GROW WITH LIBERTAS & EXP REALTY
By Tim & Julie Harris
Here's a number that should stop you cold: in early 2026, 68% of Google searches ended without a single click. Not to your site, not to your listings, not to anywhere. The consumer asked a question, an AI answered it right there on the screen, and the conversation was over. When Google's AI Mode is doing the answering, that number jumps to 93%.
Read that again. Ninety-three percent of those searches send a click to nobody.
For fifteen years we coached agents to "win the SEO game" — keywords, backlinks, blog posts stuffed with "best realtor in [your town]." That game is ending. Not slowing down. Ending. The new game is getting the AI to say your name when a buyer asks it for help. And the rules are completely different.
Let's talk about how you actually win.
The buyer isn't Googling anymore. They're asking.
The modern luxury buyer doesn't type "Dorado Beach homes for sale" into a search bar and scroll ten blue links. They open ChatGPT and say, "I'm relocating to Puerto Rico under Act 60 — who can help me buy in Dorado Beach, and what's it like to live there?"
And the AI answers. With names. With recommendations. With a confident paragraph that sounds like advice from a trusted friend.
The only question that matters for your business is: is your name in that paragraph, or is your competitor's?
ChatGPT now commands roughly 68% of all AI chatbot traffic. Add Microsoft Copilot and that alliance controls nearly 74% of AI search. Google's Gemini holds about 18%. These three are the new front door to your market, and most agents don't even know the door exists.
Here's the secret the SEO crowd won't tell you: the AIs read your Google Business Profile first.
This is the part that changes everything, so lean in.
When you ask an AI for a local recommendation — a realtor, a restaurant, a contractor — it does not crawl your beautiful website. It reaches for structured, verified, tier-one data. And the single biggest source of that data is your Google Business Profile.
Gemini is grounded directly in Google Maps and Google Business Profile data. When it recommends a local agent, it's reading your profile as authoritative truth. Google made "Grounding with Google Maps" — 250 million+ verified places — generally available to developers. Your profile is literally wired into the machine.
Google AI Overviews use your Business Profile as the spine of every local answer.
ChatGPT pulls from Bing Places, Foursquare, and verified business directories — the same structured-data ecosystem your Google Profile feeds and mirrors.
The pattern across every platform is identical: the businesses getting named in AI answers are almost exclusively the ones with complete, well-managed Google Business Profiles. Your website is a brochure. Your Business Profile is the source code the robots actually read.
A real example: "Dorado Beach Insider"
We've been building out a profile for a niche real estate brand called Dorado Beach Insider — luxury and Act 60 relocation in Dorado Beach, Puerto Rico. Watch how the AEO playbook differs from the old SEO one:
Old SEO move: write 2,000-word blog posts stuffed with "Dorado Beach luxury homes" and pray Google ranks you on page one.
New AEO moves that actually get you cited:
Pick the commercial-intent category. Real estate agency as the primary category — that's the bucket AI maps buyer and seller queries into.
Go service-area, not pinned address. List every town — Dorado, Vega Alta, the San Juan metro — and every neighborhood: Dorado Beach East, West Beach, Plantation Village, La Cala. Each named place is another entity the AI can connect you to.
Front-load the description with the entity + location. AI weights your first sentence heaviest. Lead with who you are and exactly where.
Seed the Q&A with the questions buyers actually ask AI. Not "do you sell homes" — but "What's it like to live in Dorado Beach year-round?" and "How does Act 60 work with buying here?" Those clean question-and-answer pairs are exactly what an AI lifts into its response.
Obsess over consistency. Same name, same phone, same service area on Google, Bing, Yelp, Apple, Facebook. When the AI sees mismatched data, it loses confidence and drops you. Consistency beats cleverness every single time.
That's it. That's the work. And almost nobody in your market is doing it.
Your action steps this week
You don't need a six-month content strategy. You need to do these five things before Friday:
Claim and complete your Google Business Profile — 100%. Every field. Every category. Every photo. Blank fields are lost AI citations.
Rewrite your description to lead with what you do and where, in the first sentence.
Fill the services section with full descriptions — this is prime AI-scraping real estate.
Seed 8–10 real buyer questions in your Q&A and answer them like a local insider.
Audit your NAP (name, address/area, phone) across every platform and make it byte-for-byte identical.
The bottom line
The agents who win the next decade aren't the ones with the prettiest website or the most blog posts. They're the ones the machines trust enough to recommend by name.
SEO was about getting found by people searching. AEO — Answer Engine Optimization — is about getting quoted by the AI that the people now ask instead. The traffic isn't coming to your site anymore. The recommendation is happening inside the answer.
Get your Google Business Profile right, and you're tier-one content for every AI on the planet. Ignore it, and you're invisible — no matter how good your SEO used to be.
The robots are making introductions right now. Make sure they know your name.
— Tim & Julie Harris
Founders of Tim & Julie Harris Real Estate Coaching | Publishers of Harris Real Estate Daily | Hosts of PowerHouseTalk | eXp Realty Sponsors at Libertas
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