An SEO and AEO audit for a crypto or fintech site is a structured assessment of four things: whether search engines and AI crawlers can access and understand your site, whether your content and entity signals meet the trust standard Google applies to financial pages, whether AI assistants cite your brand accurately when buyers ask about your category, and whether the organic and AI-referred traffic you already get actually converts. For exchanges, stablecoin issuers and wallets the trust layer carries the most weight, because Google classifies these pages as YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) and holds them to a higher bar than almost any other kind of content.
This guide walks through how I approach that audit, layer by layer, and what I look for at each stage. It is written for in-house marketing leads and heads of growth who want to know what a proper audit should cover before they commission one or try to run one internally.
Why financial sites get audited differently
Most SEO audit templates were built for ecommerce and publishing sites. They check crawlability, page speed, duplicate content, title tags and backlinks, and then hand you a spreadsheet sorted by severity. That is a reasonable starting point, but it misses the thing that decides outcomes in finance: whether Google and the AI assistants have enough evidence to trust you with a topic that can affect someone's money.
Google's search quality rater guidelines define YMYL topics as those that could significantly affect a person's health, financial stability, safety or wellbeing. Financial advice, investing, and pages where people transact or store value sit squarely inside that definition. A crypto exchange, a stablecoin issuer and a self-custody wallet all ask users to move or hold funds. That is about as direct a financial consequence as a web page can have.
Two things follow from that. First, the quality bar for the content is higher, so thin pages, anonymous authorship and unsourced claims cost you more than they would on a travel blog. Second, the audit has to look outside your own domain, because trust in this space is judged partly on what independent sources say about you.
What the quality rater guidelines actually say, and what they do not
It is worth being precise here, because this topic attracts a lot of loose talk.
Quality raters are contractors who evaluate search results against Google's guidelines. Their ratings do not change the ranking of any individual page. Google uses the feedback to measure how well its ranking systems are performing and to refine them. So the guidelines are best read as a description of what Google's systems are trying to reward, not as a checklist that moves rankings directly.
Google's own documentation says E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness) is not a single ranking factor. Its systems use a mix of signals to surface helpful and reliable content, and for YMYL topics Google says it places even greater emphasis on those signals. The guidelines also describe trust as the most important element of the four, with the other three feeding into it.
For a financial site, the practical reading is this. Raters are told to work out who is responsible for the site and the content, what the purpose of the page is, and what the reputation of the site and its creators looks like based on independent sources. They are told to look for accurate, well-sourced content that reflects genuine expertise, clear information about who runs the business, and for transactional sites, clear customer service and contact information. They are told to rate pages low when a YMYL page lacks adequate evidence of expertise or trust, contains inaccurate or misleading information, or appears designed to mislead.
None of that is exotic. But when I audit exchange and wallet sites, I regularly find that the About page names no one, the licence information is buried in a footer PDF, the educational content has no author, and the pricing and fee pages have no last-updated date. Each of those is a small trust gap on its own. Together they describe a site that a careful rater, or a careful language model, has little reason to rely on.
Layer one: technical foundations
A site that cannot be crawled, rendered and indexed reliably cannot be trusted by anyone, human or machine. The technical layer comes first because every later finding depends on it.
For crypto and fintech sites, the problems I see most often are these.
Rendering is the first. Many exchange and dApp front ends are single page applications that depend on client-side JavaScript. If critical content such as fee tables, supported assets, jurisdiction information or product descriptions only appears after scripts run, search crawlers may see a partial page, and AI crawlers, many of which do not execute JavaScript at all, may see almost nothing. I test this by comparing the raw HTML response with the rendered DOM for each template type, and by checking what the major crawlers actually receive in server logs.
Indexation control is the second. Exchanges tend to generate enormous numbers of URLs: trading pairs, token pages, price pages, language and region variants, filtered and sorted views. Without a deliberate canonical and indexation strategy, you end up with crawl budget spent on near-duplicate pages while the pages that matter are crawled infrequently. Programmatic pages need a quality threshold. A price page that shows a ticker and nothing else is the kind of thin content that drags down how a whole directory is perceived.
International and jurisdictional setup is the third. Crypto businesses operate under different licences in different markets, and the site structure usually has to reflect that. I check hreflang implementation, whether region selectors and geo-redirects block crawlers from seeing content, and whether the right entity and licence information appears on the right regional version. A site that shows a user in the EU the wrong regulatory status is a compliance problem and a trust problem at the same time.
Performance and stability make up the fourth. Core Web Vitals (LCP, CLS and INP, which replaced FID in 2024) matter most on mobile, where a large share of retail crypto traffic arrives. Heavy charting libraries, third-party widgets and wallet connection scripts are the usual culprits.
Structured data is the fifth. Organization markup with sameAs links to your official profiles and regulator register entries helps machines resolve who you are. Article markup with named authors and dates supports the editorial layer. FAQ markup no longer produces rich results for most sites, since Google restricted them in 2023, but I still use it where the content is genuinely question and answer, because it gives answer engines a clean structure to parse. I treat schema as a way to state facts clearly, not as a lever to pull for visual SERP features.
Finally, AI crawler access. I check robots.txt and any bot management layer for the user agents that matter, including GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and ClaudeBot, and I check CDN and WAF rules, because security tools often block these by default without anyone deciding to. Whether to allow training crawlers is a business decision. Whether to allow retrieval and search crawlers is usually an easier one, because blocking them removes you from the answers entirely. It is worth knowing which choice you have made rather than discovering it later.
Layer two: authority and trust signals
This is where YMYL changes the audit most. I split it into on-site and off-site.
On the site, I look for the following. A clear legal entity, with the registered company name, registration number, jurisdiction and address easy to find. Licence and registration information stated plainly, with links to the relevant regulator register entry so a reader can verify it. For an EU business that might be a MiCA authorisation, for a UK business an FCA registration, and so on. A real About page naming leadership, with credentials and verifiable profiles. Authors on educational and market content, with bios that explain why they are qualified to write about the topic. An editorial policy that explains how content is researched, reviewed and updated. Visible published and last-updated dates, and a habit of actually updating the page when facts change. Primary sources cited for factual claims, such as regulator documents, reserve attestations, audit reports and protocol documentation rather than other blogs. Risk disclosures written for humans. And accessible contact and support information, including how to report a problem.
Off the site, I look at how the entity is described elsewhere. That includes regulator registers, review platforms, news coverage, community discussion, Wikipedia and Wikidata where an entry exists, and the sources that rank for your brand name plus words like review, scam, legit and complaints. This matters for two reasons. The guidelines tell raters to research reputation from independent sources, and the large language models draw heavily on exactly these third-party sources when they form an answer about a company. If the independent record is thin, outdated or negative, no amount of on-site polish fully compensates.
I also look at brand SERP defence. In this industry, impersonation and phishing sites are common, and a user who searches for your wallet or exchange by name may be shown a convincing fake. Monitoring your brand results, claiming your official profiles and making your canonical URLs unambiguous is part of being authoritative, not a separate security exercise.
Layer three: what changes by business type
The framework above applies everywhere, but the details differ across exchanges, stablecoin issuers and wallets.
Exchanges
For exchanges the central question is licensing and jurisdiction, and whether your site says clearly where you are permitted to operate. Users and AI assistants both ask questions like whether a platform is regulated in a given country, what its fees are, and which assets it supports. If your answers to those questions are scattered, out of date or contradicted by third-party sites, you lose control of the narrative. I check that fee schedules, supported jurisdictions and product availability each live on a dedicated, dated, crawlable page, that comparison and alternative pages are handled honestly, and that programmatic pairs and token pages meet a real quality bar. I also review financial promotion compliance, since the wording on landing pages is regulated in many markets and the audit should flag anything that creates risk.
Stablecoin issuers
A stablecoin page is a page about whether a person can rely on something to hold its value. That makes accuracy and transparency the whole game. I look for a clear statement of the issuing entity, the reserve composition and where it is held, the frequency and source of attestations or audits, redemption terms and who is eligible to redeem, supported chains and contract addresses, and a plain account of the risks. Data that changes, such as reserve breakdowns and circulating supply, should be dated and sourced, ideally with links to the primary documents. AI assistants frequently summarise stablecoins by pulling from comparison articles, so I also check what those third-party summaries say about the issuer and whether they are accurate.
Wallets
Wallets are judged on security claims. I check whether statements about custody model, key management, audits and open source status are specific and verifiable: a link to the repository, a link to the audit report, a named security contact and a bug bounty programme where one exists. Educational content about seed phrases, recovery and transaction safety needs accurate, expert-reviewed guidance, because errors here lead directly to lost funds. Wallets also face the heaviest impersonation risk, so download page integrity and official link consistency across the site, app stores and social profiles deserve a careful review.
