Latest Update:
Owning, Securing and Measuring Your Website
This series has covered why your website now has two audiences, what to change on your pages, and how agents browse differently to people. This final post is a short, practical checklist to work through, nothing here requires a redesign, just a close look at what you already have.
Go through your sales, lettings and property management pages and ask a simple question: could an AI system, or a person skimming quickly, tell exactly what you offer and where you operate within a few seconds? Vague, general phrasing is the most common gap. Naming specific towns, postcodes and services does more work than broad claims to being "local" or "trusted."
Check that your team pages, branch information and reviews are current, specific and easy to find. A named negotiator with a photograph and a genuine review carries more weight, with people and with AI systems, than a generic "meet the team" page that hasn't been updated in years.
Walk through your online valuation journey as if you were an AI agent trying to complete it on someone else's behalf. Are the fields clearly labelled? Is the call to action obvious? Anything that would confuse an agent is very likely quietly costing you human conversions too.
A meaningful share of AI-driven traffic now arrives with no referrer at all, which means it's invisible in standard analytics. If your traffic patterns look flat but your enquiries are holding up, or you're getting valuation requests that don't map neatly to a known source, that's worth investigating rather than dismissing as noise.
The quickest way to see where you stand is also the simplest. Open ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity and ask the kind of question a vendor might: which agents are best for selling in your town, or who's a good letting agent near a particular patch. Whether your agency is mentioned, and how accurately, tells you more in five minutes than most audits will. If you're absent or misrepresented, that's a strong signal of where the earlier items on this list need attention first.
Many websites, often without anyone deciding it deliberately, end up blocking the crawlers that power AI search results. This tends to happen through security or hosting settings that treat any unfamiliar bot as a threat, rather than through an intentional choice. It's worth checking your site's robots.txt file and any web application firewall settings to confirm that AI search and retrieval crawlers, as distinct from the crawlers used to train models, aren't being blocked by default. It's a five-minute technical check that can otherwise undo a lot of the work covered elsewhere in this series.
Most of what's covered in this series is groundwork rather than novelty, the same clarity and structure that's always made a good agency website, now mattering to a second audience as well as the first. None of it needs to happen at once. Working through it a page at a time, starting with the ones that matter most, is enough to keep your agency visible as more of this discovery moves through AI. If you'd like a hand thinking through where to start, our recent webinar on AI and lead management covers some of the same ground from the enquiry side.
