Can AI find your agency?

Most agencies have Googled their own business at some point.

You probably know what comes up. Your:

• Website
• Google Business Profile
• Reviews
• Social profiles
• Maybe a few listings

You might even know roughly where you rank when someone searches for a real estate agent in your suburb.

But when was the last time you asked ChatGPT, Gemini or another AI tool about your agency?

Here’s a better question: can those tools actually find you?

Recent research from Foundable tested 100 major real estate agency website to see whether AI crawlers could access and understand them.

More than a third failed the basic visibility audit.

Some of those websites worked perfectly well when opened bya person, but blocked AI crawlers from accessing them.

Nothing looked broken.

The agency website was still there, buyers and sellers could still browse it and listings still loaded.

Behind the scenes, though, there was a door that some AI tools couldn’t get through.

The way people search is starting to change

Google isn’t going anywhere tomorrow.

Neither are the portals, social media, referrals, signboards or any of the other places people discover agents.

But there’s another behaviour starting to creep into the mix.

People can ask a question and let an AI tool do some of the researching for them.

Instead of typing:

“real estate agent Paddington”

into Google and working through the results, someone could ask:

“Who are some good agents for selling a family home in Paddington?”

That’s quite a different search.

We’re already starting to see this idea make its way into property discovery too, with conversational search allowing buyers to describe what they’re looking for in normal language rather than ticking their way through a long list of filters.

A buyer might care about being within 30mins of work, having room for a dog and avoiding a big reno.

That’s how people actually talk about property around the dinner table.

AI gives them another way to search like that online.

And if people become more comfortable asking AI about properties, it isn’t much of a leap to imagine them asking about agents too.

Real estate has always been a shortlist business

Think about what happens before an appraisal.

A homeowner might notice whose boards are around the suburb.

They ask a neighbour who sold their place.

They check a few reviews, look at recent sales and Google some names.

Eventually, two or three agents make the shortlist.

The appraisal appointment is simply the point where all that quiet research becomes visible.

AI could become another part of that research.

A homeowner might ask who sells the most properties like theirs, which agents know their suburb or who has experience selling apartments rather than houses.

They may get a handful of suggestions and start their research from there.

That’s why the Foundable research is worth paying attention to.

Before an AI tool can understand whether your agency might be relevant, it needs information about you to work with.

And that starts with being able to find you.

Your website might be telling AI less than you think

You shouldn’t need to become an expert in AI crawlers or structured data to understand the basic problem.

Imagine someone walks into your office and asks:

“What does your agency do?”

You’d probably have a pretty straightforward answer.

You’d tell them where you operate, the services you offer, who your agents are and the types of properties you work with.

Your real estate website should make those things just as clear.

• Can someone quickly work out where your agency operates?
• Are your agent profiles up to date?
• Does your website explain what each person specialises in?
• Is your local experience obvious?
• Can people find evidence of what you know about the market?

Foundable’s research suggests some real estate websites are falling down before they even get this far because AI crawlers can’t access them.

Others can be assessed, but don’t give machines much structured information about their business or its agents.

For the person looking at the website, everything might seem fine.

For a machine trying to work out exactly who you are, there may be a few blanks to fill in.

Your website isn’t the only place telling your story

Of course, nobody chooses an agent based purely on a homepage.

Your agency leaves little clues all over the internet.

There are:

• Your reviews
• Your agent profiles
• Listings
• Recent sales
• Local news coverage
• Social profiles
• Market commentary
• Business directories

Maybe that interview your principal did with the local paper three years ago that everyone had completely forgotten about.

All of those things help build a picture of who you are.

This matters because AI tools can use information from different sources when forming an answer.

Your own website is important, but so is the wider trail your agency leaves online.

It’s another good reason to make sure that trail make sense.

If one profile says an agent specialises in one area, another lists a different office and your website still has someone on the team who left two years ago, you’re making the job harder.

Humans find that too, to be fair.

So, what should agencies do?

There’s a temptation whenever something new happens in digital marketing to invent an entirely new playbook for it.

We saw it with SEO.

Suddenly everyone was trying to squeeze suburb names into every available sentence because somebody said that’s what Google wanted.

Nobody needs a repeat of:

“Your leading New Farm real estate agents for New Farm real estate in the New Farm property market.”

Please don’t.

The basics here are much less dramatic.

Make it obvious who your agency is, where you operate and what you do.

Keep agent profiles current and useful.

Publish content that shows you genuinely understand your local market.

Make sure your business information is consistent wherever it appears online.

And ask whoever manages your website whether the public content you want discovered can actually be accessed by AI search crawlers.

That last one might be worth doing sooner rather than later.

The interesting part of the Foundable research was that some agencies may not have deliberately chosen to block AI at all.

A plugin, security setting or website configuration can potentially make that decision for them.

Don’t start writing for the robots

There’s another side to this.

Please don’t make every piece of content on your website about getting mentioned by ChatGPT.

The same principle that has applied to good SEO for years still makes sense here.

Write something a person would want to read.

Answer real questions.

Show that you know what you’re talking about.

Be specific when you have genuine experience to share.

Google’s guidance around helpful content and Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) has long encouraged businesses to demonstrate real experience and expertise rather than simply creating pages designed to rank.

AI search doesn’t suddenly make those fundamentals irrelevant.

If your website clearly explains who you are and genuinely helps a potential vendor understand something about their local property market, you’re already giving both people and technology something useful to work with.

Your next listing might start with a question you never see

A potential vendor might find your agency because they drove past one of your boards.

Their neighbour might recommend you.

They might find you on Google, see one of your listings on a portal or come across an agent on social media.

And increasingly, there may be another route into that shortlist.

They ask a question.

“Who knows my suburb?”

“Who’s good with homes like mine?”

“Who should I speak to about selling?”

You may never know that search happened.

But you’d probably like your agency to have a chance of being part of the answer.

Your real estate website remains one of the places where your brand, people, listings and local expertise come together.

Reapit Websites helps real estate agencies build an online presence around their business, brand and property experience.

→ Book a walkthrough with one of our team today.