AI Search for Estate Agents in North Hertfordshire | Win More Instructions Locally
I had a conversation last Tuesday that I can't stop thinking about. Mate of mine runs a mid-size agency in Hitchin, been going twelve years, does well. We're at the pub and he's showing me his numbers on his phone. Website traffic: up. Google ranking for his main terms: solid. Enquiries from new sellers: down 35% since autumn.
He's staring at his pint going "I don't get it."
And I felt bad because I did get it. I'd been watching it happen across the board. His would-be clients weren't searching Google for "estate agents Hitchin" anymore. They were opening ChatGPT or Perplexity and asking something like "which estate agent in Hitchin has the best track record selling Victorian terraces under 500k." A very different kind of question. And one his entire online presence was invisible to.
Most agents haven't noticed the shift yet
So the thing about AI search, whether it's ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, whatever Copilot's doing these days, is it doesn't work like Google. People don't type two keywords and scan a list of blue links. They ask full questions. Specific ones. And the AI goes off, reads a load of sources, decides who seems credible, and builds a recommendation.
Your Google ranking? Doesn't factor in the way you'd expect. I've seen a two-person agency in Baldock show up in AI answers ahead of a national chain with a massive SEO budget. Because the AI didn't care about domain authority or backlink profiles. It cared about whether the content was specific, factual, and actually answered the question.
OK so what does this look like with real numbers
I track this. Obsessively, probably. Across the estate agents I work with in North Herts, AI-sourced enquiries went from around 6% of total in mid-2025 to roughly 19% by the end of February 2026. That's not a blip. And the trend line doesn't wobble, it just goes up.
One agency in Stevenage, three branches, decent setup. They were getting maybe two enquiries a month that traced back to AI tools last summer. Now it's eleven or twelve. Same marketing spend. Same team. Same Rightmove listing package. The only thing that changed was the channel people used to find them.
And here's what bugs me. The agents who aren't getting those enquiries don't know they're missing them. You can't see a gap in something you never measured. So they carry on optimising for Google, which is still worth doing (I'm not saying abandon that), but they're playing on one pitch while the crowd's moving to another.
Your website is probably talking to humans and ignoring machines
Right. I did an audit last month. Pulled up fourteen estate agent websites across Hitchin, Letchworth, Stevenage, Baldock. Thirteen of them had the same basic structure. Nice photos. "Welcome to [Agency Name], your local property experts." A valuation tool. Staff bios. Blog that died in September.
That's fine for a human visitor. But an AI reading your site is looking for different things.
It wants specifics. Not "we've sold thousands of homes" but "we completed 47 sales in Letchworth Garden City in the second half of 2025, averaging 26 days from listing to offer accepted." It wants opinions backed by data. It wants structured answers to the exact questions people ask it.
And this is the bit that makes me sound like a broken record but I'll say it anyway: you need to be the most useful, most specific source of information about property in your patch. Not the prettiest website. Not the most keywords jammed into your homepage. The most useful.
What that actually means in practice:
- Write area guides that go properly deep. Not 200 words about Royston being "a charming market town." I'm talking schools, catchment boundaries, what the parking situation's like on market day, which streets are in flood zone 2, what the planned development off Baldock Road means for supply over the next three years
- Monthly market updates with actual figures. Sales volumes, average prices, days on market. Pull it from your own data and Land Registry. AI systems eat this stuff up because it's timestamped, factual, local
- Answer the questions your vendors and buyers actually ask you on valuation visits. "Should I get an EPC before listing?" "Is it better to sell before buying in this market?" "How does the new stamp duty threshold affect a £375k semi?" Put the answers on your site. In full.
- Have someone look at your schema markup because I guarantee your listings don't have PropertyListing schema and your business details probably aren't structured either
That last one sounds technical and it is. You don't need to understand it, you just need someone who does to sort it out.
The agent who's accidentally winning
There's a woman running a small agency near Baldock, just her and one other, and she's dominating AI search results across half of North Hertfordshire. I ran into her at a BNI thing last year and we got talking. She had no idea what AEO was.
But she'd been doing something for about four years. Every month she publishes a detailed market breakdown. "North Herts property: what happened in January 2026." Completions, asking prices versus sold prices, which postcodes are moving, which are sitting. Real commentary. She writes it partly because she finds it interesting and partly because her clients ask for it.
Turns out she'd built exactly the kind of content library that AI tools trust. Regular publication cadence. Factual. Hyper-local. Opinionated where it counts ("I think the SG7 market is going to soften in Q2 and here's why"). She'd done AEO without knowing AEO existed.
Which should tell you something about what this actually requires. It's not some black-box trick. It's being the most knowledgeable, most forthcoming source in your area, and making sure that knowledge is structured so machines can parse it.
The technical layer you probably can't DIY
Look, I said some of this is stuff you can do yourself. Write better content, be more specific, publish regularly. And that's true, if you've got the time and the discipline to keep it up. (Most agents are busy, you know... selling houses. So it tends to fall off after month two.)
But there's a technical layer underneath that really does need professional handling. Your robots.txt might be blocking AI crawlers right now, loads of agents' sites do this by default and they've no clue. Your sitemap might be outdated. You probably don't have FAQ schema on your advice content. Your internal linking structure might be a mess, which means an AI crawling your site can't tell that your Letchworth area guide connects to your Letchworth market update connects to your Letchworth team page.
All of that affects whether AI tools find you, trust you, and cite you. And none of it shows up in your standard Google Analytics report, which is part of why this whole thing creeps up on people.
I'll be blunt about timing
The window for getting ahead on this in North Herts is open but it's not going to stay open forever. Right now, most estate agents are doing absolutely nothing about AI search optimisation. The few who are, whether by accident or design, are hoovering up enquiries that everyone else doesn't even know exist.
Six months from now? A year? Every agency and their franchise head office will be scrambling to do this. And it'll still work, but you'll be fighting for position rather than walking into an empty room.
I've been doing this for three years now and I've worked with enough agents to know what actually shifts the numbers versus what sounds good in a blog post. (Bit ironic saying that in a blog post, I know.)
If any of this made you think "bloody hell, I should probably look into this," then book a call and we can go through where your agency stands. Takes about twenty minutes and I'll show you exactly what AI tools are saying when someone asks about agents in your area. You might like it. You probably won't. Either way you'll know.
Or if you want a broader look at what we're doing locally, there's more on AEO in North Hertfordshire.