By Thomas Gregorich, Luxury Presence’s Manager of Search & AI Visibility

According to research from AirOps, about 85% of brand mentions in AI answers (think ChatGPT or Gemini) come from third-party pages, not your own website. About 48% of those citations come from community platforms like Reddit and YouTube alone. 

If you’re spending all your energy optimizing your own site and ignoring the rest of the web, you’re likely missing out on getting mentioned in answers on platforms like ChatGPT.

The good news is there’s a clear playbook for this, and agents who move now will have a real head start.

TLDR

• About 85% of the time an AI tool cites your brand, it’s linking to a third-party site, not your own.
• About 48% of AI citations come from community platforms like Reddit and YouTube.
• You can find exactly which sites AI tools are citing in your market with a simple manual search, or tools like AirOps, Semrush’s AI Toolkit, and Ahrefs Brand Radar
• Once you know which pages AI is pulling from, you can reach out and ask to be included.
• Brand popularity, how often people search your name, correlates with how often you show up in AI answers.

How to See What AI Is Already Saying About You

LLM search often depends on live web retrieval. ChatGPT Search is known to use Bing’s index and OpenAI’s crawlers, while claims that it also relies on Google are still more tentative. Being a strong, well-indexed brand can help visibility in AI answers, though it does not guarantee inclusion.

If you’ve been working in your market for any amount of time, your name may already be showing up in AI-generated answers. 

The question is whether that mention is sending people to your website, or to a Zillow page or a brokerage profile where you don’t control what’s being said.

Here’s something I’d tell any agent to do this week: Google your name along with your market. Then ask ChatGPT the same thing. Try Perplexity too. Compare what comes up. You’ll see what’s actually representing you out there. If those profiles are outdated or incomplete, that’s your first fix.

The Fastest Way to Show Up in ChatGPT as a Real Estate Agent

Here’s a pro tip for agents who want to fast-track this: find the pages ChatGPT is already citing. If you search “best realtor in [your area]” in ChatGPT, the answer will have links to the pages where the information was found. 

If one of those pages is a list of top agents in your area on a site like Zillow or a local publication, reach out to that website and ask them to add you. Once you’re on that page, the next time an LLM crawls it, you’re in the answer.

This is why about 85% of your mentions in ChatGPT will come from off-site sources. Getting on the pages that are already being cited is the fastest path in.

How to Find Cited Pages Yourself 

Open ChatGPT with browsing turned on, and open Google’s AI Overview. Start typing in the queries that matter to your business: “Best luxury real estate agent in [your market].” “Top realtor for first-time homebuyers in [your city].” “Who should I hire to sell my home in [your neighborhood].”

For each result, look at the cited sources and log every URL. You’ll start to see patterns fast. Certain sites, directories, and publications keep coming up. Those are the pages you want to be on.

What Tools Find AI Cited Pages for You?

If you want to do this across dozens of queries, AirOps, Semrush’s AI Toolkit, and Ahrefs Brand Radar all let you enter prompts relevant to your market and see exactly which third-party pages are being cited. That gives you a clear picture of where to focus.

The Off-Site Sources That Matter Most, and How to Get on Them

About 48% of AI citations come from community platforms like Reddit, YouTube, and online forums. Most agents are completely ignoring those channels. 

Local publications carry serious weight too. Review platforms like Google, Zillow, and Yelp are consistently cited. And then you have industry directories and brokerage pages.

For local publications, position yourself as a source. Reach out when there’s a market shift and offer your take. Journalists are always looking for local experts who can speak to trends with real data.

For Reddit and community forums, participate in conversations about your market, answer questions, and share your actual knowledge. Agents who show up with genuinely helpful answers on these platforms are the ones getting cited.

For directories and listing sites, make sure your profiles are complete and accurate everywhere. A lot of agents have incomplete or outdated profiles on the exact platforms AI tools are pulling from.

And once you create content, distribute it. Get it out somewhere: Reddit, local news sites, community forums. A lot of those sites are hungry for new stories and angles. Cold emails asking for links or paying for mentions on low-quality sites are a waste of time. The links that matter are the ones that are earned.

Reviews Are One of the Strongest Signals AI Tools Use

I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to have a brand people are raving about. When AI tools are deciding which agents to recommend, reviews are one of the biggest factors.

If you have 55 five-star reviews on your Google Business Profile and you’re consistently getting new ones, that’s a powerful signal. It tells search algorithms you’re active, good at what you do, and that real people are vouching for you.

Respond to Reviews

When a client leaves a five-star review saying you helped them buy their first home, go beyond “thanks.” Be specific. “I loved helping you and Sarah find your place in Westwood. It’s such a well-rounded neighborhood with a lot to offer.” 

You’re adding context and location-relevant detail. Anyone reading those reviews, AI included, can see you genuinely know your area and your clients.

Even one-star reviews are an opportunity. A thoughtful response like “I’m sorry about that experience, please reach out directly” tells both users and AI tools that you care about your client relationships.

This week, look at your review profiles across Google, Zillow, and Yelp. Are you actively getting new reviews? Are you responding to every single one with specifics about the transaction and the area? If not, that’s probably the fastest win available to you right now.

Brand Popularity Feeds AI Visibility

There’s a documented correlation between brand search volume and LLM visibility. Brand popularity and AI visibility feed each other.

I saw a realtor ranking at the top of search results for a pretty competitive keyword not long ago. When I looked at the article, it was really short. It came from first-hand experience, not something that looked like it took a lot of time to research. And yet it was outranking everything else. I was led to believe it’s because that realtor had his own TV show, had written books, was on podcasts. People knew and trusted his name so search engines did too. 

You can do as much on-page SEO as you want and make sure your site is technically sound, but without brand awareness driving people to search for you, it won’t go far. 

Ways to build it: get on local podcasts, get quoted in local press, get involved in your community, be active on social media in a way that’s genuine to you, be mentioned on Reddit. 

Every time somebody searches your name because they heard you on a podcast or saw you in a local article, that’s a signal that compounds.

To track whether it’s working, use a tool like Semrush or Ahrefs. Just search your brand and it’ll show you approximately how often each month your name gets searched. There should be a direct correlation between the PR and social work you’re doing and that number going up. 

If you want a free option, Google Trends lets you enter your name and see how you’re trending over time. Track the impact of your promotional work as you go.

The real user pattern we’re seeing: someone goes to ChatGPT, asks for the best agents in their area, gets a list of names, then turns around and Googles those names. 

They check the Google Business Profile, read the reviews, visit the website. That branded Google search tells Google you’re relevant. That feeds back into how AI tools evaluate your authority.

How to Monitor Your AI Mentions Over Time

I want to be upfront about this: tracking your exact position in AI answers is still unreliable. Research from SparkToro found that when you run the same prompt 100 times, you almost never get the same list of names twice, and the odds of getting them in the same order are less than 1 in 1,000. Even brands that showed up reliably only landed in roughly 55–90% of answers, with their position bouncing around every time.

Anyone selling you an “AI rankings” dashboard should be met with some skepticism. AI search tracking tools can certainly indicate how you’re performing in LLM answers but have limitations. 

The silver lining is you can track visits to your site from ChatGPT citations in Google Analytics (GA4). It tells you whether those mentions are driving real people to your site.

You can also watch branded search impressions in Google Search Console. If you’re seeing quarter-over-quarter growth in branded impressions tied to specific marketing activity, there’s a good chance AI mentions are part of the reason.

And the manual version: run your key market queries through ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overview once a month. Screenshot the results. 

Over time you’ll see whether your name is showing up more frequently and whether the sites citing you are ones you’ve actively worked to get on.

Start tracking all three now so you have a baseline. You improve only what you measure.

Agents Who Don’t Work on SEO and GEO May Have to Play Catch-Up

I sell LLM search optimization for real estate agents as risk mitigation, not as a guarantee that ChatGPT will one day be dominant. I have to be honest about how ambiguous this environment is. It changes all the time. 

Some sites will multiply their citations overnight, and then ChatGPT will change models and feature fewer citations, or start favoring something like Wikipedia, and citation count and traffic will drop. There’s a lot of learning going on right now, and no guarantee of how it all shakes out.

But it’s better to get a foothold now before competitors lock in. 

And here’s what makes this worth doing regardless: organic search and how often you’re being cited in ChatGPT often go up and down together. If you’re not working on your organic search, your citations aren’t going to increase. 

If you start losing organic visibility, your citations will most likely drop at the same time. Quality content, strong reviews, off-site mentions. Everything you do to build AI visibility also strengthens your traditional SEO. It’s one strategy that pays off across every platform where people discover agents.