I’ll try to make this as straight to the point as I can. The way that your prospective customers find you via online search is about to change dramatically. But this is not an SEO pitch. SEO is done.
The other day I noticed how my teenage daughters were searching for information for their homework – they went straight to Chat GPT. See also Copilot, Claude, Grok etc.
No doubt Google and Bing will catch up and will enter the AI search fight properly but right now pioneering AI platforms are at the front of the pack for those of a certain age searching for things online.
WHAT AI MEANS TO YOU
So, to my point. What does this mean for your business as a mortgage broker as an estate agent trying to attract sellers and buyers or landlords and tenants from here on?
What does it mean for property industry suppliers seeking new B2B clients?
For mortgage brokers, housebuilders, real estate investment funds or park home providers, how will this move to ‘internet 3.0’ alter consumer behaviour?
Importantly though, the question for you is ‘What does this all mean for my marketing strategy?’
Let’s take an example of a potential property buyer about to start their search for a home.
Traditionally they’d pop over to Rightmove to find 90% of the UK’s listings and then go through the rigmarole of filtering for location, price, property type, bedrooms etc. Frankly, a painfully 20th century way of looking for something where the parameters are horribly fixed.
Now think about how my kids will search for their first home.
“Hey Chat GPT, show me a list of houses within a 15 minute walk of a rail station that gets me to London Liverpool Street or Fenchurch Street in less than 40 minutes. A minimum of three bedrooms and two bathrooms with a garage. A nice area that has low crime levels and good schools. Oh, and I like character homes”.
The results are served in less than five seconds and, guess what? Most of the results are listings from estate agents’ websites. Not Rightmove.
Does that make you think? It should.
MAKING AI WORK FOR YOU
Ok, so how to capitalise…
First, if you want to geek out on how internet search works and how machine learning is changing it from a deep, technical perspective, fill your boots here.
In essence you need to ensure two things. That your website is up to date with the information you want found and that it is regularly added to. It must be relevant to what you do or sell.
In order to show AI search that you are credible, you will need some third party validation (domain authority of sorts).
So, other websites that mention your brand and what you do – especially authoritative news sites. Peer review, kind of.
I cannot stress enough how important 1 and 2 are in order for you to be found in the future.
There will be no more PPC/adwords. No SEO trickery. In fact regular SEO is dying.
As a consequence, digital PR – brand mentions across news websites – have never been more important.
Scrub that. It’s not just important. It’s your very survival commercially.
