How Finance First pairs source-backed finance guides with selective AI drafting
Asim Ahmad is the Founder of Finance First, which provides independent, source-backed personal finance education through practical guides, transparent calculators and original household-finance research. This conversation explains Finance First’s editorial approach that separates commercial relationships from recommendations, how the team uses AI for drafting while keeping humans for final edits, and what publishers should change to reach readers coming via AI assistants.
Use AI to speed up drafting and idea development, but keep humans responsible for final edits, strategic positioning and risk-sensitive content. Make pages easy for AI assistants to cite by using answer-first intros, question headings, short definitions, clear schema and visible primary sources.
What’s the quick origin story of your business, and what makes what you do genuinely different from the other options your customers are looking at?
Founded by Asim Ahmad, FinanceFirst aims to provide better options for personal finance advice since most are driven by affiliate arrangements or provide too much general information that does not lead the reader to better outcomes. FinanceFirst began as a specialized "money desk" publishing site that focused on providing source-based money and household finances guides and providing the first-ever transparent research calculators.
FinanceFirst’s editorial method stands out from others. Instead of asking the reader to trust the writer, FinanceFirst makes its primary sources visible. FinanceFirst explains the assumptions and the limits of its research and calculators, and it keeps its commercial relationships separate from its editorial decisions. When a reader notifies FinanceFirst of an error, FinanceFirst fixes the error. In short, FinanceFirst provides practical tools and guides for budgeting, credit, investing, retirement, taxes, and insurance that explain the pros and cons of each. FinanceFirst’s goal is to provide clarity, not to market products.
Where does most of your new business come from today, and where do you wish it came from?
According to FinanceFirst data, the majority of new business lately has been attributed to discovery through organic search and content. With its library of 237 published guides, 6 working calculators, and 10 original reports, FinanceFirst publishes content that is optimized to rank for queries that are related to personal finance. Content for topics related to banking, credit cards, insurance, investing, retirement, and taxes are some of the topics that FinanceFirst covers and has built individual topic hubs for. drove search discovery and conversion traffic via clear guidance and supportive tools.
Ultimately, direct business relationships would be preferable as would repeat readership. Dependable readership is built when customers find FinanceFirst and return for future reference and when business professionals and organizations send their clientele and audiences to FinanceFirst for research and use of calculators. Eventually, the focus will be on the audience and less on the unpredictable nature of search traffic by publishing FinanceFirst as the preferred resource for personal finance that relies on evidence and by strategic partnerships that promote original content.
What’s one thing you’ve actually handed over to AI in the last year, and one thing you tried it on and went back to doing the human way?
I have deployed AI to help you draft and develop content for your client FinanceFirst in the last year. This has involved developing articles from outline notes to drafts that are ready for publication. My team also uses AI to improve the drafts that they prepared. This has improved your velocity in getting ideas published in the form of guides.
Earlier, you tried the same with the development of articles, and decided to revert to the normal method of human involvement for final edits and strategic positioning of content. I use AI in such cases for the drafting of content, but you reserve the final version of the content for your team as the semantics and positioning of the content are most important for scenarios involving sensitive or dangerous content, opinion-based content, or content involving the disclosure of risks and ensuring the brand voice.
Have you noticed a change in how customers find you or what they already know before they reach out? Is anyone arriving through AI assistants like ChatGPT yet?
I have worked out some new trends in how clients find, and how much clients know, when they first contact FinanceFirst. Now, instead of broad based keyword searches, I see clients who, through long-tail searches, appear to ask questions of their AI assistant. Examples of questions include “How much of an emergency fund should I have if I am freelance?” “Which is better for a beginner, index funds or mutual funds?” or “How will my score actually be impacted by having a high credit utilization ratio?” These clients come to us with an idea and the basics, but then want more specific and detailed information, along with resources and/or calculators to input their own data.
I also have noticed early signs of AI-driven discovery. In the financial services industry, percentages for AI-based referrals is small, but growing, and in our industry, ChatGPT is the dominant referral source for AI based traffic. I don’t have cut and dry numbers for FinanceFirst, but the trends that I see in the queries and client behavior match what I see in traffic sources. More and more people are coming with more specific questions and will expect a quick and direct response that includes something that supports the answer, and not just another summary. In the next year, I would expect more readers to find us through various forms of AI driven assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and the Google AI Overviews, even if the sources don’t appear to be AI assistants when analyzed in the referral traffic.
If you were advising someone in your industry on all of this for the next 12 months, what would you tell them to actually do, and what would you tell them to ignore?
Here are some areas I would recommend finance publishers invest in over the coming year to enable AI tools to quickly and accurately capture clean answers: answer-first intros, easy-to-find question-based headings, short definitions, step-by-step instructions, and FAQs. Add more E‑E‑A‑T with named authors, credentials, last-updated dates, and links to primary sources to priority pages; add focused schema (Article, FAQ, HowTo, Organization, Person). Spend money on content worth citing, data analysis, calculators, and good frameworks, and begin monitoring your brand in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews in addition to traditional rankings.
Meanwhile, avoid chasing the longest guide possible for the sake of it, optimizing schema or author bios as a sort of shortcut, and trying to game AI by keyword stuffing or purely-created AI content. Do not rule out traffic that appears to be “direct” or “branded search” because it is difficult to attribute; there will be a lot of AI discovery that will show up as direct or branded search. Top pages should be easy to pull, hard to argue with, and quotable, while AI visibility is a key metric (along with rankings and conversions).
Thank you to Asim Ahmad and the team at Finance First for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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