Nicky Senyard has been doing digital acquisition since before Facebook existed, and she’s seen every wave: web, social, mobile, and now what we’re calling the LLM era.
She started in 2002, built and exited her first affiliate tech company, then co-founded Fintel Connect to help financial services companies scale digital growth. She was named the 2025 Industry Legend at the Global Performance Marketixng Awards, and her insights have been featured in Forbes and American Banker.
When I asked her if LLMs are going to disrupt affiliate marketing, she pushed back immediately.
Listen to the full Podcast episode with Nicky here.
She sees LLMs as a new layer on top of affiliate marketing. What has changed, she said, is “the two layers above, which is awareness and consideration.” People are using ChatGPT and Claude to discover products, not just to transact.
Citation Problems, According to Fintel's Own Research
~90% of LLM citations are non-branded, which means a lender has about a 1-in-10 chance of being quoted directly. The other nine times, the citation goes to a publisher or user-generated content.
54% of surveyed Americans now use ChatGPT for personal finance recommendations.
LLMs reward neutrality and comparison content.
“They’re looking for comparisons. So a domain will get more authority if it’s got more comparisons on it.”
A brand is very unlikely to put a comparison of themselves and their major competitor on their own branded site. Domain authority, she said, “is going to be a... collection of voice... where the publishers win.”
You can see the disruption already at the publisher level, using NerdWallet’s recent earnings report, as I noted in the episode:
Card business reportedly down more than 50%.
Visitors who used to come straight from Google to their top-10 listicles are now in Claude and ChatGPT, synthesizing their own answers, and not making it to NerdWallet at all.
But from the lender’s chair, the acquisition mix looks basically the same as it did five years ago.
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On ChatGPT selling paid ads
Publishers are already selling placement inside the LLM answers. “What we’re actually finding is most of the larger publishers actually have a specific package for GEO,” Nicky said.
“What they’re optimizing to, through insertion, through sponsorship, through different types of deal structures, they’re actually optimizing for those placements.”
She noted that one publisher Fintel works with is “the largest advertiser in finance on ChatGPT.”
I was surprised when Nicky told me ChatGPT doesn’t let advertisers track the performance of the ads, but she said she’d almost bet her career that tracking is coming.
I’ll go out on a limb and guess that thoughtfully placed ads inside an LLM are going to be the highest converting ads on the internet.
ChatGPT will know more about the user, their shopping intent, budget, goals, and constraints than any publisher out there.
I have no doubt advertisers will pay through the nose for that kind of targeted intent.
But gosh, will there be a bunch of questions regarding how exactly it will all work.
Nicky’s LLM playbook for lenders
So what should a CMO or VP of marketing at a card or personal loan company do?
Nicky laid out a three-step playbook for customer acquisition leaders:
Step 1: Use your customer service backlog for LLM content. Analyze your call center questions and chatbot logs. They may have the perfect material to rank for the LLMs, because that’s the questions customers are asking. Those pages don’t even need to be human-visible.
Step 2: Draft off of publishers with authority in the LLMs. Some publishers are already appearing in these LLMs and been indexed as domain authorities. Why attempt to build authority from scratch when someone already has it and is willing to work with you? Reddit pops up a lot as example domain that indexes well in the LLMs. In a B2B context, LinkedIn seems to be up there, too.
Step 3: Save the site overhaul for last. Nicky recommends using a “sandwich effect.” Do the quick wins first, use what’s already working, then “do your own hard work in terms of maybe site restructures or overhauls or whatever else, but do that last.”
And take note of how each engine is different. Gemini, for example, will mention a brand 50% of the time over publishers (this seems understandable given Google’s alliances with many large advertisers). Claude on the other hand, mentions brands less often and goes to aggregators more often.
“You need to decide where your audience is, and then you need to decide how to optimize for that engine, and the optimization processes are going to be different.”
How long before LLMs disrupt distribution for lenders?
I said five years before consumers default to LLMs for new (account opening) financial transactions. Nicky said ten, at least.
Her reasoning was that we have three variables in play, and that introduces complexity.
Consumer trust.
Bank willingness to open functionality to agents.
Regulatory posture.
“When you have one variable, it becomes easier to predict. When you have two variables, it gets a bit more complicated. When you have three variables, it’s complex. And complex usually takes time.”
For lenders, the near-term LLM game is discoverability through partners. The LLM layer is entrenching the publisher role, which means the acquisition leader’s playbook looks more like a marketplace strategy. You can win through the partners you already work with.
Listen to the full episode with Nicky here.
Catch you next week,
The Free Toaster Team
Carlos Caro, Founder at NMG, Co-Founder of The Free Toaster
Nick Madrid, Co-Founder of The Free Toaster and Uncovered Media
P.S.: We’re super pumped to see you at the Summit in SF next week!!!