How Real Estate Websites Can Appear on AI Queries For Lead Generation

What is GEO, and why does it matter for real estate websites?

Google search traffic is down by as much as 30% in the past year. And no, people did not stop their online activities or go on strike (unlike Canada Post). A lot of online searches are being performed on AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Grok and more. This is what is being called “zero-click” search, where the search engine is providing the full answer on the results page (or in the app), so the user never needs to leave the search engine. In fact, 37 of the top 50 news domains suffered negative YoY traffic for that exact reason.

This blog post was co-authored between Matt Coenen (digital marketing expert and founder of SurfSavvy.co) and Jeff Kee (founder/janitor at Brixwork).

For many businesses, including Realtors® and new project marketers, being visible on AI for real estate related queries means more leads and more sales, making it hard to ignore.

Introducing GEO – What is it, and how is it different from SEO?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) focused on getting your website ranking higher on search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo. GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) shifts the focus to AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Grok and more.

GEO refers to the methodology and practice of optimizing a website to get it recommended and cited by relevant queries on AI platforms. Being referenced as a reputable source of information builds authority, and brings highly motivated visitors to your website, and can replacing the lost search traffic.

Is AIO (AI Optimization) different from GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)? And what on earth is LLM?

Honestly, we are not sure yet. Some argue it’s the same, while others say AIO means optimizing workflows to utilize AI platforms for better efficiency and accuracy. We’ll go with GEO as most publications online are leaning towards it.

Most currently popular AI tools (such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) are built on the LLM model. Large Language Models (LLMs) are types of AI that ingest massive amounts of text, then use it to generate human-like responses to the people using it. It’s the brain behind AI that answers questions, writes content, and explains things in plain english (or whatever language you use AI in). You can now see why the content on your website matters, and why the mantra of “Content is King” is still true! Here are some handy guides on how to make your website appear more often on AI chats.

The Claim “AI Killed SEO” is Not True for Real Estate and SMBs

The idea that “AI killed SEO” isn’t quite true. For SMBs (small to medium-sized businesses), customers still have to purchase directly from you, so whether they start from Google or an AI assistant, they still end up on your website. Google’s new AI Overview, powered by Gemini, now surfaces detailed answers directly on the results page, and OpenAI’s upcoming SearchGPT will blend web search with AI reasoning – what we are now calling a “zero-click”.

SEO still matters, and these developments may actually create more opportunities for deep, meaningful content that allows SMBs to compete with major brands like Apple or Nike. As LLMs continue to evolve, driving local performance will become more critical than ever. Large domains will naturally dominate AI-generated answers, making it harder for individual brands to achieve broad visibility, but with a strong seeding strategy and high-quality localized content, SMBs can still build a powerful presence within AI-driven search results.

How AI Uses Web Searches To Discover and Recommend Your Website

When you ask ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity a question, they don’t scour the internet in great depth for answers. Instead, they perform quick, surface-level web searches to gather information efficiently. Gemini uses Google’s internal search system, while ChatGPT relies on Bing indexes along with 3rd party verifications. Perplexity uses a combination of its own PerplexityBot and Bing search results, and analyzes it deeper to prepare its responses to its human user.

Why The Shallow and Limited Search of the Web?

Computing power is expensive, and AI platforms need to balance answer quality with operational costs. Unless specifically prompted to dig deeper, these AI tools stick to the top-ranking results they find quickly. Remember that all these AI platforms are a Large Language Model (LLM), not a sentient being with a sense of purpose and mission. For deeper research, the human user will have to explicitly request and guide it.

Here’s how real estate websites can leverage this: AI queries tend to be more detailed and specific than traditional Google searches. Someone might ask, “What are the best waterfront neighborhoods in North Vancouver for families?” instead of just searching “North Vancouver homes.” This specificity creates opportunities for niche content to surface, even if you’re not dominating broad keywords like “Vancouver real estate.”

What Pushed Certain Real Estate Websites To AI References, and How To Compete

As we conducted our research on AI visibility, we saw very interesting trends and insights:

• Phrases like “Top-Rated”, “Experts” or “Best” were taken more literally. Websites that didn’t have much useful information or content related to the niche were still being referenced (this may be fixed in the future, we hope).
• Fresh content with a clear datestamp performed better, as AI engines prioritized recent real estate market stat blog articles with detailed price and sales ratio changes ($ and %) on a month-by-month basis, with the time period covered clearly (see Nest Presale’s Vancouver area market stats of October 2025).
• Reviews and ratings from 3rd parties seem to have a heavier impact, especially for queries such as “Best Realtors® in Burnaby”. While Google has been known to combat link spam (demoting importance of paid links, or backlink abuses), AI engines are not yet scrutinizing this well.

For queries that are not science/fact based, but more opinion-based, it appears that AI searches care more about the surface-level keywords and links from 3rd party websites (like a popularity contest), rather than a deep analysis of the entire website and its content (unless the human explicitly asks for it).

What Realtors® Should Do Yesterday – Get Client Testimonials and Reviews

Getting reviews on RankMyAgent, TrustPilot, ThreeBestRated provides external backlinks (popularity votes) which AI models are heavily relying on. Your Google Business Profile and Yelp reviews also impact your AI visibility, but this also helps local search visibility, and has been critical for years already before the invention of AI.

Getting reviews is a must-do, regardless of whether you want GEO or SEO, so we suggest you ask your past clients now if you don’t have at least 10 five-star reviews.

It’s now time for the serious real estate die-hards like yourself to move onto more in-depth GEO – Content!

Content Is Still King for GEO, and Solid SEO is The Foundation for AI Visibility

If search engine visibility is fundamental to AI visibility, it’s abundantly clear that solid SEO is foundational to AI referencing. In fact, we found that websites on which we performed heavy SEO over the years have already been shown to perform better on AI.

“As it turns out, SEO is the foundation of good GEO.” – Jeff Kee (Founder & Director of Brixwork)

SEO fundamentals such as a clean heading hierarchy, descriptive page and meta titles that support the content, relevant and enticing meta descriptions, and substantial amount of unique content on your major pages remain critical. For those who wish to step up their game even further, we gathered some more GEO specific techniques to help you step up your game beyond just SEO.

3 GEO Methods To Get More AI Citations On Your Website

Method 1 – Leverage Region & Niche Keywords With Some Bold Claims On Page & Meta Titles For AI Visibility

Your major pages – home page, neighborhood guides, service pages, listing result pages – need robust, well-structured content with strategic keywords naturally woven in. Consider incorporating phrases like “Top-Rated in [Your City]” or “Best [Your Specialty] Realtor® in [Neighborhood]” where they make sense. Our meta title and description instruction for real estate webpages show you even more samples and how-tos.

This doesn’t mean you should keyword spam your pages, and neglect content. Human visitors can quickly see through a shallow husk of a website that claims to be “The Top Presale Experts” yet don’t offer a comprehensive database of upcoming presales, and they’ll leave the page without contacting you, like a Tinder date disappearing while “Going to the bathroom”.

Method 2 – Use Questions and/or Full Phrases As Headings Instead of Short Statements

Because the LLM models are looking for the most likely answer to questions asked by humans, many digital marketers are finding that pages with headings that contain the question and/or detailed answers in phrases are getting more love from AI.

Here are some samples of headings on a Realtor®’s service pages, improved to get more love from AI:

Original Heading: “Premium Video Tours for Every Listing” (Heading 3)
AI-Friendly Headings: Open with “What Does It Take to Sell Your Home For The Highest Price Possible?” (Heading 2), with “4K Video Tours For An Immersive Digital Home Tour” (Additional Heading 4s)

Original Heading: “Guiding You Through the Buyer’s Journey”
AI-Friendly Heading: “What Does A Realtor® Do For a Homebuyer? What Services Are Provided?”

Method 3 – Publish Unique and Fresh Content To Out-Compete the AI-Duplicated Trash

Here’s where many real estate websites shoot themselves in the foot: AI platforms and Google actively deprioritize commoditized, generic content that sounds like it was written by—well, AI. If your neighborhood guides, market reports, and blog posts read like every other agent’s content (either plagiarized, or spat out by ChatGPT), you become invisible.

Furthermore, when asking about real estate market conditions, or buying and selling advice, AI searches often appended “2025” to its web searches before providing you with an answer along with citations. Our Blogging for Real Estate Websites Tips (Part 3) post covers meta title/descriptions with great depth.

The irony is ripe indeed – AI engines don’t want to regurgitate content created by AI! They prioritize original insights, fresh statistics and sales figures, and the newest intel that only a human expert would know will trump plagiarized/repeated content. If you are merely copy-pasting your local real estate board’s “Market Update” newsletter, you are wasting your time – you’re better off to go doorknocking (seriously, this is not sarcasm).

Describe the market conditions with specific dollar amounts, and clarify the reporting period. For example, a paragraph that starts with “September of 2025 saw a mild rise in sales compared to the same month in 2024 in North Vancouver, as the real estate market responded to the 0.25% drop in interest rates… ” will perform better than a generic “Last month’s market stats in North Vancouver:”

How Do I See AI Traffic Stats On My Website? Am I Showing Up On AI Results?

Google Analytics is a must-have tool for analyzing website traffic and visitor engagement. If you don’t have Google Analytics installed on your website yet, here’s how to activate it in 5 minutes.

Google Analytics can break down your website visitors by source (Search? Click on a link? Email campaign?), and that includes tracking which AI platform your visitors came from.

Unlike “Mobile Traffic” or “Organic Traffic”, “AI Traffic” is not yet natively classified in Google Analytics

Google Analytics does not (yet) have a natively built “AI Traffic” filter option. Any traffic from AI platforms are deemed “Referral” traffic just like any other link click from any external website, and you will see sources that look like chatgpt.com or perplexity.ai.

While it may seem simple enough to manually filter for Session Sources that contain “chatgpt” or “claude”, here is a more sophisticated way to get all of your AI traffic filtered properly.

Once in Google Analytics, go to the report of your choice. We recommend “Engagement” or “Acquisition” reports for this.

How To Filter AI Visitor Data Only on Google Analytics:

1. Click the Add Filter button (near the top left, under the title) – do not confuse this with the Add Comparison button.
2. On the sidebar to the right, set the Dimension to “Session source”.
3. Set the Match Type to “matches partial regex”
4. In the Value field, enter the following, including the brackets: (openai|chatgpt|gpt|gemini|claude|anthropic|perplexity|poe|copilot|phind|mistral|cohere|grok|reka|qwen|deepseek)
5. Click the “Apply” button on the bottom right of the sidebar.

Your filter is now set. You can now modify further details to get accurate intel on how much AI traffic your website has enjoyed.

1. Set the date range on the top right corner.
2. To see which AI platforms sent the most traffic, set the rows to “Session source”
3. To see which pages got the most traffic, change the dimensions to “Landing Page”.
4. If Landing Page or Session Source are not visible in the table dropdown, you will need to add this to the Dimensions in the report editor (pencil button on the top right).

Notes Regarding the Above Filter Value, and How To Update It

The above regular expression covers all the public-facing AI platforms we are aware of as of November 2025. You can add more matching source types separated by the | character, which means “or”. We recommend not putting the domain endings such as .com or .ai, as some referral source values were missing that portion.

How Can I Get Intel and Strategy on My Current Performance and Strategy for AI Visibility?

All this talk of AI-search, zero-clicks, and LLM seeding can be overwhelming. To understand how you’re performing in AI search and where your biggest opportunities lie, you have options. Matt Coenen at SurfSavvy.co recommends tools such as Search Atlas to gain deep intel on your website’s AI visibility. These platforms have learned how to reverse-engineer LLM behaviour, showing you which topics your brand already appears for in AI-generated results and where gaps exist. This gives you a competitive advantage by helping you show up in searches your competitors miss, and by revealing high-quality content opportunities where others may outrank you.

Building strong local citations (online listings like Yelp and Yellow Pages) will be essential for smaller businesses as these all help signal to LLMs brand legitimacy. These citations also serve as a measurable way for business owner to gauge their online word-of-mouth and overall brand presence. You can also analyze your ‘AI sentiment’ (how LLMs describe and perceive your brand) to proactively address inaccuracies, strengthen your positioning, and maintain a positive presence across AI-driven search experiences.

Competing Against Goliath – Where to Strike to Be Found on AI

Going head-to-head with Big Brands in GEO or SEO is like trying to outshout someone with a megaphone – you won’t win by going after the biggest, most popular searches right away. Big conglomerates and brokerages spend tens of thousands every month on SEO, so the Davids of the world need to be smart about where they compete. Instead of trying to rank for huge, impossible phrases like “top Vancouver Realtor” or “best running shoes,” it’s better to focus on smaller, more specific searches that big brands ignore – things like “Downsizing expert Realtor in North Vancouver” or “running shoes for flat feet under $100” These “long-tail” and local searches are easier to win and still bring in high-quality customers.

“A good SEO partner helps you identify keywords that align with your strengths, where there are numerous searches but few competing businesses.” – Matt Coenen (Founder of SurfSavvy)

It’s better to be a big fish in a small pond than a small fish in a big lake. That sweet spot is where small businesses can realistically rank, grow, and stand out. In the industry, we call these high-volume, low-competition keywords, and they’re the ideal starting point for a cost-effective, strategic SEO campaign.

Want Your Website To Be Shown on AI Queries? You Must Start With SEO

If your website content is easy for search engines such as Bing or Google to scan and index, AI bots will also crawl it with ease. Furthermore, AI queries rely on web-search results first to gather the foundational information.

“As it turns out, good GEO starts with good SEO.” – Jeff Kee

Want to get started on foundational SEO for your real estate website?

We have been researching and performing SEO for the real estate niche for well over a decade, and offer a wealth of expertise on how to build up your search engine ranking and increase organic traffic.

Take a look at our top-rated SEO how-to guides for real estate:

• Part 1 Of Blogging Tips and Inspiration
• Part 2 Of Blogging Tips and Inspiration
• Part 3 Of Blogging Tips and Inspiration
• DIY SEO for Realtors – Part 1: The Foundations
• DIY SEO for Realtors – Part 2: Optimise Every Listing

We also offer Dedicated SEO services for Brixwork website subscribers (sorry, we don’t work on websites on other platforms).

Don’t have the time, energy or money to spend months on SEO & GEO?

The brutal truth is that vast majority Realtors/Teams will not have the resources to dedicate to ongoing organic SEO & GEO. It’s an all or nothing game – either you’re dominating on 1st page, or be completely invisible on pages 2~50. There’s no middle ground in SEO.

Then, what are the middle-of-the-pack real estate professionals to do to get online leads? The only other way to get online leads is PPC Campaigns.