How your site gets found: search, AI answers and Google

Every website we build is built to be found and cited: by search engines, by AI answer tools and through your Google Business Profile. No one can promise a ranking, and we don’t. Here’s what’s in place.

Built into every site#

The basics:

• a sitemap and a robots.txt file;
• canonical addresses, so each page has one address search engines count;
• a title and a description on every page;
• fast pages, made for phones first.

Structured data (schema.org), so search engines and AI tools can read who you are and what each page is:

• your website, with its search box;
• you and your brokerage, with the areas you serve and your office address;
• breadcrumbs on every page;
• FAQs, where a page has them;
• articles, for blog posts;
• places, for area guides.

AI search and answer tools#

Your live site welcomes AI search and answer tools: the ones that read a page to cite it and link back to you, like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude’s search and Google.

Who’s kept off your listing pages, and why#

Two kinds of crawler are turned away from your listing pages, and only from those:

• AI training crawlers, like GPTBot, ClaudeBot and Google-Extended. Your MLS licenses its listings for display on your site, not for training an AI model.
• SEO-tool crawlers, like Ahrefs and Semrush. They send you no visitors, and every listing page they read is another read from your MLS.

Both are still welcome on your own pages: your bio, your area guides and your blog.

Before launch#

A site that isn’t live yet stays out of search. Its pages are marked not to be indexed, and only Google and Bing may crawl them, so they can read that mark.

What Growth adds#

Growth adds pages made to be found:

• Area guides: neighborhood, town and relocation pages, in your sitemap and in an llms.txt file that lists them for AI tools.
• A blog: 1 to 4 posts a month, each with article structured data.
• A monthly SEO check, with fixes drafted for you: up to 6 a month.

In Site Manager#

• SEO: the monthly SEO check on Growth, and Google Search, with what Google reports from Search Console. Our team connects Search Console once your site is live. See the SEO check.
• Analytics: your visitors, where they came from, the pages they viewed and where they are.

Your Google Business Profile#

Our team sets up your Google Business Profile and helps optimize it, on both plans. It’s work our team does for you, not a feature in Site Manager: there’s no posting, review management or profile syncing in the software. Like search, no one can promise where it shows on the map.