How ChatGPT Is Ripping Up the SEO Rulebook For Estate Agents

Depending on who you speak to, artificial Intelligence heralds either the dawn of an elysian new era or the end of civilisation. As ever, the reality is probably somewhere in the middle. But there are already significant changes afoot for estate agents and other property businesses in more prosaic areas – notably in the online marketing sphere.

AI is reshaping how brands achieve visibility, says SEO firm Blue Array. While traditional organic search remains important, success in AI chatbot responses is becoming a crucial differentiator – with some surprising winners and losers.

Blue Array’s team has looked into which property brands perform best when the search term “property for sale” is plugged into popular AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Meta’s Llama. Results confirm that strong organic search visibility (i.e. traditional Google results) generally correlates with strong AI visibility – but not always.

The research focused on established UK property players, that rank highly in organic Google search results.
Rightmove leads Blue Array’s performance analysis overall, with the highest average probability of recommendation across three AI models. But both major portals Rightmove and Zoopla were associated with negative descriptors such as “outdated listings”.

Despite being frequently cited as authoritative data sources by the AIs, property portals are “often not surfaced directly in AI output mentions”. This is a trend Blue Array has noted across various aggregator-based industries, and indicates that while they underpin AI learning, “brand perception may lag behind brand utility”.

The research suggests that Gemini in particular “seems to have a preference for mentioning estate agents themselves as opposed to portals like Rightmove and Zoopla”. This could be due to this AI model leaning heavily on its owner Google’s search indexes.

Amongst estate agencies, Savills has emerged with the highest probability of being recommended across the big AI models (especially Google’s Gemini).

Blue Array says Savills “dominates” search results, with AI-generated language frequently associating the firm with terms like “luxury,” “expertise,” and “international reach” – that chime with the agency’s established premium market positioning. Savills is clearly ahead of other analysed estate agencies, but different AIs yield slightly different results. Purplebricks is a close second if ChatGPT is used, followed at a distance by Knight Frank. These positions are reversed if the same search term (“property for sale”) is thrown at Gemini.

While higher fees were a minor point of negative sentiment for both Savills and Knight Frank, the overall AI perception seems robustly positive.

Other agencies analysed include Purplebricks, Foxtons, Strutt & Parker, Hamptons, Jackson-Stops, and John D Wood.