Homebuyers Are Asking ChatGPT Who To Call Before They Ever Call You

A buyer looking for a realtor in Wallingford used to open Google, scroll past the ads, and click through a few websites. That is changing fast. More buyers are opening ChatGPT or Perplexity first and typing something like "who is a good realtor in Wallingford CT" and just going with whatever name comes back.

Here is the part that should get your attention. AI tools are not making that recommendation up. They are pulling it from what already exists about you online. Your Google Business Profile. Your reviews. Articles that mention your name alongside your town. Local pages that talk about what you do and where. If that information is thin, outdated, or missing, the AI has nothing to work with, and it recommends someone else instead.

I started paying attention to this after a broker client mentioned that a buyer told her, flat out, that ChatGPT had suggested her name. She had not done anything special for that. She had just kept her profile current and had a handful of local pages that named her and her town together. That was enough to get picked up.

What this means for agents

Being findable on Google is no longer the whole game. Being citable matters now too. That means your name, your service area, and your specialties need to show up consistently across your website, your Google Business Profile, and any local content written about you, not just buried in a bio page nobody reads.

Reviews still matter, maybe more than before, because AI tools treat a steady stream of recent reviews as a signal that you are active and trusted, not just someone who signed up for a directory once and disappeared.

And local content matters in a way it did not two years ago. A page that talks about buying or selling in a specific Connecticut town, written honestly instead of stuffed with keywords, gives an AI tool something real to point to when someone in that town asks for a recommendation.

What to do about it

Start with your Google Business Profile, since that feeds almost everything downstream of it. Then look at whether your name and your town appear together anywhere besides your homepage. If the answer is no, that is your gap.

I put together a longer breakdown of how this works and what QuickFlip does about it on our AI Visibility page, if you want to see the mechanics behind it.

If you want someone to check whether ChatGPT and Perplexity would even find you right now, reach out for a 90 Day Growth Plan at /contact. I will show you exactly what an AI tool sees when it looks you up, and what is missing.