Ryan Darani
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October 21, 2025
How AI Search Has Changed The Homeowners Journey To Find Agents
Search didn’t die. I think it’s gotten better.
There’s the tab-hopping, “open six results and compare” version most of us grew up on.
And there’s the new lane where you ask ChatGPT a messy, 100-word-long question and get a straight answer.
That difference in search is where agents can show up in the journey. It also changes what buyers and sellers expect when they finally reach out. Agents can expect to see higher, more qualified leads thanks to ChatGPT and AI search.
AI search crushes the research phase into something tighter and more decisive. It front-loads trust. If you’re used to playing the volume game—more blogs, more clicks, more forms—you’re going to feel whiplash.
If you’ve been building a reputation you can prove, this is the best thing that’s happened to you in a decade.
Agents built entire plans around this loop:
Keyword → page → click → compare → inquire.
It rewarded impressions and click-through rates.
It made retargeting lists your security blanket. We tweaked headline tags, shaved milliseconds off load times, and celebrated when the new city guide nudged the bounce rate from 72% to 69%.
It was work tuned to an attention economy where “open five tabs and graze” was normal.
Buyers and sellers got trained by that system. They’d read a “moving to X” guide, skim a list of “best neighborhoods,” pop over to an agent grid, and half-seriously submit a form to see who responded first.
Lots of motion, not much memory. It kept pipelines busy, but it also filled them with people who weren’t ready or weren’t sure (which meant agents were chasing dead leads).
When someone asks, “Can I close in 30 days with a VA loan on a 1990s ranch in Maple Ridge, and what tends to blow up inspection?” the model isn’t hunting for your clever title. It’s hunting for certainty.
Names. Dates. Relationships. Receipts.
If you exist online like a person with a very specific lane—real markets, real designations, real cases—the answer engine can point at you without blushing.
If you exist like a slogan (“top agent, great service, born to help”), it shrugs and moves on.
The machine’s risk is recommending the wrong human. So it prefers humans who are easy to verify.
Before: You searched, you skimmed a listicle, you opened five agent profiles, you filled one form because you got tired.
After: You ask the exact thing you’re worried about. You get an answer with details that don’t feel generic—plus one or two names attached to similar situations.
You make a micro-decision: “Call this person,” or, “Ask one follow-up.”
You contact fewer agents, later in the process, with sharper intent.
I’ve watched this play out in real time.
A seller doesn’t ask for “market updates.” They ask, “If we list in late October, how often do appraisals come in light around here, and what kills them?”
A buyer doesn’t want a “neighborhood guide.” He wants, “Which pockets of Cedar Grove actually feed into Northview High next year, and what’s a realistic offer window if we have to be in by January?”
The answer layer handles 80% of that and hands you the baton for the last 20%. You win not because you wrote the longest guide, but because you’re the most believable solution to that exact problem.
AI search is the new referral engine… just warmer, and faster.
When the call comes, they’re not looking for a pitch. They’re checking if you can start.
Expect fewer leads. Expect better ones.
People will reach out after they’ve done research inside ChatGPT. They’ll come with a specific question and a timeline.
They’ll have zero patience for vague bios and “we love helping families” paragraphs.
This is where a lot of marketing gets exposed.
If your online footprint can’t answer the simplest questions about you—who you are, who you work with, where you actually operate, what you’re good at, and what you’ve done lately—the model won’t risk recommending you.
And if you do get the call, your first five minutes have to match the confidence of the answer they just read. “Let’s book a discovery for next week” feels like a stall. “Here’s the path, here’s what we’ll send, and here’s what we’ll decide by Friday” feels like a fit.
Entity reputation is all that matters in AI search.
Your name tied to a real practice, in a real place, with real proof—beats keyword volume now.
It’s not that content stops mattering; it’s that content without receipts stops moving the needle.
Winners: Agents who picked a lane and can show work. The relocation person who can talk lender timelines without flipping a coin.
The lake specialist who knows which inspectors actually get under the crawl space and which ones wave from the driveway. Teams whose name, brokerage, and offices show up the same way in every place that matters.
Boringly consistent beats loudly prolific.
Losers: Everybody who built a maze of look-alike posts and doorway pages just to capture a phrase. Folks renting credibility—splashy site, thin proof. Anyone who thinks volume will outrun verification.
The internet used to reward “cover everything.” AI search rewards “own something and prove it.”
Inside the next year or so, we’ll see more queries that end with a human name than with “10 pages you might like.”
The answer layer will absorb the research grind, and you’ll show up not as a blogger but as a person the system trusts to finish the job.
You won’t out-write a model—you’ll out-verify it.
That doesn’t mean stop writing. It means write like someone who was there. Short, specific, dated, and tied to a place and a process. If you can’t attach a name, a number, or a “what happened next,” it’s probably filler.
Tighten the way you exist online. Make your bio read like a fact card: legal name, role, team/brokerage relationship, where you actually work, what you actually handle, what you’ve done lately.
If you claim “top 1%,” say where, when, and by whose math. If you say “closed 42 buyer sides since 2022,” make sure the rest of your footprint doesn’t undercut the number.
Publish proofs, not platitudes. One-pagers that show how you shave days off VA timelines. A short write-up of the inspection that didn’t blow up because you handled the roof bid in the offer.
A clean comparison of two neighborhoods buyers always mix up, with the unglamorous details (schools, bylaws, flood maps, parking rules), the model can quote without guessing.
You don’t need 40 thin pages; you need 8 pages that carry weight and agree with each other.
Assume the lead is already warmed up and on the clock. Have the lender intro ready. Have the inspection prep ready. Have the timeline template ready. Send them fast. Start where the answer left off.
I’m not mourning the old funnel. It made us chase pageviews and high-five dashboards while we quietly dreaded the Monday list of cold leads.
This new version is harsher, but fair.
It favors adults who do the work and show their work. If you’re that person, you’ll be fine. If you’re not, there’s still time to become them.
Less noise. More names. Fewer leads. Better conversations. I can live with that.
