How securedloanrates.co.uk got cited by Claude while ranking page 6 on Google

A case study in being read by AI when classical search has ruled you out.

The challenge

The UK secured loans market is one of the most competitive verticals in financial services online. The top ten Google results are owned by:

• Multi-billion-pound lenders with twenty-five years of domain authority
• Comparison aggregators with seven-figure annual SEO budgets
• Established brokers with thousands of high-quality backlinks accumulated over decades

A new entrant has effectively zero chance of breaking the top page within the first three years. Even with perfect technical SEO, perfect content, and significant link-building investment, a newcomer will be looking at page six or seven for years. That's where securedloanrates.co.uk sat: average position 58.

What we did differently

We didn't try to compete on classical SEO. The maths doesn't work for newcomers in incumbent-heavy verticals. Instead, we built the site to be structurally readable by AI engines — even though, at the time, we didn't fully realise that's what we were doing.

The technical decisions:

• Modern stack (server-side rendered, hosted on enterprise cloud infrastructure). Fast initial load, fully-rendered HTML for crawlers — including AI crawlers that don't execute JavaScript.
• Comprehensive structured data. Entity identity, question/answer, service description and site-hierarchy markup across the site. Most competitor sites have minimal or no structured data.
• Semantic HTML throughout. Proper heading hierarchy, semantic sectioning, descriptive anchor text. AI engines parse meaning from structure; messy markup is invisible.
• Fact-dense content. Direct answers to direct questions. Specific numbers, specific lender names, specific scenarios. AI engines cite sources that contain extractable facts.
• AI crawler permissions. Explicit allow rules in robots.txt for the major AI crawlers. Most sites either block these accidentally or never address them.

None of this is exotic. It's just careful modern web development applied with consistency.

What happened

Within months of launch, real loan enquiries started coming in from prospects who told us that Claude — and later ChatGPT and Perplexity — had recommended us when they asked questions about secured loan rates and brokers.

We were being cited by AI engines for the same queries we couldn't rank for on Google. The classical search ranking stayed at position 58. The AI citation share quietly opened up.

When we ran the site through our own AI Readiness Audit later, it scored 95/100 — Grade A+. The technical work that made it citable was already in place. We just hadn't named the discipline yet.

What this means for other businesses

The dynamic that worked for securedloanrates.co.uk isn't unique to financial services. Wherever an industry is dominated by incumbents with twenty years of Google authority — legal services, accountancy, professional services, insurance, recruitment — there's an opportunity to bypass the classical-search bottleneck entirely by being properly structured for AI citation.

The window won't stay open forever. AI engines will eventually develop incumbent-favouring patterns of their own as citation graphs consolidate. But right now, in 2026, the field is open in a way it hasn't been since the early days of Google.

If you're sitting on page three, four, or five of Google for the terms that matter to your business — and you've tried SEO and run out of road against the incumbents — your route forward might be sideways, not upward. Becoming citable instead of trying to outrank.

That's the work we do.