When vendors
ask AI.

Buyers ask AI to find homes: 'three-bedroom house in Woy Woy under $900k with a yard'. In February 2026 realestate.com.au launched an app inside ChatGPT that searches its listings, showing photos, prices and agent details. That answer comes from the portal's data, so an agency's own website rarely features. Your listings appear there because they're on the portal, not because of anything you did for AI.

Vendors ask different questions: 'who's the best real estate agent in Kincumber', 'what's my house worth in Merewether', 'should I sell before Christmas or wait'. Those are the answers an agent can be part of, because they lean on local knowledge, recent sales and reputation, which no portal owns outright.

Landlords ask a third set: 'how much does a property manager cost in Parramatta', 'how do I switch property managers'. The same logic applies, and the property management page covers what those landlords want to read.

Google's guide to its AI features calls the process query fan-out: a set of related searches the model runs at the same time. A question like 'best agent to sell a unit in Gosford' might fan out into recent unit sales in Gosford, agent reviews, days on market and agency fees. The answer then links to pages that back up each part.

ChatGPT works in a similar way. OpenAI says it rewrites a question into one or more targeted searches, sometimes through partner search providers, and can use location for nearby business listings. It also says there's no way to guarantee a top spot.

One technical point is easy to miss. OpenAI says sites that block OAI-SearchBot won't be shown in ChatGPT search answers. Some website platforms and security plugins turn away unfamiliar bots by default, so ask whoever looks after your site to check.

Google's own requirements are short: a page must be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet. The same guide says a Google Business Profile can help a business show in AI responses as well as normal results. For an agency, that makes the profile, and the seller reviews on it, part of the AI answer rather than a separate job.

Agent bios are full of lines like 'Central Coast's No.1 agent', 'record-breaking results' and 'unmatched local knowledge'. A tool building an answer from several sources has nothing to check in those, so they add little. 'Sold 23 homes in Avoca Beach between 1 November 2025 and 31 October 2026' is something it can match against sold data and repeat.

There's a legal reason to tidy them too. The ACCC says claims must be true, accurate and based on reasonable grounds, and a business must be able to prove any claim it advertises. 'No.1' without saying by what measure, where and over what period is hard to prove, and your website bio is advertising.

Write each claim the way you'd defend it: the number, the suburb, the period and where the figure comes from. If you can't fill in all four, it isn't ready to publish.

Paste a bio or your 'about' page. It flags the lines an AI tool can't check and shows what would make them usable.

This is the vendor question people put to AI most readily, and the one most likely to get a wrong answer. A tool may quote a portal estimate, an old suburb median, or a sale from the wrong street.

You can't control that answer, but you can be the most useful page behind it. In NSW, for agency agreements from 17 November 2026, agents must work out an estimated selling price usually from comparable sales within 2 km and 6 months in metropolitan areas, or 5 km and 18 months elsewhere, and give the seller that estimate in writing with the evidence. A page that explains how you work out a price, using that same method, answers the question better than a general AI summary can.

Victoria and Queensland differ. In Victoria, the Property Price Statement must now be displayed prominently in online advertising and updated with the sale price after an unconditional sale. In Queensland, agents must not give a price guide for auction properties, so a Brisbane page promising 'a free auction price guide' is wrong under Queensland law, and an AI tool may repeat it anyway. If you sell across a border, keep each state's rules straight on your own pages.

Buyers aren't forgiving about this. In Cotality's AI in Housing 2026 research, 42% of Australian buyers said they had zero tolerance for errors in listing data, and 70% said AI errors would reduce their trust in a platform.

The industry has already had its warning. In November 2024 an LJ Hooker branch used ChatGPT to write a rental listing in Farley, near Maitland, that named two local schools that don't exist. It was corrected once Guardian Australia asked about it. AI tools read listings like that, and a made-up detail can travel.

So check anything AI wrote before it goes out, and check what AI says about you. Every couple of months, ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Google's AI Mode the vendor questions for your suburbs. When a detail is wrong, find where it probably came from: an old agent profile, a closed office on your Google profile, a directory listing nobody updates. Fix the source, then make the rest match.

None of this needs special code. Google's guide says you don't need llms.txt files, special markup or content cut into chunks for AI, and warns that churning out a page for every way a question can be asked can count as scaled content abuse. One honest page per suburb you know beats 40 thin ones. Search Console's generative AI performance report shows how your pages are doing in Google's AI features.

• A page per agent with their real sales, suburbs, reviews and photo. When a vendor searches an agent's name before the appraisal, this is the page you want them to find.
• Recent sales on your own site as text, with suburb, sale method and date, not only in a photo slider or a portal widget.
• One business name, address and phone number everywhere: your site, Google Business Profile, realestate.com.au and Domain profiles.
• Seller reviews on your Google profile, asked for at settlement, within the ACCC's rules on reviews.
• Suburb pages only you could write. The SEO page has a planner for which suburbs earn one.