35% of major real estate sites are invisible to AI

More than a third of Australia's biggest real estate agency  websites have failed a basic AI visibility audit, according to new research from Foundable, the  Australian AI visibility and optimisation business for real estate. 

Foundable tested 100 of the country's biggest agency websites to answer one simple question: can  AI actually find and read them at all? Not whether AI would recommend the agency, just whether it  could see the site in the first place. Thirty-five of the 100 sites failed and scored an F. 

FURTHER FINDINGS 

• 25 of the 100 sites worked perfectly on an ordinary web browser but refused an AI crawler  seconds later: the same page, the same network address. Fourteen refused ChatGPT, Claude  and Perplexity alike. The site works perfectly for humans, but silently shuts the door on AI. 

• 11 of those 25 sites were running the same WordPress SEO plugin at the same version  number. The same software producing the same refusal behaviour, across unrelated  agencies. 

• Seven sites go further and instruct AI crawlers to stay away in their robots.txt file — a  deliberate setting, whether or not anyone remembers making it. 

• Of the 83 sites that returned content, nine in ten publish no real estate agent structured  data and 46 per cent publish no business structured data at all. Nothing on the page tells  an AI crawler what the business is, where it works, or how to reach it. 

• 22 sites publish a file designed to welcome AI systems in. Twelve of those are refusing  ChatGPT at the server at the same time. 

NOTHING LOOKS BROKEN FROM THE OUTSIDE 

Foundable founder Sandy Abram said the pattern behind the findings surprised her more than the  numbers themselves.

“In many cases, nobody at these agencies appears to have decided to block AI,” Abram said. “A  setting may have done it for them - buried in a plugin, firewall or security configuration nobody's  thought to check. This isn't a strategy problem. It's a marketing hygiene problem, and most agencies  don't know they have it.” 

That distinction matters because it comes before any question of whether AI would recommend an  agency to a seller. Abram said most agencies have never thought to ask it, largely because nothing  about a blocked site looks broken from the outside — it loads normally for every human visitor who  lands on it. 

WHY IT MATTERS 

The research comes as generative AI changes the way consumers search for businesses and  professional services, and highlights a new measure of an agency’s AI readiness. 

Google presents vendors a page of blue links to sort through. AI gives them one answer — and  mostly a shortlist of one to three names tops. Rather than presenting pages of options to  investigate, AI platforms increasingly skip straight to a small number of businesses, brands or  professionals they recommend directly. 

For real estate agents, that creates an entirely new marketing question: when a vendor asks AI,  “Who is the best agent to sell my home?”, are you one of the names it recommends? 

“AI isn't a search engine. It's a recommendation engine,” Abram said. “It doesn't hand a vendor a  list to work through — it hands them one to three names. But before AI can recommend an agent, it  first has to be able to find and read their website. 

“Our audit shows agents whether that's happening at all, and whether something in their own setup  may be quietly stopping it.” 

“Real estate has always been a shortlist business. What's changing is who, or what, is helping create  that shortlist,” Abram said. 

“If you're not one of those names, you may never know you were in the running.” 

THE BLIND SPOT 

Abram said the audit findings point to a blind spot for an industry that has traditionally measured its  digital visibility through Google rankings, property portals, social media and website traffic. 

“Agents know where they rank on Google. They know how many listings they have on  realestate.com.au. They know their social media numbers.

“But ask an agency director whether their own website is quietly blocking ChatGPT, and almost  none of them know — because almost none of them thought to check. 

“That's the gap we wanted to solve.” 

WHAT AGENCIES CAN DO 

Foundable has created a free AI Visibility Audit intended as a starting point, allowing agencies to see  how they currently appear, and whether anything in their own setup is working against them,  before undertaking deeper AI visibility and optimisation work. 

“For years the battle was to be number one on Google. The next battle may be much simpler: when  someone asks AI who to call, does it say your name — or does it never even get the chance to find  you?”