Garanti BBVA Case Study
Garanti BBVA worked with Webtures on a programme that treated organic search and generative AI visibility as one problem rather than two. In banking, whether the correct answer comes from the brand's own pages is not only a matter of traffic. It shapes customer trust and sits inside a strict advertising-compliance frame, so the work covered every surface where an answer can be formed.
Why Garanti BBVA needed SEO and GEO support
Four structural challenges specific to the banking category shaped the brief.
- Information decay. Pages carrying rates, fees and loan terms age within a single year. An unmanaged page does not just mislead a reader; under Turkish advertising regulation, financial promotions must state total cost clearly, so stale figures become a compliance exposure.
- Entity clarity. Garanti BBVA is read alongside BBVA's global organisation and sub-brands such as Bonus. Generative engines tend to merge entities like these. A question as simple as "which bank issues Bonus" needed to be answerable from the brand's own content.
- Dense local intent. Hundreds of branches and thousands of ATMs generate enormous "branch near me" style demand. That intent is won with consistent location data, not with page copy.
- Third-party dominance. Complaint and comparison platforms rank strongly on brand queries. Google's quality rater guidelines state plainly that a site's reputation is assessed from independent sources too, which makes the visibility of official support content a direct trust signal.
Goals set for the Garanti BBVA project
The programme aimed to surface the brand's own sources on financial queries, make corporate and sub-brand relationships machine-readable, cover location-led intent completely, and strengthen the brand's presence in AI-assisted search results. Every goal was defined together with its regulatory boundary: any statement carrying a rate or a cost was written to hold the level of disclosure the regulation requires.
How Webtures approached SEO and GEO for Garanti BBVA
Webtures applied a strategy that combined technical SEO, content optimisation and generative visibility. The premise is simple: there is no separate mechanism for appearing in generative answers. Being indexable and snippet-eligible is the precondition for being cited at all.
Technical SEO and AI accessibility
Crawlability was reviewed so that both search engines and AI systems could parse the content reliably. The brand's own infrastructure already showed unusual maturity here: Garanti BBVA's robots.txt names generative crawlers explicitly, including OAI-SearchBot, GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended, and grants them access. That posture is rare in the Turkish market and satisfies the most basic precondition for being quoted in AI answers. The work built on it through indexability, page experience and structured data.
Content and semantic authority
Content was developed around the questions people actually put to search engines and AI assistants. In banking those questions are mostly pre-transaction: the difference between a wire and an EFT, what an IBAN is, how to improve a credit score, what happens when only the minimum payment is made, how an overdraft account works. Answering these from the brand's own pages, in passages that read correctly out of context, matters as much to a reader as it does to a model deciding what to cite. On product pages covering loans and deposits, accuracy and freshness came before volume.
GEO and AI visibility
Work was carried out to strengthen the brand's presence across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. A category-specific question set was defined, generative answers to those questions were monitored, and the questions where the brand was cited were separated from those where it was not. The gaps were treated as content gaps. Measurement relied on the Generative AI performance report in Search Console; third-party tools claiming access to Google's internal ranking metrics were not accepted as evidence.
Experience and conversion
Page structures and journeys were arranged so visitors could reach what they needed and act on it. In banking this rarely means shortening a form. It means showing the information a decision requires, conditions, total cost, documents needed, in the right order. Calculators and branch or ATM finders were treated as high-intent surfaces in their own right.
What was carried out in the Garanti BBVA project
Webtures delivered work across technical SEO, content architecture, site structure, structured data and GEO. The main workstreams:
- Crawl and indexation audit, including verification of generative crawler access
- Freshness and compliance review of pages carrying financial figures
- Question-led content architecture with context-independent answer passages
- Corporate and sub-brand relationships clarified through structured data
- Consistent business data for location-led intent
- Question-set monitoring across generative answer surfaces
- Page experience and Core Web Vitals improvements
What the SEO and GEO work delivered
The programme was tracked across three reinforcing layers rather than a single number: organic search performance, location-led visibility, and citation in generative answers. The measurement frame combined Search Console, analytics and regular review of the defined question set.
Organic traffic and search visibility
Coverage of informational banking queries was widened, and product pages were brought to the level of clarity and currency the regulation expects. Search visibility was reported by query intent rather than by volume alone.
Visibility across AI platforms
Generative answers to the defined banking question set were monitored, tracking separately where the brand was cited as a source and where it was absent. Open access for AI crawlers provided the technical basis that made this monitoring meaningful.
The outcome of the Garanti BBVA and Webtures partnership
The strategy addressed organic search performance and AI-assisted visibility together. In a category where information ages quickly and every claim sits inside a regulatory frame, durable visibility is not held by a one-off optimisation. It is held by a discipline of freshness and a measurement loop.