back, and treating the results as a measurable
TL;DR The marketing brief is the document the function has revised more times than any other and trusted less than it should. In 2026, the brief I see working is a different artifact. It is shorter, written for an AI co-worker as much as a human one, and built around three inputs the old brief
A core banking provider from outside the US asked how to enter the US credit union and community bank market. The conversation surfaced a pattern every US financial services marketer should be tracking right now.
How a non-developer marketing leader shipped a working AI competitive intelligence agent in a week. Plus two other AI things I built this year and what it means for the buy versus build conversation in financial services.