In most categories a wrong answer costs a click. In financial services it can send someone to a look-alike brand with a similar name and a very different licence. That raises the stakes on two things at once: being present, and being unmistakably you.
Who is asking
Two audiences, one surface. Consumers ask whether a product is safe, what it costs, and whether it beats the bank they already use. Businesses ask about limits, coverage, settlement, and who is actually on the hook when something goes wrong.
Both audiences are unusually likely to check. An assistant's answer is a starting point that gets verified against a register, a review site or a forum — which makes being cited alongside a credible source worth more here than being cited alone.
Questions buyers actually ask
Not keyword variants — whole questions, the way a person types them into an assistant. These are the shapes we build tracking around.
- is this app safe to keep my salary in
- best business account for a freelancer with international clients
- what are the fees for sending money in another currency
- is this provider regulated, and by whom
- what happens to my money if this company fails
- how does this compare with a traditional bank account
Which surfaces matter here
Money questions get answered cautiously on every surface we track, often with a visible hedge and a pointer to an official source. That is a feature rather than a bug: it means the citation slot next to the hedge is disproportionately valuable, and it usually goes to a register, a comparison site or an established publisher.
Chat surfaces carry the open comparison questions. Search-side surfaces show up on the narrow factual ones — a fee, a limit, an eligibility rule. Both can name you correctly and cite someone else entirely.
Reference pages for these surfaces
Where these answers come from
The pages an assistant leans on in this category are rarely all yours. Each block below is a source family worth checking before you write another article.
Public registers and regulator databases
Authorisation is a matter of public record in most markets, and a register entry is exactly the kind of primary source an answer about safety reaches for. It is also the source most likely to name a firm precisely, licence and all.
Comparison and aggregator sites
Fee tables, eligibility rules, accounts side by side. These pages exist to answer the questions above, and they are usually updated more often than the brand sites they describe.
Financial press and consumer publishers
Coverage carries authority into an answer, and a single characterisation from a well-read outlet tends to outlive the product decision that prompted it.
Communities and forums
People compare real experiences of transfers, frozen accounts and support queues in public. This is where the “is it actually safe” question gets its texture.
Your own terms, fees and legal pages
The most citable pages you own are almost never the marketing ones. Fee schedules, eligibility criteria and protection statements answer the question directly — provided they are readable text rather than a PDF nobody can quote.
What the documentation says
Each line below is read from the linked document — a vendor's own guidance, a published standard, or a public register. Nothing in this section is our estimate.
The UK Financial Conduct Authority publishes the Financial Services Register, a public record of the firms and individuals it authorises. A register entry is primary evidence of a firm's status, in a form an answer can point at.
Source: Financial Conduct Authority — Financial Services Register (opens the source document in a new tab)The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission publishes company filings through EDGAR, a free public database. Where a firm files, that filing is a citable primary source about the entity itself.
Source: U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission — EDGAR (opens the source document in a new tab)schema.org defines the FinancialService type for describing a financial services business, with properties for the services offered and the terms attached to them.
Source: schema.org — FinancialService (opens the source document in a new tab)Google's guidance is that structured data is what makes rich results possible in Search, and that its own Search Central documentation, not schema.org, is definitive for how Search behaves.
Source: Google — Introduction to structured data markup in Google Search (opens the source document in a new tab)
What is not documented
Open questions, not omissions. Anyone answering these with a precise number for your category is guessing.
- No assistant vendor documents how it treats regulatory claims, or whether a register entry carries more weight than a marketing page. We can observe which sources an answer cited; we cannot tell you why it chose them.
- An answer saying a firm is regulated is not a compliance check, and neither is this page. Nothing here is legal, regulatory or financial advice — verify status against the register itself.
- Look-alike brand names cause more damage in finance than in most categories, and no vendor documents how any assistant resolves them. What we can do is detect when an answer names you but cites someone else's domain.
- Fee and limit data ages badly. An assistant can restate a rate you changed months ago, and no vendor documents a way to force a re-read.
What GetCited.me measures here
We run your product and category questions on a schedule and record whether you were named, which competitors appeared beside you, which sources the answer cited, and how the mention was framed — because in this category tone is part of the outcome.
Where an answer names your brand but cites only look-alike or sibling domains instead of your own, we do not count that as a clean mention. It is flagged as a mismatch, with the hosts that were actually cited, so identity work can start from evidence rather than suspicion.
The headline figure is the organic mention rate — questions that never name you — kept apart from questions that already do.
Launch (Free) tracks Gemini only, with a one-time grant of answer credits and weekly automatic tracking. ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews are on Growth and Scale, and the entity-clarification workflow is metered per plan. Card payments are temporarily disabled while payment-provider onboarding completes, so every account currently runs on Launch — the pricing page lists what each plan includes.
What you can actually do
Concrete steps, each one checkable with a free tool or explained in the glossary.
Free tools for this industry
No account, no card — results in the browser.
Related terms
Keep reading
The reference sets behind this page.