Banksparency.com
A daily-updated financial data platform built to test whether data utility can drive organic and AI discovery without editorial operations or link building.
The Hypothesis
Incumbents like NerdWallet win generic high-value queries through years of accumulated authority and large editorial teams. That's not a gap that closes quickly for a new entrant.
The question was whether a different approach could work instead — not competing on authority, but competing on data granularity. By ingesting live rates from 80+ institutions daily, the system targets specific, high-intent queries that incumbents are too broad to serve at that level of detail.
The Result
Roughly 9–10K monthly pageviews. No link-building efforts. No editorial hours. Powered entirely by automated data pipelines.
That's a proof of concept, not a proof of scale. The point is that a low-authority challenger on a new domain can earn organic and AI discovery by engineering genuine data utility — not by producing content or buying links.
The Architecture
Built to decouple content coverage from headcount.
Hybrid Rendering
Built on Next.js. Critical content is pre-rendered server-side for instant crawler access. Interactive elements hydrate selectively for users. Both search crawlers and AI agents can reach the content without JavaScript dependency.
Automated Pipeline
A serverless Supabase pipeline ingests rates from 80+ institutions daily. No manual data entry. The content maintains itself.
Data-as-Product
Instead of prose, the site serves interactive filterable data tables. The utility is in the data itself — something an AI summary can reference but not replace.
The architecture here is specific to financial rate data. The underlying principle — that data utility is more durable than content volume — applies wherever a company has proprietary or acquirable data that incumbents aren't serving at sufficient granularity.
If that's relevant to your situation, the programmatic architecture page has more detail on when this approach makes sense and when it doesn't.
See Programmatic SEO Architecture →