You deserve a lot more information on your upcoming real estate transaction than your search engine is offering.

A real estate search should begin with an assessment of your needs, your local market, financing options, agency representation, and information on local real estate practices. But search engines and AI portals equate the term ‘real estate’ with listings–returning results from listing aggregators like Zillow and Redfin–or listing services, like Houzeo, Realtor.com and Homes.com. They also promote generic articles from large publications that have no firsthand knowledge of real estate. Article pages may be so riddled with ads they’re unreadable, or hidden behind paywalls.

Google and AI platforms like ChatGPT Search and Perplexity favor these national, corporate “authority” sites when real estate information that matters most to consumers is niche and local. As McDougall Interactive reported, “Google put way too much trust into a site’s domain authority and apparently didn’t consider the fact that those sites would abuse their position and give us the same affiliate spam. Forbes is now publishing content about pest removal services and CBD oils—neither of which have anything to do with business. And they’re making a killing in affiliate marketing revenue. So instead of hundreds of smaller sites serving us affiliate content in the SERPs, Google’s new algorithm is just directing us to a few major sites. But it’s all just affiliate spam.

• High DA sites that “should” be providing helpful content are actually producing garbage.
• Google seems to be ignoring the quality of the content and the affiliate angle as long as it’s a top 500 domain.
• Google’s AI overview is leading to more zero-click searches, which will only hurt Google in the long run.
• If sites producing this content aren’t getting traffic, they lose the incentive to keep publishing, and Google loses quality content to scrape.
• In certain cases, AI content is actually ranking (although I think this will be short-lived—more on this later).
• Some high-quality websites producing excellent content with real substance are losing traffic and disappearing from the search results just because of their domain authority.”

How does all this impact your real estate search? Badly. Remember, plaintiffs in the NAR class action lawsuits claimed they didn’t have adequate information on how transactions work, what’s negotiable, and how to value homes. The information is available, but search engines and AI bury it.

Why?

Because:

• Besides promoting irrelevant corporate sites, search engines often promote brokerages and agents who pay for advertising on their platform
• AI, in turn, promotes many of those same entities who rose to prominence thanks to that search engine advertising and promotion
• Featured agents and brokerages also get top-ranked results from expensive, SEO-centric websites that are designed, written and managed by companies that exist to sell agents and brokerages a Google-friendly online presence. They accomplish that. But their content is often cookie-cutter promotion of little value to consumers.
• Online agent ranking sites are typically owned by third-party listing aggregators, or non-industry companies that charge agents to be included on their ‘recommended’ lists, unbeknownst to consumers.
• ‘Best of’ sites that don’t accept fees for recommendations rely on metics similar to those used by search engines, equating reprsentation quality with production levels, backlinks from “authority” sites, and social media activity.
• Production levels are particularly deceptive in determining representation quality because they relate solely to transaction quantity. Transactions for an entire team can be attributed to a single team leader. Off-market listings and new home transactions aren’t included because their data is unavailable to MLS and those to whom they sell data, so production numbers are skewed.
• ‘Authority site’ backlinks commonly result from paid PR and advertising
• Lead generation is job #1 for real estate agents and brokerages. Many new agents are surprised to learn this after they obtain their licenses. Those adept at lead generation, those with large ad and PR budgets, and those with the business skills to build big teams, however, are not necessarily the “best” agents in terms of knowledge, real estate practice skill, client care, educating buyers and sellers, negotiation, or transaction management.

It’s important to understand at least the basics on the practices, strategies and market itrends that will influence your transaction, and have a thorough understanding of agency, broker compensation, financing options, and transaction costs.

What you need to know varies according to your level of transaction experience, the type of transaction you’re considering, and many other factors. That’s why defining your needs, researching your local market, and interviewing agents and lenders to discuss the particulars is an important prelude to reviewing listings.

I tell you how to do these things in the articles on my Tools page.  SEO and AI guides advise me to dummy the content down, shorten it, add ‘entertainment’ features like clickbaity quips, videos and decorative images. They don’t think you have the intelligence and/or attention span to read long-form articles. But I post them anyway, because someone should.

Real estate purchases and sales are typically the largest transactions Americans make during their lifetimes. Read the stuff. Do the work. Find the agent whose skills, experience and representation style match your needs, and the rest will fall into place.

Compass is the #1 real estate brokerage in the nation and a leader in real estate technology.