According to new research conducted by Foundable, an Australian AI visibility firm, over a third of Australia’s largest real estate agency websites are invisible to the crawlers used by AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude.
While the audit looked at real estate agencies, the findings demonstrate a clear warning for mortgage brokers, whose own websites could be exposed without their knowledge.
Foundable tested 100 of the country’s biggest agency websites against 11 live AI crawler identities, comprising bots used by ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity – to test whether AI could find and read the sites at all.
35 of the 100 sites failed straight away, and a further 25 sites loaded normally in a normal browser but blocked AI crawlers on the same page moments later. 11 of those were running the identical WordPress SEO plugin version. This indicates a shared technical setting as opposed to a deliberate business decision. Seven sites explicitly told AI crawlers to stay away via their robots.txt file.
Founder of Foundable Sandy Abram advised the pattern was more revealing than the numbers suggest.
“In many cases, nobody at these agencies appears to have decided to block AI. A setting may have done it for them – buried in a plugin, firewall or security configuration nobody’s thought to check.
“This isn’t a strategy problem. It’s a marketing hygiene problem, and most agencies don’t know they have it.”
Sandy Abram, Founder, Foundable
Of the 83 sites that did return content to AI crawlers, the majority provided no real data identifying the business, its services or how to contact it, thus even accessible sites gave AI little substance.
Sandy added this matters because consumers are moving away from search engines which offer options to AI tools that slim decisions down sharply.
“AI isn’t a search engine. It’s a recommendation engine. It doesn’t hand a vendor a list to work through – it hands them one to three names.”
Sandy Abram, Founder, Foundable
