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How Bankrate is using artificial intelligence and automation to enhance our editorial content

By Lance Davis, Vice President of Content for Bankrate

Bankrate’s mission is to help people make informed financial decisions. For nearly 50 years, we’ve built our reputation as the authority on personal finance by delivering proprietary interest rate data, tools and calculators, and editorial content.

Our editorial team supports this mission through stories, product reviews, explainers, how-to’s, charts and other content that’s accurate and unbiased. With advancements in technology, including recently machine learning and artificial intelligence, we will look for opportunities to use automation to further support Bankrate’s mission and provide uniquely helpful content to our audience. Here are some details about our editorial team’s key ethical standards we abide by in content production and our use of automation technology. We’ll revisit and update these uses and standards over time as technology continues to evolve.

Examples of how we’ll use automation technology in our editorial workflow

  • We will use AI to organize and contextualize large amounts of data. Using the tooling to source data (proprietary and licensed), extract insights and then contextualize it for our staff with relevant content allows us to create entirely new types of resources for our audience. In some cases, we may provide a methodology-based disclosure that gives insight into how the insights were derived. Just as we would with any content, we’ll always cite our sources.
  • We will use AI to optimize portions of our workflow. AI tooling can automate or optimize portions of our workflow, extending the reach of our editorial team and allowing them to spend more time on work that requires their expertise, creativity and thoughtfulness. Examples include suggesting tweaks to content’s technical structure, offering internal or external link destinations to improve user journeys and auditing our content to identify grammatical or other shortcomings.
  • We will use AI to assist in creating certain new articles and refresh existing ones. Our writers and editors are able to use AI tooling to assist with drafting content, allowing them to spend more time researching information that is uniquely helpful to our audience. This specific type of automation is used in only a small minority of our overall content production. A writer and editor will not only be involved in the production process from start to finish, but driving the process throughout. Each article will be fact-checked and edited in its entirety, prior to publishing, just as we would require on any article.

Key ethical standards

  • Accuracy: Anything we publish — regardless of how we leverage technology for enhancement  — needs to be accurate. That's why we have expert writers and editors driving each stage of the content creation process, including writing, fact-checking and editing every article before it's published. Many of our articles will also receive a review from our Financial Review Board. Editorial creators, such as writers and editors, will always have bylines on their content to credit them for their work.
  • Transparency: Any time our writers leverage generative AI to assist in drafting portions of the content delivered to you, we will provide a clear disclosure to our readers.

We’ll continue to test AI tools to help us improve our editorial processes while ensuring we produce fact-based work that is highly valuable and helpful to our audience.