How To Optimize Finance Content For Google AI Overviews

Ever since Google AI overview launched, click-through-rates have dropped. Organic traffic turned ugly overnight. Open letters were sent to Google. Everyone called SEO dead.

But here we are. Today, SEO is still thriving- just a different strategy. Clicks are more intent-driven now, and optimizing for AI is just part of the game.

I have always thought AI search will be hyper personalized, bringing the exact right content that consumers need, but does Google AI overview do the job as intended? Or is there more that Google can improve on?

A little play with the AI overview led me to some huge insights in how Google sources for their answers. Especially for small businesses producing content that falls under the YMYL category.

YMYL stands for "Your Money or Your Life." It is a classification Google uses to identify content that could directly impact a person's financial situation, health, safety, or overall wellbeing. Common examples include businesses in finance, law, politics, healthcare, safety.

In this short experimentation, it turns out that many AI search tool gets their sources from trusted sites.

Even businesses that have been around for years, with seemingly great backlinks, did not manage to appear in google AI Overview. Of course, there are many other factors that contribute to ranking but let’s try to understand the cause.

By the end of this you will also have an understanding of what Google favours among the sea of businesses fighting for the spot.

In my search I was looking for the ‘best trading courses to learn in Singapore’.

I chose this as I’m familiar with the course providers in Singapore although I’m affiliated with none of them.

Nonetheless, the results did surprise me. So what happened?

As you can see, the results provided a list of courses available for me to learn about trading.
Let me explain what I’ve gotten and why I’m surprised:

Most of the time, in trading courses, people generally look for methods and strategies on how to buy/sell options on the stock market to make quick profits.
But in this search, Google AI Overview gave me broad results where it showed trading courses on futures, forex, commodities, and even fixed income.

Furthermore, one look at the results, and I understand that Google looks for sources that rank high not just in domain authority but in institutional branding.

That’s because, almost none of the results were what I’m expecting for, except for Dr Wealth. Many long-time course providers in trading were simply not mentioned in this search.

Some examples I were looking for are Adam Khoo wealth academy, CollinSeow, AnytimeTrader. These big players have been in the field for more than 10 years in Singapore.

The recommended ones such as Heicoder and Asia Forex Mentor were actually unknown to me. Turns out that Heicoder does not even provide a standalone trading course, they also provide courses on cybersecurity, digital marketing, Python, and more!

To find out the reasons, I took a hard look at the websites of Heicoder and compared it with CollinSeow’s website.

The government accreditations and subsidies offered by Heicoders provides a strong signal for what Google prioritizes in called E-E-A-T- Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trusworthiness. Although Collin Seow had more than 13years of experience in this area, the disclaimer about not being a licensed financial advisor is picked out by Google as a Negative Trust Signal.

Google treats trading and investment content as YMYL ("Your Money or Your Life") content, a category held to a much higher standard of accuracy and accountability. Collin Seow's course pages contain language like "Get Profitable Trades Handed to You on a Silver Platter" and promotional claims about trading performance.

From Google’s perspective, promoting a trading course through performance claims without regulatory backing is a red flag, not a trust signal. Rather than making personal returns-based claims, Heicoders sidesteps this by positioning their offering as education.

A quick check on both of their backlinks showed that both have several solid backlinks from reputable sites.

This is one that many have overlooked often, Google AI Overview rewards content with structured FAQ sections, schema markup, and direct answers to informational queries.

Heicoders course page is built for Attribute Extraction. AI Overviews don't just 'read' your page, they look for specific data points like price, duration, and accreditation. By using structured FAQ sections and explicit schedules, Heicoders makes it easy for Google’s RAG system to extract these attributes and plug them directly into the summary cards.

If your data is buried in a long-form blog post without these clear markers, the AI treats it as 'unextractable' and moves on.

Collin Seow's site is structured as a blog-first, personality-led site with courses as a secondary navigation layer. There is no FAQ schema visible on any of the pages.

Dr Wealth also started out in personality-led brand than as an academy. So how did they get so much trust from Google? One thing I understand is that they had very strong SEO game even before AI came about. In my findings long ago, they had ranked 1st in SERP in almost every category of keywords in the financial space in Singapore. No other competitors came close to them.

They had 10 years of continuous publishing, cited by dozens of editorial mentions.

Their topical authority and domain authority has been built long ago, that is why even though they might not have the best schema markups on the trading course page, they still get recommended.

This little experimentation of Google AI Overview reveals that YMYL is weighted extremely strictly. Even sites with solid backlinks can be bypassed if their content raises red flags. Small businesses under YMYL category including financial, health, safety, and legal industries will need to pay careful consideration on what is displayed on their webpage.
It may be challenging especially when faced with regulatory issues as well.

Some quick fix can still be made such as the language used throughout the site. Anything that reads like a big financial claim or a performance promise will work against you, regardless of how credible the underlying business actually is.

It is quite clear that Google consistently favours institutional brands over personal brands. A registered company with a clear business identity will be treated with more trust than an individual operating under their own name, even if that individual has stronger expertise. And, I think this factor quite sums up the findings in this research.

SEO is far from dead, but the "Top 10" rule is evolving. While early 2025 data suggested that 99% of AI citations came from the first page of search, 2026 data from Ahrefs and ZipTie shows that for complex queries, only about 38% of cited links come from the top 10 results of the original keyword.

Interestingly, that seemed to be the case in this search as well. Heicoders was found in page 4 of google search while CollinSeow was found in page 2.

So why did Heicoders beat CollinSeow?

Because of Query Fan-Out.

When I searched for "best trading courses", Google’s AI didn't just look at that one result page. It broke my query into sub-questions like "Which trading courses in Singapore have government subsidies?" For that specific sub-question, Heicoders likely ranks #1. Even if you don't rank for the big "head" keyword, you must rank in the top 10 for the specific sub-intents the AI wants to summarize.

Schema markup and structured data also play a meaningful role, particularly for course related queries. FAQ schema, course information, and transparent pricing displayed directly on the page give Google's AI something concrete to extract and surface. Sites that hide this information behind signups or leave it off the page entirely are effectively invisible to the AI Overview layer, no matter how good the rest of their SEO is.

The last is of course to continue monitoring how your site appears on AI search engines.

There are a couple of paid tools that help your to monitor and even optimize your site for AI visibility such as Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit, or Ahref’s Brand Radar.

There are also free ai visibility tools you can run. But whether free or paid, the consensus I’m seeing is that they are not fool proof ways to get high AI visibility for your site.

For small businesses in the YMYL space, this short research proves that trust is the ultimate ranking factor. You can have the best backlinks in the world, but if your site lacks institutional signals or uses high-risk marketing language, the AI will bypass you for a safer source.

Tips you can apply immediately:

I did a repeat search on “what are best courses to learn about trading in singapore“ and found that some results have changed.

Some results remained such as SMU academy and IG academy, but new ones like SGX (not surprising), sources from Seedly that mentioned Adam Khoo’s (Piranha Profits).

This means search results can vary and keep changing. I’ll be experimenting more in this and see if there are more factors to this.