Last Updated on August 12, 2026
A landlord with three properties wants a new letting agent. A year ago they would have searched, opened five tabs and rung round. Now a growing number of them ask ChatGPT, or read the AI answer at the top of Google, and get handed two or three agency names with a reason attached.
If your agency is not one of those names, you never knew the conversation happened.
Estate and letting agents have a particular blind spot here. Most of the industry’s marketing budget goes to the portals. Rightmove, Zoopla and OnTheMarket are where the properties are, so that is where the money goes. But the portals market your listings, not your agency. When someone asks an AI tool which agent to instruct, portal spend counts for nothing.
Our estate and letting agents leaderboard found the same pattern at national level. Purplebricks spent years being the loudest brand in the industry and lost £37.3m doing it. Knight Frank barely advertises and tops the table, because everything a careful buyer checks is in order. AI tools make the same kind of checks, just faster.
What sellers and landlords actually ask AI
The questions are blunter than most agents expect. Best estate agent in the town name. Which letting agent should I use for a buy to let. Estate agent with the lowest fees near me. Who sells houses fastest in the postcode. Letting agent for a landlord who lives abroad.
Notice what those questions have in common. They are about the agency, not the stock. The portals cannot answer them. What answers them is the public record of your business: your Google Business Profile, your reviews, your website and the directories that mention you.
Why AI leaves agencies out
Your Google Business Profile
This is the first place AI tools look for a local business, and it is where multi branch agencies quietly win. Each branch needs its own complete profile: correct category, opening hours, photos of the actual branch and team, and the services spelled out. Sales, lettings, property management, block management. If your profile says estate agent and nothing else, AI has nothing to match against a landlord’s question.
Your reviews
Estate agency is a low trust industry. That is not an insult, it is a market condition. AI tools lean heavily on review volume and recency when the stakes are high, and instructing an agent is a five figure decision for a seller. Twelve reviews from 2023 will lose to a competitor collecting two a week, every time. The habit matters more than the total: ask at completion, ask when the tenancy starts, ask when the first month’s rent lands.
Clear services on your own website
Many agency websites are a search box and a carousel of stock. The words AI needs are missing. If you manage property, say so in plain text, with the fee structure. If you specialise in new builds, land, auctions or student lets, say so. A page that plainly states what you do, where you do it and what it costs will be quoted by AI tools. A page that says your local property experts will not.
Your credentials
Letting agents in England must belong to a government approved redress scheme, and agents handling client money need client money protection. Propertymark membership is voluntary but checkable. These are exactly the verifiable signals AI tools favour, because they separate a real agency from a lead farm. If you hold them and your website does not mention them, you are hiding the evidence.
What to fix, in order
- Claim and complete a Google Business Profile for every branch, with services, hours, photos and the areas you cover.
- Check your name, address and phone number match everywhere you are listed. Rebrands and office moves leave a trail of conflicting records that AI reads as doubt.
- Put your redress scheme, client money protection and any Propertymark membership in your website footer and on your fees page, in text, not just logos.
- Build a review habit tied to your pipeline: completion, move in day, first rent payment. Reply to every review, including the rough ones.
- Write one plain page per service. What it costs, how it works, who it is for. That is the page AI will quote.
Common questions
Do portal listings help my agency show up in AI answers?
Not much. Portals promote the property, and the agency branding on a listing is thin. AI tools recommending an agent draw on your Google Business Profile, your reviews, your own website and independent mentions of your business. An agency can dominate its local portal listings and still be invisible when someone asks who to instruct.
How long does it take to show up in AI recommendations?
The basics move quickly. A completed profile and consistent listings can change what AI tools say about you within weeks. Reviews compound over months. None of it is instant, which is exactly why the agencies that start now will be hard to displace later.
Find out where you stand
Run the free check in check if AI recommends your business, then fix the gaps in the order above. If you want the deeper picture of how AI search is changing local discovery, read how UK businesses get found by AI search.
The advice on this page is drawn from our own testing of AI assistants, not from guesswork. We put buyer style questions to Google AI Mode, ChatGPT and Gemini, recorded which businesses each one named, and checked those names against the Companies House register.
The most recent trade level rounds were run in July and August 2026, across 15 UK towns. Two findings shape most of what you read here: the engines rarely agree with each other, and a business can be recommended while its registered company is dissolved or in liquidation.
The underlying studies, with full method and dates:
- Which electricians AI actually recommends
- Which roofers AI actually recommends
- The AI recommendation lottery
- Can you trust Google AI to recommend a tradesperson
- Where AI answers get their sources
AI answers vary between runs and change over time. These are findings from dated tests, not a description of how any engine will behave on the day you ask. Queries were run by hand through each engine’s standard web interface.
How visible is your agency?
The free Whito AI Visibility Scorecard checks how findable and trusted your business looks to customers and AI search in about two minutes, and tells you the one thing to fix first.
The structural checks behind this research run on any website in about twenty seconds. Enter yours and read the full result on the page. Free, and we do not ask for your email.
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