Avenue Z, a digital marketing and PR agency specializing in AI search visibility and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), has released its latest AI Visibility Index Report (AIVx) findings across five fintech categories: Digital Banks, Payments, Digital Assets, WealthTech, and Alts.

Taken together, the 2026 AIVx reports show a clear pattern emerging across fintech: AI search visibility is increasingly shaped by third-party authority, and a relatively small group of brands is pulling away in each category. The index tracks citations — the instances in which an AI engine names or references a brand while composing an answer — a metric that has taken on commercial weight as AI assistants become a common starting point for product research, a role once filled largely by conventional search engines.

Digital Banks

SoFi leads digital banks, where the top five brands — SoFi, Chime, Ally, Capital One, and Varo — control 66.0% of AI citations, leaving every other brand in the category to share the remaining 34.0%. The reports present this as reinforcing that the brands winning AI search are the ones the market already talks about most — a battle won, according to the findings, through the strategic execution of editorial media and content dissemination.

Payments

Stripe leads Payments, where the top five brands — Stripe, PayPal, Adyen, Square, and Venmo — control 90.0% of AI citations, leaving challenger brands to divide the remaining 10.0% among themselves. The reports state that AI visibility in the Payments category is highly concentrated, with the top two brands establishing clear separation from the broader competitive field.

Digital Assets

Fireblocks leads digital assets, where the top five brands — Fireblocks, Coinbase, BitGo, Anchorage Digital, and Copper — control only 38.0% of AI citations, a figure the reports read as showing a market that remains more open while third-party authority already separates the leaders. Four of those five — Fireblocks, BitGo, Anchorage Digital, and Copper — are custody or digital-asset infrastructure providers serving institutions, while Coinbase operates one of the largest US crypto exchanges. As in the other categories, the battle in digital assets is being won by brands that consistently dominate earned media and thought-leadership content.

WealthTech

Envestnet leads the WealthTech category, where the top five brands — Envestnet, Addepar, Black Diamond, Redtail, and Advyzon, all suppliers of technology used by financial advisers — control 55.0% of AI citations. The report describes a competitive field that is still taking shape and finds that, unlike other categories in the fintech space, AI visibility in WealthTech is being shaped by the sources that help buyers compare and validate providers.

Alts

iCapital leads the Alts category, where the top five brands — iCapital, Yieldstreet, CAIS, Moonfare, and Fundrise, platforms that distribute alternative investments to advisers and individual investors — hold 64.0% of AI citations. The findings indicate a category that is beginning to consolidate around a small set of leaders, while Alts brands still have the opportunity to gain AI visibility through third-party authority and more reusable content signals.

Third-Party Authority Sets the Recommendation Layer

Among the third-party sources noted for their impact in driving AI visibility, top-tier editorial media and trade publications were found to be especially effective. The AIVx reports state that these editorial environments help set the recommendation layer but do not dominate a category on their own; the strongest visibility profiles are built by brands that show up across trade coverage, business press, company information pages, and reference environments at the same time.

The editorial media and trade publications found to have the most impact by retrievals were: Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, Barrons, Reuters, TechRepublic, TechRadar, InvestmentNews, and BeInCrypto, among others — a mix spanning business press, consumer tech titles, and trade and niche media.

"AI trusts the entire signal around your brand more than any one channel, including your own website," said Whitney Hart, CSO and Director of the AI Lab at Avenue Z. "Across fintech, the brands winning AI visibility are the ones treating PR, editorial coverage, reference sources, and owned content as one system: they earn third-party validation, structure their sites so AI models can actually use it, and build content that shows how they solve real problems in the category rather than just repeating their tagline."

A Category-by-Category Benchmark

As brands compete for influence in AI search, Avenue Z's AIVx reports provide a category-by-category benchmark for where visibility is being won, how citation authority is formed, and which brands are setting the pace. The spread across categories — from 38.0% of citations for the top five in digital assets to 90.0% in payments — offers a rough gauge of how much visibility headroom remains in each market, and gives subsequent AIVx editions a baseline for measuring whether leadership shifts over time. The findings suggest that the window is still open, but narrowing, for fintech brands that want to build durable AI visibility before the market leaders widen the gap further.

"It's validating to see that our AIVx data reiterates that editorial authority is a key pillar of AI search viability," said Libbie Wilcox, Vice President of PR and Managing Director of Avenue Z's New York City Office. "The companies leading the AI visibility race are the ones who prioritize traditional PR. They have built out thought leadership programs and a steady stream of coverage across a wide range of outlets, from tier-one to trade media. They're coupling these efforts and outputs with strong owned-content programs designed around specific AI search prompts and their priority LLMs. That level of consideration is clearly making a difference."

"Building on that, seeing Forbes, WSJ, Barrons, TechRadar, and niche fintech publications show up again and again in our AIVx reports is energizing for our PR teams, but it also raises the bar," said Bristol Jones, Vice President of PR, and Managing Director of Avenue Z's Miami Office. "Fintech brands need a PR program that knows which editorial environments actually move AI visibility, how to pitch stories that align with target AI prompts, and how to manage sentiment and accuracy across all third-party coverage."

Monitoring Across Leading AI Engines

Avenue Z is itself a vendor in this market: the agency sells the AI-visibility services that the AIVx findings underscore, a dynamic common to vendor-produced benchmarks and worth weighing alongside the underlying citation data. Its AI Optimization / Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) solutions are built to help brands win AI search by connecting PR, editorial authority, content, social media and user-generated content, and technical optimization around the prompts and journeys that matter most, with reporting that tracks AI citations, visibility, sentiment, and share of voice across engines. This style of work — sometimes called generative engine optimization — has emerged as a marketing discipline as AI chat and search products have grown into answer engines that cite outside sources. Through its AIVx methodology, the agency monitors and optimizes performance across leading LLMs and AI search sources — ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews, operated by OpenAI, Google, Perplexity, Anthropic, and Google, respectively — giving brands a single view of how they show up where decisions are being made.

Known as the agency for influence and one of the top PR and digital agencies in fintech, finance, and emerging tech, Avenue Z is built for growth-stage and category-leading brands in digital banking, payments, digital assets, wealthtech, alts, fintech and broader financial services, SaaS, AI infrastructure, consumer, and eCommerce, including complex and regulated environments.