Your Buyers Aren’t Googling Anymore. Some of Them Are Just Asking.
Digital Insights — David Can’t Swim
Back in 1998, if you wanted your business found online, you submitted your site to AltaVista and Northern Lights by hand, crossed your fingers, and waited. It felt like a strange new world. It wasn’t, not really — it was just the same old job of “be clear about who you are and where you are” wearing a new coat. I’ve watched that coat get changed four or five times since. This is another one of those moments, and it’s worth talking about plainly, without the hype.
What’s actually changed
More people are starting their house hunt by asking an AI assistant a question, rather than typing it into a search box. Something like “which areas near PL6 are good for families” or “recommend an estate agent in Plymouth who actually answers the phone.” The assistant reads around, works out an answer, and hands the person a short, confident summary — often without the person ever clicking through to a website at all.
That’s a real shift. For twenty-odd years, the game was: get your page to rank, then win the click. Now there’s a step before that. The assistant has to decide your page is worth reading and quoting in the first place. If it isn’t, you don’t lose a ranking position — you simply don’t exist in that conversation at all.
Why this actually suits estate agents
Here’s the encouraging part. AI assistants aren’t impressed by keyword tricks or clever backlink schemes — never really were the point, whatever anyone tried to sell you. What they respond to is exactly what a good local agent already has: specific, honest, well-organised information. Which roads flood. Which schools are oversubscribed. What a three-bed semi off Mannamead Road actually goes for versus the asking price. That’s not content marketing, that’s just knowing your patch — and it happens to be precisely the material that gets pulled into an AI answer, because it’s useful and nobody else bothered to write it down properly.
The agents I’ve worked with who write plain, specific pages for each PL postcode area — not padded-out fluff, actual detail — are sitting on exactly the kind of content these systems favour. The work we’ve already done together on location pages and consistent business details wasn’t just for Google. It turns out to be the right groundwork for this next bit too, which is a nice bit of luck rather than clever foresight on my part.
What I’d actually do about it
Nothing drastic. A few honest habits:
- Keep your name, address and phone number identical everywhere — Google Business Profile, website, Rightmove, the lot. AI assistants cross-check this the same way people do.
- Answer the actual question on the page. If a page is meant to cover “family homes near PL7,” it should say something useful about schools and parks in the first two sentences, not three paragraphs in.
- Write like a person who’s actually walked the street, because that’s the kind of detail these systems can’t fake and increasingly seem to prefer.
I don’t think anyone fully knows where this settles. I didn’t know where the internet was going in 1998 either, and I turned out to be wrong about several confident predictions I made at the time (ask me about the one involving fax-to-email gateways, if you’d like a laugh). But the underlying principle hasn’t moved in twenty-five years: be genuinely useful about your actual local area, say it plainly, and the discovery layer — whatever it happens to be built from this decade — tends to find you.
If you’d like your location pages looked at with this in mind, get in touch — and as ever, anything and everything from new local business work goes straight to St Luke’s Hospice and the Primrose Foundation.
Need help and/or advice? Get in touch 🙂