Rightmove is now inside ChatGPT. What that means for your site

Rightmove has launched inside ChatGPT, making it the first UK property portal to put its listings in front of people who never open a property website at all. It follows the same move by Zillow and Realtor.com in the United States. If you want a single piece of evidence that property search is shifting, this is a good one: the portal with the most to lose from people not visiting it has decided the audience is worth meeting where it now stands.

What has actually changed

Less than the headlines suggest, and more than it might feel. Rightmove has not been replaced, and the portals are not about to disappear. What has changed is the front door. A buyer who once opened an app and typed a postcode can now describe what they want in a sentence, in a conversation, and get properties back without a portal ever loading. The listing still comes from Rightmove. The moment of choosing, though, happens somewhere you cannot influence with a featured property spend.

The part that should interest you

A portal appearing in ChatGPT helps the portal. It does very little for the individual agent, because the thing being surfaced is the property, not the agency behind it. That distinction matters. Portals compete on stock; you compete on being chosen to list the stock. Those are different games, and the second one is played on your own website.

When a vendor asks an AI assistant which agent they should instruct in their town, the answer is not assembled from portal listings. It is assembled from what the assistant can read about you across the open web: your own site, your reviews, your directory entries, the things other people have written. That is a question we have written about before, and this development makes it more pressing rather than less.

What this does not mean

It does not mean cancelling your portal subscriptions. Most buyers still use them, and a portal-free strategy is a decision to be made on your own numbers rather than on a headline. It also does not mean rushing to bolt AI onto your website for the sake of saying you have. A chat box that answers badly is worse than no chat box.

What to do instead

Make your website easy for a machine to read and quote. That means structured data on your listings and your business, so an assistant can tell what a page is rather than guessing. It means clear, factual pages about your fees, your areas and how you work, because a machine cannot recommend what it cannot find stated plainly. It means your details being consistent everywhere they appear, since contradictions make you a risky thing to cite. And it means your own property search being good enough that a buyer who arrives has no reason to leave.

None of that is exotic. It is the same discipline that made a site rank well on Google, applied to a reader that summarises rather than lists. We cover the mechanics in our piece on structured data and on Answer Engine Optimisation.

The honest summary

A portal moving into ChatGPT is a portal defending its position, and sensible of it. For an agent, the lesson is not to follow it there but to notice why it went: because that is where people are asking. Your job is to be the answer when the question is about who to trust, not just to be one of the listings when the question is about a three-bedroom semi.

If you would like to know how your agency currently turns up when someone asks an AI assistant about your area, our SEO and AI search work starts with exactly that, and a free site review will show you where the gaps are.