Reddit vanished from ChatGPT in four days. Real estate should take the hint.

A seller opens ChatGPT and types: Who’s the best listing agent in my neighborhood? Three names come back, a sentence about each, a few links. No page two. No ads to buy your way onto. Every other agent in that market is out of the conversation before it starts because of real estate AI visibility. That’s the fear driving a whole new spend category in real estate marketing: Answer Engine Optimization, Generative Engine Optimization, real estate AI visibility — pick your acronym. Some of what’s sold under those labels is real work. Cleaning up your business data, fixing your site’s structure, publishing verifiable transaction evidence, tracking which sources the models actually pull from. Some of it is people are getting paid to post about you on Reddit and pretend they’re a happy client. Two things happened in the last eight months that should change how brokerages buy this stuff. The Reddit collapse On Aug. 20, the AI visibility firm Promptwatch reported that Reddit’s share of ChatGPT Search citations fell from about 3.83% to about 0.52%. That’s an 86% drop, and it happened over roughly four days in mid-August. Reddit’s citation share on Google’s AI products slid too, but gradually...