Last updated: August 2026
An AI assistant has just recommended you. That should be the end of the story, but for most people, it is only the beginning of a much more sceptical second act. The questions at this stage sound noticeably more pointed than the ones that came before:
“Is this agent legit?”
“Do the reviews match what the AI told me?”
“Is this area actually safe, good for families?”
“Are these fees normal?”
And the checking happens across a genuinely wide spread of places: Rightmove, Zoopla, Google Business Profile reviews, Trustpilot, allAgents, local Facebook groups and Reddit threads, anywhere that feels human and current rather than curated.
BrightLocal’s 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey found that 97 percent of consumers now read reviews before choosing a local business, and that the share of people using AI tools such as ChatGPT to discover and vet local businesses jumped from 6 percent to 45 percent in a single year, now the third most used discovery channel behind only Google and Facebook. That is a US panel, but the pattern applies directly to how UK buyers and sellers are checking out agents and surveyors today.
This looks different depending on who is checking
For a residential buyer or seller, this is largely about recent, specific reviews and a fee structure that does not need decoding.
For surveying, commercial agency and property management, the checking process is just as thorough but looks for different things entirely. Buyers of these professional services want to know whether a surveying firm is RICS Regulated and carries adequate professional indemnity insurance. They look for case studies or a track record with similar assets, industrial, retail, listed buildings, mixed use blocks. They check how a managing agent handles service charge transparency and Section 20 consultation. And they look for evidence that a commercial agent has genuinely closed deals in that sub-sector recently, not just listed them.
Why journalism carries particular weight here
Muck Rack’s Generative Pulse research, based on more than a million AI cited links, found that earned media and journalism make up around a quarter of all links AI models cite, rising to roughly half when a query implies the need for recent information. A house price or rental market question is exactly that kind of query. “Is this still true today” is baked into almost everything people ask about property.
What actually earns trust at this stage
- Show your professional memberships clearly and consistently. RICS, Propertymark, ARLA, NAEA, wherever they apply, not buried in a footer.
- Keep review responses current, and reply properly to the difficult ones. A calm, specific explanation when something has gone wrong signals accountability, which matters more here than a spotless record ever could.
- For commercial and institutional audiences, replace the star rating instinct with a named, citable case study or client testimonial. “Advised on X rent reviews across a Y square foot portfolio” does more work for this audience than any number of five star reviews.
None of this needs to be flawless. It needs to hold up to a second look, because that second look is exactly what is happening before anyone ever picks up the phone. Our AI Marketing team can help you build the kind of review and accreditation presence that survives it.
Next: once the sense check is done, how does AI actually decide who gets mentioned? Read “Why AI Recommends Some Property Brands and Not Others”
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