For many years now, a solid SEO strategy has been crucial to building an online presence for any business, including estate agents. The picture looks different now. While SEO is still important for brand discoverability, the rise of AI platforms from ChatGPT and Google AI to Claude and Perplexity has fundamentally shifted the way searchers interact with brands. 

Buyers and sellers are increasingly likely to head to their favourite chatbot to find a trusted agent to list their property or search for homes that match their buying criteria. Inside their chosen AI interface, users will type in specific prompts, such as ‘Who is the best estate agent in Devon for country estates?’ rather than short keywords like ‘estate agent Exeter.’Because of this, agencies with content designed around prompts could circumvent traditional Google rankings. 

As Paul Smith recently pointed out in his piece for Property Industry Eye, this change in how buyers and sellers interact with estate agents also means that AI is set to rival – if not replace – major property platforms, given its ability to synthesise data from across the web.

The upshot is that early adopters of an AI visibility strategy stand to gain more instructions than their competitors and sell more homes. So, how do you ensure AI systems choose your agency’s information and property listings over others on your patch?

Building AI visibility requires a shift in focus. Alongside a keyword strategy that solidifies their search engine rankings, estate agents must focus on positioning themselves as a trusted source for AI chat platforms to draw upon. Getting this right will increase your brand mentions (when AI mentions your agency by name) and your share of voice (the percentage that shows how often your content is cited compared to a competitor). 

In 2026, there are a few key areas where agents should concentrate their efforts:

Website content

AI bots thrive on fact-rich content they can easily cite, so it’s worth investing in cornerstone pieces for your website. Think about in-depth buyer and seller guides, articles, and FAQs thatare helpful to your target demographic. 

Plan your content around natural prompts your audience uses in AI chat interfaces – the question and answer format workswell for this. This will complement time-honoured SEO techniques such as the pillar-and-cluster model and internal link building. 

To ensure AI bots can index the information on your site,follow best practices, such as chunking pages into sections with straightforward headings, using short paragraphs, and including easy-to-scan bullet points and tables. 

Property listings

AI chat lets buyers find a curated list of homes that match their criteria without visiting a property portal or home page. That doesn’t mean you can avoid the portals right now or neglect your other webpages – the more information AI can learn about your agency and your available properties, the more likely it will identify a positive match to a user query. 

Instead, maximise your efforts to showcase your homes by using schema markup (there are plugins for this) so bots can identify listings and content such as pictures and videos.Include in-depth descriptions that explicitly reference buyers’desires, from house features to lifestyle, using structured headings and bullet points to appeal to both human readers and AI bots. 

Reputation building

For AI platforms to view you as a trusted agency, allocate time to building your brand’s presence and reputation across the web. This will involve tracking your reviews from sources such as Google, Trustpilot, and social media, along with your scores on agent–ranking sites. Everywhere AI looks, it wants to see a glowing report – or it may skip your brand in its answers. 

While buyers and sellers may largely ignore industry awards and guides, AI is likely to factor these into its assessment, along with statistics such as sale completion data. It will also spot your company and key people within it on trusted industry platforms. 

Reaching out to big-name sites to contribute thought pieces and research is a great way to earn citations in AI search results and build high-quality backlinks to your site, making your agency more discoverable through AI and organic search. 

Technical considerations

For AI to catalogue your site, it must meet certain technical specifications. If you don’t have the expertise, ask a tech-savvy employee or hire a developer to verify that your site allows crawler bots access to non-sensitive areas and uses HTML for core content. As mentioned earlier, schema markupis also essential for AI to find and index your listings. 

Mastering AI visibility in 2026 will take time. The good news? AI is still so new that everyone is in the same boat, and you can outsource much of the heavy lifting. The industry can be slow to move and adapt to change, which means proactive agents are likely to dominate their local areas in terms of brand mentions, citations, and share of voice. You can now track all of these through various online tools – and many website hosting platforms have built this into their systems for free. The bottom line: if you don’t start soon, your competitors will.

Sofia Villaweaver is a messaging strategist and AI manager specialising in the property sector.