Is AI Search Behind the Drop in Business Loan Enquiries?

Something is shifting in the commercial finance space and not everyone is talking about it openly.

Lenders and brokers who have relied on Google driven SEO for enquiry generation are reporting a drop in traffic. Lead generation partners are concerned. At least one major player has already signalled they are pulling out of the market entirely.

The obvious question is whether demand has fallen. The less obvious answer is that it probably has not.

The traffic has not disappeared. It has moved.

For years Google was the front door for anyone looking for a business loan. You searched, you found, you enquired. SEO was the game and the firms that played it well won. But AI search has changed the first step in that journey. People are increasingly asking ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google AI Overviews for recommendations before they ever run a traditional search.

That changes everything about where enquiries come from and who receives them.

There is a quiet confidence among a small number of lenders and brokers right now. The ones who moved early on AI search and AI SEO are seeing something the rest of the market is not yet seeing. Clients are finding them directly. No lead generation cost. No Google Ad spend. No third party broker fee. Just a direct enquiry from someone who was told by an AI system that this was the firm to speak to.

For some of those businesses the timing was fortuitous. Firms that never had the budget to compete on traditional SEO suddenly found that the playing field had shifted in their favour. The space others vacated has been filled by businesses AI systems have decided to trust.

For lenders and brokers still relying on bought leads and Google traffic the risk is not just that costs go up as lead supply tightens. It is that the firms quietly building AI search presence now are accumulating an advantage that will become very difficult to close.

The enquiries are still out there. The question is simply who AI search is sending them to.

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