Ryan Darani
•
October 15, 2025
What Is AI‑Powered Search? How Can Real Estate Agents Use It?
AI‑powered search lets people ask full questions (“Find me a three‑bedroom near good coffee, 25 minutes to the hospital, under $900K”) and get a single, conversational answer instead of ten tabs and a headache.
Under the hood, large language models (LLMs) don’t just match keywords; they infer intent, stitch together facts, and explain them in plain English.
Because of this, prospects move faster from curiosity to clarity—which is exactly where great agents win.
If buyers and sellers are discovering answers inside AI systems, your job is to make sure those systems can (a) recognize you as a real, reputable agent and (b) quote your expertise accurately
LLMs handle four broad intents—each mapping neatly to the homebuyer and seller funnel:
Your content, profiles, and reviews either help models answer these—or someone else’s do.
A quick note on tone in your own content: People now ask AI systems questions the way they talk to a friend. Let your site copy mirror that. If your FAQ reads like a municipal codebook, both AI and humans will likely skip it.
Short answer: yes—if you do it right.
One of our clients, Katelyn Warren, booked two calls worth roughly $1.3M in listings in six weeks from AI‑driven discovery.
We aligned her identity data (same name/phone/brokerage everywhere), built conversational, locally specific content, and earned third-party mentions that models could cite. Volume was modest; intent was high.
Timeline-wise, we saw leading indicators inside three weeks (brand-query lift, longer time on the Q&A pages, more GBP actions) and the first serious caller in week 2.
Two caveats to keep us honest.
One: This is an anecdote, not a universal law. Markets vary, inventory shifts, and assistants evolve.
Two: trust compiles slowly and then suddenly—so keep the cadence. Quarterly audits for profile accuracy, quarterly refreshes on the Q&A pages, and one or two new citations every month will do more for you than a single heroic weekend of “SEOing.”
If you want the playbook in one breath: make it unambiguous who you are, answer the questions people actually paste into assistants, let neutral sites vouch for you, and instrument just enough measurement to know it’s working.
Do that, and you’ll get calls.
Agents change brokerages. Change address. Change phone numbers, but who takes care of all that? AI assistants reconcile entities the way a meticulous TC reconciles signatures: nothing moves until everything matches.
This feels about as thrilling as reconciling lockboxes—but it’s the difference between being cited in answers and being invisible.
Think Q&A first. Write the question as your H2, then the clearest, least‑fluffy answer you can muster.
Starter set (steal these):
Content format rules that LLMs love:
Avoid protected‑class proxies (“family‑friendly,” “Christian neighborhood,” “safe for seniors,” etc.).
Focus on objective factors like parks, school ratings from public sources, noise scores, and commute times—and point readers to official resources. If you publish photos with people, HUD has guidance on inclusive representation.
LLMs cross‑check you across the web the way a skeptical buyer cross‑checks foundation repair receipts.
Think of these as the conversations you have in your car between showings, captured on the page.
Choose the dozen questions you answer most—prep for appraisal, reading an HOA budget, earnest money basics—and write each like an email to a smart friend who hates jargon.
Start with the one-sentence answer, expand into specifics with examples from your market, and end with a short “what can go wrong” so readers trust you’re not sugarcoating the process.
If you can, embed a 30-second vertical video where you explain the gist in your own voice.
Your “About” hub should read like a dossier, not a brochure.
Lead with what you do—areas, price bands, property types—follow with proof that you do it well—recent closings, a couple of review excerpts with names, designations that matter in your niche—and close with one paragraph on why you work the way you do.
Authority in 2025 looks like clean facts delivered in a structured way that LLMs can understand.
This is where you earn your keep. Pick pairs of neighborhoods buyers actually compare and write side-by-sides that talk like real people: commute realities on a Tuesday at 8:15, the tax line that surprises everyone, which condos run hot on special assessments, where the morning sun hits the kitchen.
Cite one neutral source when you’re quoting hard numbers, then give your lived-in take on what trips buyers up the first week they move in.
If you do it right, readers finish the page thinking, “That’s exactly what I would have asked on a tour.”
When someone is ready to move, remove friction. Build a “Work with us” page that mirrors how prospects phrase requests in assistants—“Find me a buyer’s agent who…”—and answer with a clear promise: what you do, how you’ll run the first call, and what happens next.
Put a short, human video at the top, keep the intake form to only what you need for a useful conversation, and add scheduling right there on the page.
The metric here isn’t traffic; it’s momentum—from page view to calendar invite with as few clicks as possible.
Treat your online identity like a living profile.
Misinformation is the first enemy and the easiest to manage: schedule a quarterly “AI audit” where you search your name, ask popular assistants for your phone and brokerage, and fix whatever’s off.
Keep your Google Business Profile compliant—local number you control, no call-farm redirects, no creative renaming—and make sure portals and social bios carry the same details down to the comma.
When models see five versions of you, they default to none of you.
The second enemy is volatility.
AI features change, ranking behavior shifts, and what worked last quarter may wobble this one. Don’t take it personally; diversify your citations, keep your cornerstone pages fresh, and maintain a short change log so you can tell correlation from coincidence.
If your visibility hiccups the week after you updated half your titles, that’s a clue worth following.
The third enemy is avoidable legal trouble.
Build fair-housing discipline into your content process, not as an afterthought. Avoid language that proxies for protected classes; lead with objective, sourced facts instead—noise levels, transit times, tax rates, zoning notes, and publicly available school data. When a line might be interpreted two ways, choose the neutral version and move on.
No listing is worth a complaint, and no paragraph is worth a headache.
They’re different. Google’s AI Overviews shine for quick synthesis across multiple sources right inside results; assistant tools like ChatGPT are stronger for multi‑turn, personalized Q&A that can gather context and draft outreach. Expect overlap—and constant change.
If you want to be named inside answers (not just blue links), yes. The agents who maintain clean identity data, produce conversational, up‑to‑date content, and earn third‑party mentions will be the ones LLMs cite.
No, but it will reshape discovery. Research and vendor selection increasingly happen inside AI experiences; transactions and scheduling still happen on your site, in your CRM, or on platform. Plan for fewer—but more serious—clicks.
Lean into them. Keep portal profiles current and consistent; they’re high‑trust nodes that LLMs love to cite. Zillow’s natural‑language search is a clear signal that conversational discovery is here to stay.
