1StopVAT fintech marketing case study

Where 1StopVAT started

1StopVAT is a tax and fintech company. It handles VAT compliance and registration for online sellers and digital businesses that sell across borders. Its customers are moving into new countries and need to know quickly when they owe VAT there and how to register.

The company already ranked in Google for its core services. But its buyers had started doing their research in ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews, and those rankings didn't carry over. 1StopVAT couldn't see what the assistants said about it, including which prompts mentioned it or which competitors were named in its place.

What buyers asked ChatGPT

Online sellers moving into a new country asked the assistants which VAT compliance service to use and what the rules were. The assistants answered both questions every day, and 1StopVAT rarely appeared. Competitors and generic advice filled the rest of the answers.

A strong Google position meant little to a seller who typed the question into ChatGPT and took the answer as given. The shortlist formed inside the assistant, and 1StopVAT wasn't on it.

Learning the product

We started with the team because tax content written without the product's details reads like generic advice, and generic advice was already beating 1StopVAT in the answers. Once we understood the service, we researched the market around it.

The team interview

We interviewed 1StopVAT's team about the services it offers and the countries it covers. When we asked who buys, the team named marketplace sellers and SaaS companies as the main customers. Merchants who sell digital goods were a third group. Each group asks different questions, so we collected the ones the team hears from each.

The market research

Next we mapped the buyer prompts that AI assistants receive about VAT. Then we ran keyword research and search engine results page (SERP) analysis for each market. We also recorded which sources the assistants cited when they answered VAT questions. That last step showed us what kind of page an assistant trusts on tax, and it shaped every page we planned.

Building the content map

The content map turned the research into a list of pages, and each page was tied to a buyer question. To earn 1StopVAT more AI brand mentions, we planned a quotable page for each question the assistants received. The content map grouped pages into five types.

Every entry specified the search intent and target prompts, while an H2 outline and planned internal links gave writers a brief to work from.

Writing rules for tax content

1StopVAT's tax content needed its own writing rules because one wrong threshold or date can cost a seller money. We wrote custom rules to govern how 1StopVAT's tax information was presented.

The 1StopVAT team reviewed the first pages. After each round, we updated the rules until pages passed with few edits. That review is the human layer our AI SEO team adds on top of automated workflows.

Publishing on their domain

Every page went live on 1StopVAT's own domain, so the authority the pages built stayed with the company. We used a three-step publishing process.

1. 011Connect the domainWe linked publishing to 1StopVAT's domain through a DNS connection.
2. 022Approve each pageThe team approved every page in the dashboard before it went out.
3. 033Add markupEntity and schema markup made the company and its services machine-readable.

The markup explicitly identifies 1StopVAT as a company that offers VAT registration, which an assistant would otherwise have to infer from the prose.

Weekly visibility tracking

We measured 1StopVAT's AI visibility by running a fixed set of buyer prompts every week in ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews. We recorded which competitors appeared in each answer along with a log of 1StopVAT's mentions and citations.

The prompt set came from the buyers' own questions, the ones we collected in the interviews. We kept it fixed, so the trend line reflects the content rather than easier questions.

Visibility after 16 weeks

Snoika's founder Anton Vedeshin reported to Startup Reporter 1StopVAT's move from 2.7% to 28.3% ChatGPT visibility in 16 weeks.

Visibility here means the share of the fixed buyer prompts whose answers named 1StopVAT. The prompt set stayed the same the whole time.

What this means for you

To measure where you stand, run a fixed set of your buyers' questions in ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews and record who gets named. That list shows which pages to write first and gives you a baseline to set against the results in our case studies. Our fintech SEO work for 1StopVAT has a result only because the starting number was recorded before we wrote a single page.

Snoika does the research and the publishing as one team, with weekly tracking on top. To see your own starting point, get a free AI visibility report.