What if AI search was to eventually overtake traditional browsing altogether, what impact would this have on your estate agency? What if vendors chose their agent based not on portals, advertising or even a board on the street, but on an AI recommendation instead?

Some might dismiss it as hype, but history shows us how quickly consumer behaviour can flip. Think back to when we first relied on the Yellow Pages, then shifted almost overnight to Google.

If this happens to our industry, hundreds of thousands of instructions will be decided not by your sales pitch in a living room, but by whether the AI thinks you’re good enough to be on its list. If you’re not there, you don’t even get a look in.

We’re already starting to see a shift towards AI-driven search, where instead of scrolling through endless pages of results you’re presented with just a handful of carefully curated answers, drawn from multiple sources. I’ve made that shift myself, using tools like Perplexity and ChatGPT rather than relying solely on traditional search engines.

Already ChatGPT, the most dominant of the AI language models, handles over 2.5 billion prompts a day (Source: TechRadar) – which may not be as much as Google’s estimated 14 billion daily searches, but it’s the speed of growth that’s impressive. AI chatbots may only account for 1% of web visits currently but that figure will inevitably increase.

Sellers are already asking AI “Who should I sell my property with?” or “Which local agent sells homes fastest?”. The answers aren’t based on your glossy window display or how many keywords you’ve got on your web page. They’re built on signals scraped from everywhere: Google reviews, Trustpilot ratings, AllAgents scores, Feefo, Reddit, your presence in local press, your portal listings, even whether your office name and phone number are consistently listed online.

I’ve touched on this subject before but if you want a wake-up call, here’s a simple test. Open ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity and type: “Who’s the best estate agent in [location]?” for all the locations where you operate. If your name doesn’t appear, then you already know what your future looks like – unless you act now.

ChatGPT will list the top three agents based on GetAgent reviews – yet pulls in data from other local towns, which in one of my tests included an agent 45 miles away! What if you’ve directed your customers to leave their reviews on Google instead, so you don’t have many on GetAgent? What if a tenant leaves a stroppy review because the landlord failed to fix the gate, despite repeated requests? It all counts. But the public doesn’t know the back story. And nor does AI.

ChatGPT also lists companies based on the number of branches, as well as how long they’ve been established and the quality of their reviews.

Now ask it “Who’s the best agent for selling bungalows in [location]?” and it will draw from the Most Active Agents in [location] page on the home.co.uk website, based on the number of properties an agent has listed for sale, plus it also picks up the presence of bungalows from Rightmove listings.

Switch to Copilot and ask it the same questions and, despite being built on the same OpenAI architecture as ChatGPT, it uses completely different criteria to make its assessment. So you need to be strong in other review areas including Yell, Facebook and ThreeBestRated.

Then see how Perplexity chooses to rank local agents, pulling information from multiple sources including customer reviews and volume, property listing data including speed of sale and the percentage of asking price achieved, the Best Estate Agents Guide, plus placement in industry awards (those award organisers will, I’m sure, be rubbing their hands in glee at the prospect of many more award entries!).

Of course, Google remains dominant in search and has responded with its own Google Gemini AI listings – which will likely contain ad placements from next year.

But ask it who the best estate agent is in your area and it’s less forthcoming, saying several receive strong reviews for their customer service, communication and local expertise. If you’ve got poor feedback lurking on AllAgents, Indeed or Glassdoor, you can be sure you won’t make the list.

So how do you get ahead of this? There are some quick wins, like adding FAQs with schema markup to your website, or making sure your Google Business Profile is fully optimised. Aim for more reviews across different review sites including Trustpilot and Feefo as well as Google and GetAgent – and make sure you respond to every single one.

Publish your data on properties sold in the last year, with the asking price received and time to sell, and include in schema markup so AI can read it. Keep your blurbs on the portals up to date and add a fresh supply of stories about your community endeavours to your websites and social media.

Those who are self-employed or in franchised or smaller agencies may need to find trusted search agencies that can help them get all their content optimised for this new way of searching. Such organisations won’t survive on their own unless their parent businesses invest heavily in optimisation across all touchpoints in order to defend their brands.

We’ve seen this kind of disruption before. Portals transformed how agents marketed properties, and those who adapted thrived while others fell behind. Then came Google PPC and social media ads, creating a new arms race in spending.

The winners will be those who take AI seriously now and adapt accordingly. The losers will be those who shrug it off until they realise their agency has quietly slipped off the shortlist.

So let me put it bluntly. The question isn’t whether AI search will overtake traditional browsing. The question is whether your business will still be in the conversation if and when it does.