Where an AI Answer About Your Market Comes From

The pages an AI assistant reads before it names a real estate agent, and the empty fields on yours that leave you out.

8 min read

When a buyer asks ChatGPT or Google's AI which real estate agent to call in their ZIP code, the assistant doesn't consult a private list of good agents. It searches the public web, reads the pages it finds, and writes an answer from them.

OpenAI says ChatGPT search "leverages third-party search providers, as well as content provided directly by our partners." Google tells businesses that a current Business Profile is one of the things that helps them appear in its AI features.

The assistant builds its answer about your market from profiles, listings and reviews. A blank field on one of those pages gives it nothing to quote.

That makes this a fixable problem rather than a mysterious one. You can see what the assistant read, because it shows its sources, and you can fill in the same kind of page for yourself.

What does an AI assistant read before it recommends an agent?

Nobody outside OpenAI or Google sees the full recipe, and anyone who claims to is selling something. What both companies have said publicly is enough to work with.

ChatGPT. OpenAI's help center describes ChatGPT search as drawing on third-party search providers and on content from partners. Reporting on the launch named Microsoft Bing as one of those providers. When ChatGPT searches, it shows the links it used, so the pages behind an answer are visible to you.

Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode. Google's Search Central guidance on AI features says no special optimization is required, and lists the ordinary basics. One of them reads, in Google's words, "Making sure your Merchant Center and Business Profile information is up-to-date."

Put those together and the likely inputs for "which agent should I call in 55060" are the pages any search engine would surface for that question:

Page	Who usually fills it in	The field that most often sits empty
Google Business Profile	You	The business description, and the service areas
Bing Places listing	You, or an import from your Google profile	The whole listing, because it's easy to forget Bing has one
Zillow and Realtor.com agent profiles	You	The about section and the areas you serve
Your brokerage's agent roster page	Your brokerage, from what you send them	The bio, often one line or a placeholder
Review sites and your Google reviews	Your clients	The reviews you never asked for
Your own website's about page	You	The neighborhoods you work, named plainly
Your social profiles	You	A bio that says who you help and where

None of these pages is new to you. What has changed is who reads them.

A buyer used to skim a page and move on. An assistant reads the whole field and either finds a sentence that answers the question or finds nothing.

Why do some agents show up and others never do?

An assistant answering a local question needs three facts it can quote with confidence: that you're a real estate agent, where you work, and something specific about how you work. When those facts appear on several pages and agree with each other, the assistant has something to say about you.

Most agents lose on the second and third facts. The profile exists, the name and phone number are right, and the description field is empty or says "Your trusted local real estate professional." That sentence answers nothing a buyer asked. The assistant skips it the way a buyer would.

The agent it names instead isn't necessarily the biggest producer in the ZIP. It's the one whose profile says, in plain words, which neighborhoods they work, which buyers they help, and what they did for the last few. Being findable comes down to whether you wrote those sentences down somewhere public.

Two other reasons you may not appear, and both are worth knowing before you fix anything:

The answer changes with the wording and the person asking. "Best agent in 55060", "who should I call to buy a house in Owatonna" and "first-time buyer agent near me" can return different names. ChatGPT may also use an approximate location from the person asking. Run more than one version before you conclude anything.
Some pages outrank you no matter what you fill in. Portal pages and brokerage pages carry weight you don't control. You can make sure that what they say about you is complete.

How do you test what an AI says about your market?

The test takes about ten minutes, and the uncomfortable part is the point.

Open ChatGPT with search on, and ask the question a buyer would ask: "I'm buying a home in [your ZIP]. Which real estate agent should I call?"
Ask the same thing a second and third way. Swap in your town's name, then a buyer type you work with, such as first-time buyers or relocation.
Run the same questions in Google and read the AI Overview if one appears.
Click every source the answer cites. Write down which kind of page each name came from: a Google profile, a portal profile, a brokerage roster, a review site, a news story.
Ask one follow-up: "Which page did you get that from?" It will often point at the exact profile it quoted.

You end up with a short list of page types that the assistant trusts for your market. That list is your fix list, in order.

If you appear, read what it says about you. An answer that names you with the wrong neighborhood or an outdated brokerage is pulling from a stale field, and that's worth fixing too.

Which blank field should you fill first?

The one the assistant cited most often in your test. For most agents that's the Google Business Profile description, because Google names the Business Profile directly and Bing Places can import it.

Google lists real estate agents as individual practitioners who may have their own profile, and it asks a service-area business working from home to hide its home address. Check your brokerage's policy on individual profiles before you create one.

The description field takes up to 750 characters. Google's guidelines ask for what you offer, what sets you apart and how long you've done it, and they ask you to leave out web addresses and promotions. A description that answers a buyer's question reads something like this:

I help first-time buyers and move-up families buy and sell in Owatonna, Medford and Faribault. Most of my buyers are moving from an apartment and want a yard within twenty minutes of work. I've sold homes here since 2014, and I walk every client through inspection and appraisal before they sign anything.

That paragraph is invented for the example. Yours needs your own towns, your own buyers and your own years. It carries the three facts an assistant looks for: what you do, where, and something specific about how.

If you want AI to draft it, give it the facts and the rules:

Write a Google Business Profile description for me, under 700 characters.
I am a real estate agent. Facts: [the towns and neighborhoods you work],
[the buyers and sellers you help most], [how long you have worked here],
[one specific thing you do for every client].
Describe areas by their homes, streets, commute and amenities, never by who
lives there or who a place suits, so it stays within Fair Housing rules and my
MLS's rules. Leave out web addresses, prices, promotions and superlatives.
Write it in first person, in plain words, the way I would say it to a buyer.

Read every line before you paste it. The prompt carries the Fair Housing and MLS instructions, and you're still the one who checks the result against them.

Then copy the same three facts, in the same words, into the next field on your list: the portal about section, the brokerage bio, your social profile bios. Pages that agree with each other give an assistant something it can repeat.

What does it cost to keep these fields filled?

The times below are our estimates for a first pass, and they recur.

Job	First time	After that
Run the AI test above	10 minutes	10 minutes a quarter
Write the Google Business Profile description	20 minutes	When your towns or focus change
Claim a Bing Places listing from your Google profile	10 minutes	It syncs from Google once linked
Fill the portal and brokerage about sections	30 minutes	When you change brokerages or markets
Write a bio for each social platform you post on	15 minutes each	When your focus changes
Ask recent clients for a review	5 minutes per client	After every closing

None of it is hard. The friction is that nothing reminds you. A blank field never sends a notification, and the assistant that skipped you never says so.

The job you have now

The job is keeping every public page about you complete, current and saying the same thing in your own words. Some of those pages are yours alone to fill: the Google profile, the portal profiles, the brokerage bio, and the reviews.

You can hire out the social profiles. Avenue Growth's Content Strategist writes a Social Media Profile for each platform you post on, sized to that platform's limits, from the Brand Profile you fill out once. You review it, copy it and paste it into the platform yourself.

Avenue Growth is $89 a month, with 14 days free.

Run the test this week. The agent the assistant names next month is whoever wrote the clearer sentence first.

Sources: OpenAI, "Searching the web with ChatGPT" help center article, 2024 to 2026; Google Search Central, "AI features and your website", updated December 2025; Google Business Profile Help, "Edit your Business Profile" and "Guidelines for representing your business on Google", 2026; launch coverage of ChatGPT search naming Microsoft Bing as a provider, 2024.