How to Show Up in ChatGPT as a Realtor

Do home buyers use ChatGPT to find agents?

Some do, early in the search, and the numbers are still small. A Bank of America survey reported by NAR found 20% of prospective buyers and current homeowners have used AI tools or chatbots for homebuying research, rising to 28% of millennials and 32% of Gen Z. Use was concentrated in the early, informational phase. More than half of respondents still prefer real estate professionals when touring homes.

Traffic data agrees. Conductor's benchmarks put AI referrals at 1.01% of traffic to real estate sites, with ChatGPT behind 95.2% of those clicks, and AI Overviews on 4.5% of real estate queries. Those figures cover Conductor's enterprise customers from May to September 2025, not solo agents, and Conductor sells AEO software.

You will see much bigger numbers from firms selling AI visibility. Those are sales figures, and they vary with how the question was asked, so we do not repeat them. Note that none of the numbers above measures how often someone asks an AI to name an agent.

What does OpenAI say about appearing in ChatGPT?

OpenAI's public advice for site owners starts with access. Its crawler documentation says OAI-SearchBot is used to surface websites in ChatGPT's search features, and that sites opted out will not be shown in search answers, though they can still appear as plain links to the site. It recommends allowing the bot in robots.txt and allowing requests from its published IP ranges.

So check that first. Ask whoever runs your site whether robots.txt or a firewall blocks OAI-SearchBot. Agent sites often sit on a vendor platform you cannot see into, and a block there would stop everything else on this page from counting. Access makes you eligible. It does not earn a mention, and OpenAI's page makes no such promise.

Do you need special files or markup for AI search?

For Google, no. Its AI features guide says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode and no special schema.org structured data to add. Its generative AI guide says Google Search ignores LLMS.txt files, so keeping one will neither harm nor help you there. That page also says these features are rooted in Google's core ranking systems, so ordinary SEO comes first.

That is Google's word about Google. ChatGPT and other assistants may behave differently, and adding a small file is cheap. Do not pay much for it.

What should a realtor do to get recommended by AI?

Make your name easy to connect with your area and specialty on pages anyone can read. Nothing below is proven to cause a mention. It is what you can control, and it helps ordinary search as well.

• Write an agent page in plain text: your name, brokerage, areas, property types, languages and years in the market. A headshot and one line gives a reader nothing.
• Answer real questions on your site. What selling in this subdivision involves, what a buyer agreement means, how HOA rules work on this street. Use your own observations.
• Keep one set of facts. Match your name, brokerage, phone and areas across your site, your Google Business Profile and your portal profiles.
• Collect real reviews, and never pay for them.
• Keep listings separate from expertise. An IDX feed shows the same listings as every other site. Zillow has also had an app inside ChatGPT since October 6, 2025, so listing questions may stay with the portal. Your opening is on questions about you and your market.
• Watch your wording. An answer page about "the best area for families" raises the same issue as an ad, so read the fair housing advertising rules first.

How do you test whether ChatGPT recommends you?

Run the same prompts every month and record a rate. A single check tells you little, because answers can change between runs. Pick five to ten prompts a real client would type, run each three to five times, and log the results in a sheet like this:

What should you do with the results?

Read the cited pages. They show you what the assistant could reach, and where a competitor has something you do not. If a portal or directory keeps appearing, fix your profile there. If nothing about you appears, fix your own pages first.

Be careful with anyone selling a promised spot. Answers vary and platforms change, so nobody controls this. Judge the work on what moved in your own log over several months, next to the generative AI report in Search Console, which covers Google only.

GHOBZ runs this kind of monthly check as part of AEO for real estate agents and developers, alongside its other marketing for property businesses.