A homeowner in your farm area is thinking about selling. Two years ago she would have typed “best realtor near me” into Google and scrolled through the map pack. This year she opens ChatGPT and asks, “Who are the best real estate agents in Newport Beach, and what should I look for?”
She gets back three or four names. Not ten. Not a page of links. Maybe not even you?
If your name is among the agents that show up in search, everything else you do has a chance to work. Your website, your postcards, your listing presentation, your branding. If not, well… the rest doesn’t matter.
That is a dramatic change to how home buyers and sellers find their agents, from just a couple years ago. The good news is that the work of showing up in those answers is not mysterious, and most of it overlaps with things you should already be doing anyway. Here is how these tools actually pick names, and what you can do about it.
How Do AI Tools Decide Which Agents to Recommend?
It helps to know what is going on behind the answer.
When you ask ChatGPT or Claude or Google’s AI Mode a question like “who is the best realtor”, the tool does not just pull an answer out of memory. It breaks your question into smaller searches, pulls in real web pages, and then writes an answer based on what it found. The AI does not paste your full question into a search engine. It breaks the question into smaller sub-queries and searches for each one separately.
Then it has to decide who to name. This is the part that matters most for you.
These tools are not looking for the “best agent.” That is a subjective judgement call. Instead, they are looking for the agent they can find, understand, and verify. If four different websites agree that you are an active agent in a specific area, with good reviews and recent sales, naming you is a safe bet. If your information is thin, or your name shows up three different ways across three different sites, the tool quietly moves on to someone else. Insufficient data doesn’t just lower your ranking but removes you from consideration entirely.
Two things follow from that.
First, this is not really about ranking. Research on repeated AI prompts found that the order of names changes almost every time you ask, but some brands showed up nearly every time regardless of order. So the number to care about is not what position you land in. It is how often you show up at all.
Second, size is not the deciding factor. A solo agent with clean, consistent, well-reviewed information can absolutely beat a big national brand in a specific neighborhood. These tools are not biased toward the biggest logo. They are biased toward the cleanest data and the strongest, most recent proof.
Which means the work is very doable. It just has to actually get done.
What Should Your Own Website Be Doing?
Your website is the one piece of this you fully control, so it is the right place to start.
Publish content that answers real questions
AI tools pull from pages that answer a question clearly and completely. Not sales pages. Pages that teach something.
Think about what your clients ask you. What are closing costs in your county. How long homes are sitting in your neighborhood right now. Whether it makes sense to sell before buying. What the HOA situation is in a particular complex. Write those up, one question per page or per section, with a direct answer near the top.
Specific beats broad here. A page about property taxes in your city will get pulled into more answers than a general page about property taxes. This is the same reason SEO blog content built for realtors keeps paying off long after you publish it. Every good post is another chance to be the source.
Numbers help too. Statistics, definitions, comparisons, prices, and dates have an advantage, because they form units the AI can lift and attribute. A post with real local data in it is easier to cite than a post full of general advice.
Make sure the machines can read your site
This part is technical, but it is worth knowing about so you can ask the right questions.
Crawler access. AI companies use named crawlers to read the web. GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT, ClaudeBot for Claude, PerplexityBot for Perplexity, Google-Extended for Google. A file on your site called robots.txt tells them whether they are allowed in. Plenty of sites block these bots by accident, either in that file or through a security setting at the hosting level. If you are blocked, none of the rest of this matters. Worth checking.
Content in plain HTML. If your important text only appears after a bunch of JavaScript loads, some crawlers will miss it. The safe version is having your real content sitting in the page source.
Schema markup. This is hidden code that tells search tools what things on your page actually are. There are types built for this exact use, including RealEstateAgent, Person, LocalBusiness, and FAQPage. It is the difference between a computer reading “Sarah Chen, 15 years, La Jolla” as a sentence and reading it as a name, an experience level, and a service area. Small effort, real payoff.
Freshness. Pages that get updated get cited more. One analysis found AI-cited pages were about 13% fresher by last-update date than pages that went uncited. A site that has not changed since 2022 reads as abandoned.
Speed and accessibility. Clean structure, real heading tags, alt text on images, a site that loads fast on a phone. All of it helps people and machines at the same time.
If that list sounds like a lot to manage on top of a full client load, that is fair. It is exactly why our real estate website service handles the build and the upkeep, so the technical side is handled and stays handled.
Related: Future-Proofing Your Real Estate Marketing with AI and Emerging Trends
Why Does Your Presence on Other Websites Matter So Much?
Here is the part most agents underestimate. Your own website is only one voice. AI tools want to hear the same story from several places before they trust it.
For real estate specifically, these tools lean on a cluster of sources: portals like Zillow, Realtor.com, and Homes.com, business listings like Google Business Profile and Apple Maps, review platforms like Google and Yelp, and your own site and bio pages. When those all agree, you look like a safe recommendation. When they conflict, you look like a risk.
Get your Google Business Profile right
This one carries more weight than anything else on the list. About 78% of all real estate reviews happen on Google, which makes your Google Business Profile the strongest single trust signal these tools use.
Claim it. Verify it. Pick the correct category. Fill in every field, including service areas, hours, and description. Add photos. Post to it occasionally. An incomplete profile is a missed opportunity in both directions, since verified and complete profiles generate four times more website visits than incomplete ones.
Keep your name and details identical everywhere
This sounds tedious because it is, but it matters. Your name, business name, address, and phone number should be written the exact same way on every single profile you have. Zillow, Realtor.com, your brokerage bio, Yelp, LinkedIn, Facebook, your local chamber listing, everywhere.
“Sarah Chen” on one site and “Sarah M. Chen Real Estate Group” on another looks like two different people to a machine. Old phone numbers on abandoned profiles are the same problem. So are duplicate listings you forgot you made.
Set aside an afternoon, list every place your name appears online, and make them match.
Build reviews, and keep them coming
Review volume and recency both matter, and the bar is higher than most agents expect. One analysis found that AI recommendations average around 4.3 stars, and businesses with fewer than roughly 150 reviews rarely get named at all. Take that number as directional rather than gospel, but the direction is clear. A handful of reviews from three years ago will not carry you.
Ask every client. Make it easy. Send the direct link. And spread them out over time instead of collecting twenty in one month, because recency is its own signal.
Get mentioned in places you do not own
Research on AI citations found that brand authority is the strongest single predictor of getting cited, and presence across four or more platforms is the second strongest.
For an agent, that means showing up in places that are not yours. A quote in your local paper about the market. A neighborhood association newsletter. A podcast interview. A guest post. Sponsoring the youth soccer team and getting listed on their site. YouTube videos about your area. Answering questions in local Facebook groups and on Reddit under your real name.
None of these feel like SEO. That is sort of the point. They create the independent mentions that make you look like a real, known person in a real place.
Your social profiles feed the same picture. Active, consistent accounts that clearly state where you work and what you do give these tools one more source that agrees with the others. If keeping that up is the thing that keeps slipping, our social media management team handles the posting so your presence stays current without eating your week.
Related: Why Consistency Wins in Real Estate Social Media Marketing
How Do You Know If Any of This Is Working?
You check. Then you check again next month.
Open ChatGPT, Google’s AI Mode, Perplexity, and Claude. Ask the questions your clients would ask. “Who are the best listing agents in [your neighborhood].” “What real estate agent should I use in [your city] for a first home.” “Who knows the [specific area] market best.”
Write down what you see. Which names came up. Whether yours did. Which websites the answer pulled from. Do it monthly, because these answers move around.
Then follow the gaps. If a competitor keeps appearing and you do not, look at what they have that you do not. Usually it is one of three things. More reviews. A page on their site that answers that exact question. Or mentions somewhere you are absent.
One thing worth saying plainly: your offline marketing feeds this. When a real estate market report lands in a thousand mailboxes with your name and your data on it, some of those people look you up. They search your name. Some leave reviews. Some mention you to a neighbor. Those searches and mentions are exactly the signals that build the authority these tools are measuring. The same goes for property postcards and door drop flyers that keep your name moving through a neighborhood.
Print and digital are not two separate strategies. The mail creates the searches, and the searches create the online record that AI reads. That connection is a big part of how we think about marketing at 23 Window Media.
Where to Start
If this feels like a lot, it is. But you do not have to do all of it at once, and you do not have to do it in a year.
Start with the three that move the most weight. Fix your Google Business Profile. Make your name and details consistent on every profile you have. Set up a real system for asking clients for reviews.
Then work on the rest. Write the pages that answer local questions. Check that your site is readable by AI crawlers. Get mentioned somewhere you do not control.
This is the kind of work that gets pushed to next month forever, because none of it is urgent and all of it is important. That is the space 23 Window Media exists to fill. We build the websites, write the content, run the social accounts, and produce the print pieces, so your online presence stays current while you spend your time with clients.
If you want help getting your name into those answers, become a 23 Window Media member or contact us and we will talk through where you stand today.
