A new study conducted by 5W Public Relations in collaboration with Haute Living magazine has revealed a significant disparity between the use of artificial intelligence (AI) within the real estate sector and its visibility in public AI search engines. While 82% of real estate agents use AI tools in their daily work, in the overall rating of visibility in AI Overviews, real estate ranked last among major industries with just 0.14%.
The gaping difference in statistics is particularly evident when compared to other sectors. Healthcare generates AI-powered responses in 13% of cases, B2B software in 8.4%, and finance in 4.2%. Experts point out that the real estate market has adopted AI for internal purposes, such as writing listings in ChatGPT or summarizing market data, but has completely overlooked the process by which these models find information about the market and agents.
"Luxury real estate currently lacks an authoritative voice in the AI space that models like ChatGPT or Claude would automatically turn to for market or neighborhood queries. The first entities to start building structured content and authority will dominate this space," states Ronn Torossian, founder of 5W Public Relations.
The study further states that major platforms like Zillow, Redfin, and Google have already launched their own generative AI functions, which are changing the way buyers search for properties. However, real estate agencies themselves are lagging behind this development. They often make technical errors, such as blocking OpenAI (GPTBot) or Anthropic (ClaudeBot) robots in their website configuration files, which renders their listings invisible to modern search.
Researchers estimate that there is approximately a 24-month window of opportunity for the real estate segment before the AI response space is filled by dominant players, similar to what happened in legal services or software. Therefore, they recommend focusing on generative engine optimization (GEO), which optimizes for generative search engines. Unlike classic SEO, GEO does not focus on click-through rates but on ensuring that the entity is cited as a credible source of information in a chatbot's response.
The economic stakes are high. According to Altrata data, there are over half a million ultra-high-net-worth individuals worldwide with assets totaling $60 trillion. Given that these clients are increasingly using AI for initial market research, direct visibility in AI algorithms will be crucial for securing exclusive mandates in the coming decade.