For years, real estate agents chased the same prize: A spot on the first page of Google Search results. That goal may no longer be the right one — or even within reach.
At its annual I/O conference this month, Google unveiled what it described as the biggest overhaul to Search since the product launched, a move away from ranked website links and toward a conversational, AI-driven experience powered by Gemini.
Instead of returning a list of links, Search will increasingly drop users into AI-powered interactive experiences, with tools that dispatch “information agents” to gather information on a user’s behalf. A new search box accommodates longer, more conversational queries, and Search results will generate custom widgets and visualizations on the fly in response to user questions.
Website links remain part of the experience, but as a secondary element rather than the primary product.
The decline is already happening
This is not a future problem. Google’s AI Overviews have been pulling traffic away from websites for more than a year. Ahrefs research analyzing 300,000 keywords found that for queries triggering AI Overviews, the position one click-through rate dropped from 7.3 percent to 1.6 percent compared with pre-AI Overviews baselines. Zero-click searches rose from 56 percent to nearly 69 percent by May, according to Similarweb. The I/O announcements push further in the same direction.
What this means for real estate
Real estate searches have some natural protection here. According to SeoProfy, queries related to real estate and local services are less likely to trigger AI summaries because users typically search for specific businesses or providers rather than general information. A search for a specific agent or brokerage behaves differently than a generic how-to query.
The real exposure is earlier in the funnel. Neighborhood research, market condition questions, mortgage basics — the content that used to bring buyers and sellers to agent websites before they ever searched for a specific agent — is increasingly being answered inside AI tools without a click happening at all. According to Ranktracker, AI Mode compresses early research, meaning the top-of-funnel discovery phase increasingly happens inside AI tools rather than on agent websites.
What to do now
Agents who want search to keep working for them need to focus on being cited by AI tools, not just indexed by them.
- Lock down your Google Business Profile. Google still uses relevance, distance and prominence to rank local results, and a complete, accurate profile helps a business show up in Maps and Search. Reviews, accurate contact information, and consistent name, address and phone data across the web all feed the signals AI tools use to surface credible local providers.
- Write content that answers specific questions. Structured content, clear answers to common questions and strong E-E-A-T signals — Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness — are increasingly important as AI summaries become more prominent in search results. Hyper-local pages, neighborhood guides and market data built around specific questions are more likely to be cited in AI answers than generic blog content.
- Add structured data to your website. Key schema types for real estate include RealEstateAgent, RealEstateListing, LocalBusiness and FAQ schema for community pages, making it easier for Google to pull information into rich results directly on the search page. Most agent website platforms support this through built-in tools or plugins.
- Build channels you own. Publishers who have invested in brand development and reader loyalty are seeing direct traffic grow as search referrals decline, with email newsletters emerging as owned channels that do not depend on algorithm-driven distribution. For agents, that means email lists and direct client communication that do not require a Google search to reach an audience.
Agents with the strongest position heading into this shift are those who are already recognized by AI tools as credible local authorities, and whose past clients can find them without a search at all. If that isn’t you yet, then the steps above are where to focus first.
