Ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Google’s AI Overviews who the best real estate agent in a given city is, and the odds are overwhelming that the actual top producer in that market doesn’t come up.
Many real estate agents are trying to crack the code of AEO — Answer Engine Optimization, sometimes called AI Engine Optimization. It’s a companion discipline to traditional SEO, fueled by the rise of AI-driven search.
Jeff Lobb, founder and CEO of SparkTank Media and Coach52, elaborated on this trend in detail at Inman Connect San Diego in July. “When people ask me where they should spend their time or money, I ask them: Where’s your customer? Are they on social?” Lobb said in San Diego. “Because right now, they’re shifting to AI significantly, the same way we saw the shift from the Yellow Pages to Google.”
New research from Local Falcon, a platform that tracks and improves brand visibility across generative AI answer engines, puts some hard numbers behind the AEO trend in the residential real estate industry.
Local Falcon found that 91.5 percent of established, website-publishing agents were never named once across 37,500 AI searches run in the 100 largest U.S. cities.
The company cross-referenced every agent or team named by five AI platforms — ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini and Grok — against RealTrends Verified’s 2026 production rankings.
Local Falcon ran three search phrases (“best realtor near me,” “best real estate agent near me,” “top rated real estate agent near me”) across 25 grid points per city, for 37,500 total queries. They counted an agent as “named” only when a platform linked to that agent’s own site or a page carrying their name.
READ MORE: https://www.inman.com/2026/08/20/ai-search-real-estate-agents/