The machine reads your listing first

A quick note first. This is general information to help you brief whoever builds your site and trains your staff, not legal advice. The AI products described here are moving monthly, so check the current state of any one of them before you rely on it.

On 13 October 2026 Rightmove added a Comparison Assistant to its search results. It is the third piece of what the portal calls Ask Rightmove, after the Search Assistant that arrived on the homepage search bar in February and the Evaluation Assistant that went into property listings in July. All three are built on Google's Gemini models.

The Comparison Assistant lets a mover put several properties side by side and ask about them in their own words, rather than filtering. It also lets them add their own rows to the comparison, as many as they like. Rightmove's own examples are proximity to supermarkets, suitability for hybrid working, nearby schools and transport links. It is rolling out to a subset of users first.

The information the Ask Rightmove features work from, in Rightmove's own list: what sales and letting agents supply within property listings, Rightmove's property data, Google Maps data, Experian for schools, and Land Registry.

Read that list again and note which item is yours.

The part that matters is the first item

Two of those five, Google Maps and Experian's schools data, are location based, so they say the same thing about your listing as about the identical flat two doors down. Two more, Land Registry and Rightmove's own property data, are property specific but out of your hands. That leaves exactly one input you write yourself, and it is the only one that can tell your instruction apart from the flat two doors down on anything other than price history.

That has always been true, and it has never mattered this much, because until now a description was read by a person going from top to bottom. Now it is also mined for attributes by a model answering a question the writer never anticipated.

"Which of these is better for working from home?" is not a filter. There is no field for it. The assistant has to infer it, and on your property the main thing it can infer it from is your own words and your own photographs.

So if your description says "ideal for professionals", you have given it nothing. If it says there is a 3.4 metre square third bedroom at the back of the house with a window facing the garden, you have given it something to find. The first version is marketing. The second is data wearing a sentence.

The number Rightmove is quoting, and what it can carry

Rightmove says that for the period to 30 June, movers using the Ask Rightmove search assistant spent 40 per cent longer on Rightmove, saved more than twice as many properties and sent around twice as many leads to agents, compared with those not using the feature.

To Rightmove's credit, the claim it makes around that figure is the modest one: that these movers "are demonstrating higher levels of engagement". It is worth holding it at that width when the number gets repeated at you by somebody selling something. People who choose to try a new tool may differ from the people who do not in ways that have nothing to do with the tool, and no baseline has been published either way. A real and interesting association, and not on its own evidence that the assistant produced the leads.

What it does tell you, which is the useful part, is that Rightmove will keep building these. Tarah Lourens, Rightmove's chief technology and operations officer, said the latest development helps movers better understand the differences between properties, and that it helps partners "bring property listings to life by making key features more discoverable and meaningful to potential buyers and renters".

Note what has to happen first for a key feature to become discoverable. Somebody at your branch has to have written it down.

Seven places this breaks on a real listing

None of this is theoretical. These are the ordinary failures that make a property invisible to a question it should have won.

Empty fields. An attribute with nothing in it is not a neutral blank. Put three properties side by side, ask about council tax, and the one with nothing in the field cannot win the comparison. Rightmove has not said how a missing attribute is presented, which is itself a reason not to find out the hard way.

Facts that exist only in the photographs. A model can read images, and Rightmove's AI Keywords feature, announced in November 2025 and rolling out first on the Rightmove app, scans images as well as text in listings. Rightmove has not said how an attribute inferred from a photograph is weighted against one you wrote down. Which is rather the point: if the only evidence of a garage is that there is one in a picture, you are relying on inference where you could have given a fact.

Facts that exist only in the brochure PDF. Rightmove's published list of sources does not mention attachments, so do not assume the brochure is doing any work. Anything that matters belongs in the listing itself.

Key features used as slogans. "Must be seen", "early viewing advised" and "rare opportunity" occupy the bullets that stand as your summary of the property. They say nothing about the property.

Inconsistent vocabulary between branches and negotiators. One writes "off road parking", one writes "driveway", one writes "parking for two cars". A reader will treat those as the same thing, and so, probably, will a language model. Your own fields, filters and portal feed will not, and that is where the inconsistency actually costs you.

Numbers written as words, or not written at all. Room dimensions, the distance to the station, the length of the lease, the service charge. If a buyer would compare it, write it as a number.

Everything load bearing buried in paragraph four. Not because a model cannot read to the end, but because in our experience truncation, feeds and summaries all tend to favour what came first.

The compliance question that is only half answered

Last week we wrote that when an assistant on your own website tells a consumer something wrong, the law can treat it as your statement. That part is now settled, and by the regulator rather than by us.

On 9 March 2026, updated on 24 September, the CMA published "Complying with consumer law when using AI agents". It says a business is "responsible for what an AI agent does in the same way you are responsible for what an employee does", and that this is true "even if someone else designed or provides the AI agent on your behalf". Where an agent recommends or compares, it adds that "results should be accurate, and important information should be clearly and prominently disclosed".

The statutory route to the same place is section 225(3) of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, which defines a trader to include "a person acting in the name of, or on behalf of" the business, with section 225(6)(a) making it immaterial whether the business acts personally or through another person acting in its name. Section 226(1)(b) then treats a practice as a misleading action where it involves "an overall presentation which is likely to deceive the average consumer", and section 226(3) adds that a presentation "may be deceiving even if the information it contains is true".

A portal's assistant is a different case, and an unsettled one. The presentation there is Rightmove's, assembled by Rightmove's system, on Rightmove's page. But the raw material about your property is yours, and section 230 still requires an invitation to purchase not to omit the information it lists, from the main characteristics of the property to anything another enactment makes you disclose. That duty is stricter than the rest of the chapter: under section 225(4)(b) an omission from an invitation to purchase is unfair without anyone having to show it would have changed the average consumer's decision.

We can find no United Kingdom case, tribunal decision, ombudsman adjudication or regulator publication dealing with a portal's AI summary of another trader's listing, and the CMA's guidance does not address an agent presenting information that somebody else supplied. On that narrower question this is reasoning rather than law, and it should be read that way. The sensible working position is the dull one: the assistant can only mislead about your property using the material you gave it.

And the same shift is happening off the portal

It would be a mistake to read this as a portal story. The same questions are being asked about your properties in Google's AI Mode and in ChatGPT, before a buyer ever reaches a search box.

Some of those systems read your own website. Others do not need to. Rightmove launched an app inside ChatGPT earlier this year, so a mover asking ChatGPT about an area can be answered out of the portal's data rather than yours.

Either way the conclusion is the same. If the structured, machine-readable version of your property exists only inside the portal's feed, while your own site carries the same information as prose, the portal wins the answer about your own instruction. That is a strange thing to be paying for twice.

What to actually do this week

Pick three live listings and answer one question about each: is every fact a field, or is some of it a sentence somebody typed?

Tenure. Council tax band. EPC rating as a letter. Lease length. Service charge. Ground rent. Parking. Outside space. Heating. Broadband. For each one, either it is a value you could export tomorrow, or it is prose.

Then ask whoever runs your website whether those fields appear on the page in a form a machine can read, or only in the paragraph. The two are not the same. On most decent systems that is a configuration job rather than a rebuild, though your supplier should confirm it for yours.

Nothing here needs a budget. It needs an hour and somebody who will actually look.