Industries / US Real Estate
US Real Estate
AI Citation Index · July 2026 · Updated August 2, 2026
612 prompts spanning buying, selling, financing, regulation and market sentiment — each run 5 times on five AI platforms. The top 20 sources below account for 89% of all 41,286 citation events we captured.
612
Prompts
15,300
Answer runs
41,286
Citation events
±1.2 pp
95% confidence margin
The ranking
Blended citation share, weighted by platform usage
| # | Source | Type | Citation share | Δ Jun | 6-mo trend |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Zillowzillow.com | Marketplace | 14.7% | -0.8 pp | |
| 2 | Realtor.comrealtor.com | Marketplace | 11.4% | -0.3 pp | |
| 3 | Redfinredfin.com | Brokerage | 9.5% | +0.4 pp | |
| 4 | Investopediainvestopedia.com | Publisher | 7.7% | +0.2 pp | |
| 5 | Redditreddit.com | Community | 6.6% | +1.1 pp | |
| 6 | Bankratebankrate.com | Publisher | 5.9% | -0.2 pp | |
| 7 | NARnar.realtor | Association | 4.5% | +0.1 pp | |
| 8 | NerdWalletnerdwallet.com | Publisher | 4.1% | +0.3 pp | |
| 9 | Homes.comhomes.com | Marketplace | 3.8% | +0.5 pp | |
| 10 | HUDhud.gov | Government | 3.5% | +0.2 pp | |
| 11 | Rocket Mortgagerocketmortgage.com | Lender | 2.9% | -0.1 pp | |
| 12 | Wikipediawikipedia.org | Reference | 2.7% | -0.4 pp | |
| 13 | Truliatrulia.com | Marketplace | 2.6% | -0.2 pp | |
| 14 | YouTubeyoutube.com | Community | 2.3% | +0.6 pp | |
| 15 | HousingWirehousingwire.com | Trade media | 1.8% | +0.1 pp | |
| 16 | Inmaninman.com | Trade media | 1.5% | — | |
| 17 | Compasscompass.com | Brokerage | 1.2% | +0.1 pp | |
| 18 | RE/MAXremax.com | Brokerage | 0.9% | -0.1 pp | |
| 19 | Movotomovoto.com | Marketplace | 0.7% | — | |
| 20 | Fortunefortune.com | Publisher | 0.7% | +0.1 pp |
Top 20 of 1,912 cited domains. Δ = change in blended share vs June 2026.
Every engine has a sourcing personality
Top 10 sources × 5 platforms
| Source | ChatGPT | AI Overviews | Perplexity | Copilot | Claude | Blended |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zillow | 14.2 | 16.5 | 13.8 | 14.9 | 13.1 | 14.7 |
| Realtor.com | 11.5 | 12.8 | 10.2 | 10.8 | 9.4 | 11.4 |
| Redfin | 9.1 | 10.4 | 9.8 | 9.2 | 8.6 | 9.5 |
| Investopedia | 8.9 | 6.1 | 6.8 | 7.2 | 8.8 | 7.7 |
| 5.2 | 8.9 | 9.6 | 5.4 | 4.1 | 6.6 | |
| Bankrate | 6.4 | 4.9 | 5.2 | 6.8 | 5.9 | 5.9 |
| NAR | 4.6 | 4.2 | 3.9 | 4.4 | 5.8 | 4.5 |
| NerdWallet | 4.4 | 3.2 | 4.1 | 4.9 | 4.6 | 4.1 |
| Homes.com | 3.4 | 4.8 | 3.6 | 3.9 | 3.2 | 3.8 |
| HUD | 2.8 | 4.6 | 2.9 | 3.1 | 4.9 | 3.5 |
Citation share by platform (%). Shading scaled within each column.
What kind of content gets cited
Share of citation events by content type
- Listing & property pages24%
- Guides & explainers21%
- Community discussions14%
- Market data & statistics12%
- News & trade media10%
- Government & regulatory8%
- Video6%
- Tools & calculators5%
Listing pages win on volume, but only because transactional prompts demand them. On the 58% of prompts that are informational, guides and explainers capture 41% of citations — and community discussions are closing the gap every month.
The quiet structural story: government and regulatory content holds 8% of citations with almost no traditional SEO footprint behind it. AI engines treat primary sources as ground truth. Everyone else is competing for the remaining 92%.
Six-month trend
Blended citation share, Feb–Jul 2026
Zillow's slide is the story: still the runaway leader, but down for three straight months. Reddit (+1.1 pp in July alone) and YouTube are absorbing the informational long tail that portals used to own.
Key findings
July 2026
- Finding 01
The portal triopoly is loosening
Zillow, Realtor.com and Redfin still absorb 35.6% of all citations, but their combined share is down 3.1 pp since February. The losses are not going to other portals — they are going to community discussions and video, which grew from 19.1% to 22.4% over the same period.
- Finding 02
Each AI engine has a distinct sourcing personality
ChatGPT over-indexes on reference content (Wikipedia 3.9%, Investopedia 8.9%). AI Overviews routes 3.2× more citations to community and video than ChatGPT. Claude is the most institutional, favoring government and association sources. A brand's AI visibility strategy cannot be platform-agnostic.
- Finding 03
Guides beat listings on informational intent
For how-to and definitional prompts — 58% of the corpus — explainer content captures 41% of citations while listing pages capture just 9%. Listing pages only win when intent is explicitly transactional. Content type, not domain authority, is the strongest predictor of citation on informational prompts.
- Finding 04
Government sources punch far above their SEO weight
hud.gov appears in 8% of all citation events despite a negligible traditional-search footprint. On FHA and fair-housing prompts its citation rate quadruples. AI engines treat .gov domains as ground truth for regulatory questions — a structural advantage no commercial site can replicate.
- Finding 05
First position compounds
Brands whose average first-citation position is in the top two retained 91% of their share month-over-month, versus 67% for brands cited in position four or lower. Early citation appears to be both a cause and a consequence of durable AI visibility.
Metro editions
AI visibility, market by market
● Live
Los Angeles →
412 prompts · Local players index
◐ Collecting — Aug window
Austin
Corpus in field
◐ Collecting — Aug window
Miami
Corpus in field
◐ Aug window
Phoenix
Corpus in field
◐ Aug window
Denver
Corpus in field
National rankings tell you who runs the table; metro editions tell you who runs your street. All markets →
Method & reuse
Prompt corpus weighted by US search demand; 5 runs per prompt per platform; deterministic citation extraction with manual audit of a 4% sample; frozen prompt set re-run monthly. Full protocol, limitations and confidence math are public.
Methodology →Underlying dataset
citations.csv41,286 rows
prompts.csv612 rows
domains.parquet1,912 domains
methodology.pdf14 pages
Free with email. CC-BY 4.0 — cite us, reuse freely.
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