How Zopa scores now
Twelve signals across the three pillars, this month. Each bar shows how the brand compares with the strongest brand in the group on that signal, which sits at 100. A dark bar marks a signal this brand leads.
At a glance
The strategic read on the signals above — where Zopa sits, what is holding it back, and where the openings are. Who else is moving in the set is broken out under the trajectory chart in The detail.
Found 21 is the constraint: Zopa is named in 1,330 of 42,140 AI answers that mention any of these banks (3.2% share of voice, last of five), and draws 28k non-brand visits a month. Understood 57 is its strongest pillar, with the second-clearest AI description in the set. It is clear, but clear as a lender. Chosen 51 is propped up by the best press score in the set and a 4.6 Trustpilot rating. Revolut, at 91, leads on a scale no UK bank can match: its organic estate is built on currency-converter and crypto-price pages.
Absent from the "which bank" questions. Not named on "who is the safest online bank", "which bank in the UK is the best" or "what's the best bank to bank with" — 89,000 monthly asks between them, with three of the four rivals named on each.
AI share of voice 3.2%. Last of five. Monzo holds 21.7%, Revolut 17.7%, Chase UK 16.6% (adjusted) and Starling 13.7%.
A lender's footprint. Its non-brand rankings are credit cards and car finance. It ranks for none of the savings, ISA or current-account terms tested, and the answers group it with Vanquis, Aqua and Zable.
A rented AI position. zopa.com is cited in 185 AI answers, against Starling's 1,297 and Revolut's 1,581. Two affiliate listicles on moneyranked.com do more of the work than Zopa's own site does.
Put the bank into the sources the answers are built from. MoneySavingExpert, Which? and Finder already carry Zopa's rates. Getting Biscuit into their "best bank account", "best banking app" and "safest online bank" pages is the fastest route onto the prompts Zopa is missing.
Publish what the models can quote. Starling's business-account page alone is cited 426 times. Zopa has no equivalent owned page answering "is Zopa a real bank", "is it FSCS protected" or "what is Biscuit", so the models fall back on the rate table.
Use the award nobody is repeating. Best Banking App at the 2026 British Bank Awards appears nowhere in 1,330 answers. Third-party proof in community and creator sources (r/UKPersonalFinance, Technically Money, Be Clever With Your Cash) is where rivals get named and Zopa does not.
Organic Discovery Score over time
Overall score by month across the set. Where is the field tightening or splitting apart?
Who is moving, and why
The specific brands driving the trajectory chart above — what changed, and the content, PR programme or market shift behind it. Every brand in the set lost organic traffic year on year, with a shared trough from November to May as AI Overviews spread across the money head terms. Who held up is about what each brand's traffic was made of.
It indexes 100 on most search signals because its UK estate is currency converters and crypto prices ("gbp to inr", "xrp gbp", "dollars to pounds"). That is reach, not banking relevance. Its AI framing is the coolest in the set (sentiment 62), and it gets the safety caveats. It won a full UK banking licence in March 2026. Toggle Revolut off in the Compare chips to read the neobank race without it.
"My top pick for most people." The FCA's £21m fine in July 2025 left no mark on how the models describe it. It was named Best British Bank again at the 2026 British Bank Awards, and its CMA service ranking is quoted back in answers. It is the benchmark for being named on the everyday question.
The organic engine is getting stronger even as total traffic fell 11%. Credit card terms carry it ("credit cards" at #3 on 112k searches a month). Branded visits fell from 134k to 110k a month while brand search held at around 76k, so the loss is AI Overviews and SERP features taking the clicks. The weak spot is the AI layer, where it is last of five. Biscuit launched in June 2025 and the customer base reached 1.9m, and none of that has reached the answers yet.
Mostly self-inflicted and mostly harmless. Starling started bidding on its own name (paid traffic 0 → 50k), so branded organic clicks collapsed while brand demand only eased (71k → 56k). That mechanically lifts its non-brand share to 63%. On the AI layer it is the warmest-framed and clearest-understood brand in the set.
Every brand's link base steps up from May 2026, and the anchors give it away: Telegram link sellers, SEOExpress testimonial text and "DA 50 PBN" templates, the same on every domain. Some of Zopa's spam anchors even name rvvup.com and DivideBuy. This is injected link spam, not a coverage surge, so read refdomain growth after April as noise.
Chase UK is Zopa's closest rival on the score: less than half a point apart. The models frame it as a conditional pick, "worth considering if you mainly want cashback", and its savings rate wins it the "best all-rounder" slot on savings prompts Zopa should own. Its raw AI share is inflated more than fourfold by "chase" the verb, The Chase and JPMorgan Chase in the US.
Signal by signal, against the leader
Twelve signals side by side. Now is where Zopa stands against its closest rival on the overall score this month. 13m relative move is how that position against the field has shifted over the year — positive when Zopa gains ground on the field, even where the underlying number has fallen.
Why the two movement columns can disagree. Every signal is scored against the strongest brand in the group that month, which is set to 100. If rivals fall faster than Zopa does, its relative position rises even though its own number has dropped. The raw column shows the change in the underlying figure over the same window.
Non-brand keyword coverage
Non-brand ranking positions for all five brands, banded by how Zopa is actually placed: winning, in contention but trailing, absent while rivals compete, or a term no brand in the set ranks for. Candidates came from every brand’s non-brand estate, and every cell was then checked against the live UK SERP (top 20), so a blank means the brand is not there.
Signals moving the wrong way
The tracked signals whose raw values have slid over the thirteen months. Even where the brand holds its position against the field, a falling number still needs fixing.
Category context
SERP pattern · AIOs · Trustpilot floor · non-scored competitors
The structural shape of UK banking, savings and lending — who owns the SERP, where AI Overviews show up, which brand names inflate their own AI share of voice, and the aggregators, affiliates and high-street banks that sit outside the five brands scored here but capture most of the demand and most of the citations.
How AI describes these brands
How AI sees Zopa
Two different questions the models answer: how often a brand is named, and how clearly and warmly it is described. The first is visibility, the second is interpretation. Both are measured across six AI surfaces on UK prompts that do not name any of the five brands. Zopa splits the two: it is named in fewer answers than any rival, but where it is named the models agree on what it is — a fast, accessible lender with a good regular-saver rate.
AI Share of Voice, by model
How the models actually answer
Four real responses pulled from Brand Radar. Rival names in charcoal, Zopa in teal. The first two are the everyday bank questions Zopa is missing from; the last two are where it does appear, first as a conditional rate and then, on loans, as the answer.
What Zopa says vs what others say
Zopa's positioning from its own site, side by side with how AI, the comparison and affiliate sites and the UK money press describe it. The say/do signals gap below shows which claims land on both sides, which live only in the brand's voice, and which external framings the brand is not addressing.
Where AI's picture comes from
What each brand’s AI presence is actually built from. Every domain cited in the responses that name each brand, classified by source type — so the bar shows whether a brand is carried by its own publishing, by editorial, by reviews and community, or by comparison sites. Named drivers underneath are the specific pages doing the work.
MoneySavingExpert is the spine of every brand's AI picture, and the most-cited domain for four of the five. In the answers naming Zopa it leads with 432 responses, then MoneySuperMarket (329), moneyranked.com (308), Which? (237), Finder (233) and Forbes (190). zopa.com itself carries 185, seventh. Set that against starlingbank.com at 1,297 and revolut.com at 1,581 and the scale of the publishing gap is the whole finding: rivals are quoted from their own pages seven to nine times as often. Wise, a non-scored rival, is the most-cited domain in Revolut's answers and second in Monzo's and Starling's, which is why "Other" is so large for them.
Who the press recommends
How widely each brand is endorsed across eighteen UK national and money titles, scored on how many of them link to it live today and weighted by each title's authority. When the best-buy tables and round-ups keep naming a brand, buyers and models are both being pointed towards it.
Press endorsement
Who owns the results page
The SERP features that sit on the eight money head terms (best savings account, easy access savings account, fixed rate savings, cash ISA, personal loan, best bank account uk, credit card, car finance). The share is the proportion of those eight terms where each feature appears.
SERP feature prevalence
Where the audience actually is
SparkToro audience · cited Reddit threads · AI-cited YouTube · prompt themes
Who Zopa's audience is (SparkToro), then the Reddit threads, YouTube videos and prompts the AI answers actually cite (Brand Radar).
Where Zopa's audience spends time
What they ask AI tools
Subreddits and YouTube channels they follow
Cited Reddit posts & threads
YouTube creators cited in AI answers
Prompt themes & what they ask
Where Zopa is losing ground
The specific constraints behind the score, zoomed in — a gap to a named rival, or a signal moving the wrong way. Each one names a first action and the pillar it would move.
The gap
What to fix
The weakest signals, turned into things to work on — the starting point for a roadmap.
How the score is built
How the Organic Discovery Score is put together — the twelve signals, the weights, the adjustments and floors, and what is tracked month to month.
The twelve signals
Each signal is pulled from Ahrefs (UK) or Trustpilot and scored against the strongest brand in the group that month, which sits at 100. Those scores roll up into their pillar. Pillars combine into the headline score by the weights below. "Tracked" signals have monthly history; "point-in-time" ones are held at their latest reading.
| Pillar | Signal | What it reads | Basis |
|---|
Reading it: level, direction, consistency
Three properties, not one
Level is how good it is — read against 100, not only against rivals; leading a pillar the whole category is bad at signals an opening, not a solved problem. Direction is which way it is heading — treat the score as the lagging indicator and the trend as the leading one. Consistency is how steadily it holds — measured as variation around the brand's own 13-month average; presence built and withdrawn has to be re-earned, and machine surfaces reward sustained signal over bursts.
Relative, so it moves as the field moves
Each signal scores value ÷ category-best × 100 each month. Relative is the important word: if rivals improve and a brand stands still, its score falls even though nothing about it has changed. The latest partial month is held out so the trend reads clean.
Weighting, the brand/non-brand split, and the caveats
Weights
Understood-led: Found 30 · Understood 45 · Chosen 25. Within Found, AI Share of Voice and non-brand traffic carry 35% each and link authority 30%; within Understood, AI clarity 25%, anchor relevance 24%, topic footprint 20%, category capture 19% and AI sentiment 12%; within Chosen, brand demand 30%, top-3 rankings 25%, press endorsement 23% and Trustpilot 22%. Multiply the two to get a signal’s share of the headline score — AI clarity is the heaviest single input at 11.3%, AI sentiment the lightest at 5.4%. Switch to "Even" in the control bar to test how the pillar weighting changes the picture.
Two signals are combined, on purpose
Link authority is referring domains and Domain Rating read as one number. Domain Rating is calculated from the referring-domain graph, so the two describe the same thing from different angles and counting them separately would give the link profile double the influence it deserves. Brand demand works the same way: it combines searches for the brand name with the organic visits those searches deliver, weighted 65/35, because the second is largely a product of the first. Both are shown with their real figures throughout — referring domains and DR, monthly searches and visits — so nothing is hidden behind a blended number.
Why AI sentiment is weighted lightly
Sentiment is an analyst read of sampled answers rather than a measured quantity, so it carries 12% of the Understood pillar against 25% for representation clarity, which is calculated. Signals are weighted by how reliably they can be measured as well as by how much they matter.
How sensitive the score is to the weighting
Several of these signals move together — topic footprint and top-3 rankings track each other almost exactly, and AI share of voice moves with both. That makes the ranking stable: changing the weights within any reasonable range leaves most positions where they are. The one place to read with care is the 0.3-point gap between Zopa and Chase UK; under Even weighting Zopa leads it by 0.6. Everywhere else the brands are separated by enough that the order is settled. Revolut's lead is structural, not marginal: its UK organic estate is built on currency-converter and crypto-price pages, so it indexes at or near 100 on every search signal. Take Revolut out of the comparison and Zopa scores 53 and moves ahead of Chase UK, but still sits 21 points behind Monzo.
Brand vs non-brand traffic
Found counts these separately: being found for your own name is not the same as being found for the category. The split is measured from each brand's organic keywords at August 2025 and August 2026 and interpolated between them. It is exact for Zopa and Chase UK. For Monzo, Starling and Revolut the long tail beyond the top 150 keywords is apportioned, so their splits are estimates, and Revolut's non-brand figure is likely understated. Brand misspellings (monza, revolute, sterling bank) count as brand. Category capture in Understood reads the same non-brand share as a percentage — absolute reach in Found, mix in Understood.
The AI layer
The AI layer is measured with Ahrefs Brand Radar. There is no tracked Brand Radar report for Zopa, so this audit uses JF's brand-excluded wide scope: every UK prompt in the Ahrefs prompt dataset, with no topic filter, excluding any prompt whose question names Zopa, Monzo, Starling, Chase or Revolut. That leaves 42,140 responses that name at least one of the five, across six surfaces: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot. Share of voice is each brand's share of those answers; response coverage is the number of answers it is named in. Sentiment is an analyst read of 20–25 sampled responses per brand; clarity is cross-model consistency, 1/(1+CV) of per-model share, so a brand described at the same rate everywhere scores higher than one the models disagree about.
What a tracked report would add. A wide scope measures the questions people ask when they have no brand in mind. It does not weight them to Zopa's buyers. A tracked report built around savings, loan, credit card and current account prompts would give a sharper Zopa-specific read, and it is worth setting up before any refresh. The direction of the finding would not change: Zopa is named on borrowing and rate questions, and missing from the "which bank" questions where every rival competes.
Held at their latest reading
- The AI signals, anchor relevance and Trustpilot are shown at their most recent reading rather than as a monthly trend, so they set the level but do not drive month-to-month movement.
- The long-tail keyword count is unreliable in the most recent months, so topic footprint tracks the stable top-10 count rather than the total.
Adjustments and floors
Brand-name contamination in the tracked set
Each brand's share was pulled twice: across the full scope, and again restricted to answers that also contain a banking word (bank, savings, ISA, loan, credit card, current account, mortgage, car finance, interest). Because the base shrinks, the cleaner read is the ratio of mentions, raw to scoped. A ratio near 1 means almost every mention is a banking one.
| Brand | Raw share | Mention ratio | Read as | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chase UK | 71.0% | 4.29 | adjusted to 16.6%, upper bound | "Chase" the verb ("chase a refund"), ITV's The Chase, and JPMorgan Chase in the US. The US bank also survives the banking-word filter, so even the adjusted figure overstates Chase UK. |
| Revolut | 17.7% | 1.35 | raw, noise up to 26% | A distinctive name; most extra mentions are genuine FX and travel answers without a banking word, plus the Audi Revolut F1 team |
| Starling | 13.7% | 1.14 | raw, noise up to 12% | The bird and Clarice Starling, alongside genuine travel-card answers |
| Monzo | 21.7% | 1.09 | clean read | Distinctive name |
| Zopa | 3.2% | 1.02 | clean read | Distinctive name; almost every mention is a banking one |
Chase UK's clarity score is also affected: its per-model spread is dominated by out-of-category matches, so it carries the set median (72.5) rather than a measured value.
Model coverage
Grok returned zero coverage for every brand in this category on this window and has been dropped. The heatmap and the AI representation clarity score are computed across the remaining six surfaces: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot.
Trustpilot volume floor
A rating is only scored when a brand carries at least 500 lifetime reviews. All five brands clear the floor comfortably — the lowest is Chase UK at 15,901. Revolut's 463,885 is its global www.revolut.com profile; a separate app.revolut.com profile is rated 2.4. Monzo's UK page could not be fetched, so its figure comes from the same profile on trustpilot.com.
Two measurement notes to read honestly
Brand demand uses "zopa", "monzo", "starling bank" and "revolut". For Chase UK it combines "chase uk" and "chase bank": chase.co.uk ranks for the second term in the UK and takes 26k clicks a month from it, but some of that search is US intent, so Chase's demand is an upper bound. A November 2025 dip to 26k for "chase bank" looks like a data artefact and is interpolated.
AI sentiment is an analyst read of sampled Brand Radar responses rather than a model-generated score. Chase UK's sample was filtered to UK-bank answers; about 40% of raw "Chase" hits were JPMorgan Chase US or the verb, so its score rests on a thinner base.
Press endorsement
Live links from eighteen UK titles: nine national and consumer (BBC, Guardian, Times, Telegraph, Independent, Which?, FT, This is Money, Sky News) and nine money and fintech specialists (MoneySavingExpert, Moneyfacts, MoneyWeek, Finextra, AltFi, Sifted, FT Adviser, Fintech Futures, NerdWallet). Each title that links at least once scores its Domain Rating × (1 + 0.25 × log10(1 + links)), so breadth of endorsement counts far more than volume and MSE forum threads cannot swamp it. National titles route most product links through affiliate redirects: the Guardian has no recorded link to any of the five, and the BBC, FT, Independent, Sky, Sifted and AltFi links are almost all lost, so the live score leans on MSE, This is Money, MoneyWeek, Which? and the Telegraph. On recency, 54% of Zopa's live links were first seen in the last 18 months, against 30–38% for the rivals. The Telegraph's links to Chase UK come from football columns it sponsors, not finance coverage.
Link-spam contamination across the set
Every brand's referring-domain count rises sharply from May 2026. Anchor-text analysis shows injected link spam — Telegram link-seller anchors, SEOExpress.org testimonial text and "DA 50 PBN" templates, identical across domains — rather than earned coverage. It affects all five brands, so the relative indexing largely holds, but refdomain growth after April 2026 should not be read as PR performance for anyone. Chase UK also shows a separate spike and purge (+43% in December 2025, then −26% by April). Anchor relevance counts the share of each brand's top-100 anchors that describe it cleanly; spam share runs from 10% (Revolut) to 40% (Chase UK), with Zopa at 26%.