An agent with under four years in the business and only 30 Google reviews just outranked 10-year veterans in AI search.
It happened on the Toronto Real Estate Board, the largest real estate board in North America.
Agents with far more experience and reviews are grinding for referrals, which are valuable behind the scenes. But they’re invisible to the AI tools now feeding buyers and sellers answers to the question, “Who are the top three real estate agents in my area?”
In a recent podcast episode, guest Dave Hutchinson (aka Dave Hutch) joined The Broke Agent to break down the exact test to check if AI can find your website.
Their conversation also covers the three things AI checks before recommending an agent, backed by a live case study of the system in action.
Let’s start with square one.
First, Check If AI Can Even See Your Site
Before anything else, run one simple test. Type your website’s URL followed by /robots.txt and see what comes up.
What you see in the top left corner tells you whether AI is allowed to crawl your site at all.
A few years ago, blocking bots was standard practice. Plenty of agent sites still have that setting left over from a redesign years ago, telling AI systems to stay out. And they do.
The other piece is schema code. This is what AI actually reads to pull information from a page. Without it, AI has no way to understand who you are or what you do, even if the crawler gets in the door.
Dave runs a real estate team and coaches agents on AI content, and he explained why this is a bigger deal than most agents realize.
“So we think that AI is this magical brain that has its own thought process. That’s not the case. What AI is doing is pulling from what it finds online. And if it can’t go to your website online, that’s a massive problem.”
If your site is blocked or missing schema, AI has nothing to recommend. Reviews and years in the business don’t factor in if the system can’t reach the page in the first place.
What AI Actually Looks For: Ease of Communication and Plain-Text Reviews
Once AI can actually reach a site, it’s checking for two more things.
The first is ease of communication. A phone number, text option, and email visible on the first load of the page signal that a visitor, or an AI system, can reach the agent without digging.
The second is how reviews are presented. Widgets and reviews baked into images can look appealing to a human visitor, but AI can’t read them at all.
Dave was auditing this point live on Sarah Cromie‘s site, the same agent whose #4 ranking anchors this episode’s case study.
“Most of us that I’ve seen with real estate websites is they have widgets installed on their page or they have photos with the reviews baked into the photo. AI can’t read the photos. So all of this is plain text.”
That’s why an agent with only five reviews, all in plain text, can rank ahead of agents sitting on hundreds. The format the reviews are shown in decides whether AI counts them at all.
The same logic applies to niche language. Naming a specific neighborhood, property type, or client group in plain text on the homepage gives AI something concrete to match against a searcher’s exact question.
A generic pitch gives AI nothing to tie to anyone in particular.
How to Audit Your Own Real Estate Website
Once the concept clicks, the audit itself is straightforward enough to run in one sitting.
- Run the robots.txt check on your own URL
- Read the homepage like a stranger would. Does it say who you help and where, within the first few seconds?
- Confirm your phone, text, and email are visible and clickable, not buried in a footer or a separate contact page
- Check whether your reviews and credentials are in plain text or trapped inside a widget or image
Dave suggested going straight to the source when a competitor’s site is outranking yours.
“I asked AI, why is this person ranking, and why am I not ranking? You’re talking to the thing that’s ranking you. So ask the questions.”
Asking AI directly why another agent shows up first often surfaces the exact disconnect in your own setup, with insights straight from the system doing the ranking.
The Case Study: How a Rookie Agent Beat a 10-Year Veteran
The agent at the center of this episode has been in business for just under four years and has 30 Google reviews. Her website was built less than a month before this episode was recorded.
Sarah ranked fourth among top agents in her area on the Toronto Real Estate Board, the largest real estate board in North America.
Dave’s own numbers tell a different story:
- Ten years in real estate
- 195 star reviews
- A website he hadn’t touched in seven years
Dave was candid about what the comparison meant for his own business.
“And for all the Realtors out there that are working so hard to to get all these reviews and do all these bright things, it’s like, man, you’re getting beat by (someone) who’s been in the industry for a quarter of the time you have with a fraction of the reviews because she was intelligent about how she set herself up to be found on AI. And you can do the same.”
Her site’s setup decided the ranking. Review count and years in the business had nothing to do with it.
The Move to Run This Week
None of this requires a complete overhaul of your website.
- Run the robots.txt check
- Confirm AI is allowed and schema is in place
- Put contact info and reviews in plain text
Start with the test. Go to your own site, add /robots.txt to the end of the URL, and see what AI can actually reach right now.
For agents who want to go deeper on what AI is doing with real estate search, and how to build a site around it, BAM BBQ, BAM’s summer virtual real estate AI event, is the place to do it.
