Case study · Deep audit · August 2026

A real-estate agency with a good reputation, invisible to machines

An agency with a strong Google rating wasn’t showing up in AI answers. We checked all 659 pages of its site. Every finding below has evidence. The client asked to stay anonymous.

Pages checked: 659
Documented findings: 45
Machine-verified: 36
Fix plan: 74 h

1
dead lead form on the homepage
The main call to action, a free online property valuation, opened a third-party widget that said, in German, that the account was inactive. Every visitor who tried it hit a dead end.
574 of 674
listings missing from the sitemap
The site had 674 property pages, but its sitemap (the table of contents search engines and AI crawlers read) listed only 100. 85% of the inventory was effectively unannounced.
405
client reviews marked as news articles
Hundreds of client reviews were labelled for machines as “news”, with no ratings attached. To Google and AI assistants, the agency had no reviews on its own site.
1
wrong company name in the machine-readable card
The company name was stored with a broken character code (“&” instead of “&”). AI systems read the name exactly as stored.
154
invalid structured-data blocks
A bug in the website platform’s template broke the machine-readable data on listing pages. We found the same bug on 18 of 20 of the platform’s own demo sites, so it was a product defect, fixable by the vendor at no cost to the agency.
7.4 s
to show a listing on mobile
On desktop the site scored 98 of 100 for speed. On phones, listing pages took 7.4 seconds to show their main content (Google’s target is under 2.5).

What it meant for the business

None of these problems were visible to the owners: the site looked good and loaded fast on their office computers. But AI assistants and search engines read the machine layer, and there the agency had a broken lead form, a fraction of its listings, no reviews and a misspelled name.

What we recommended

Fix the valuation form first, it was the most expensive problem.
A formal defect report to the website platform for the template bugs, with evidence from their own demo sites, so the vendor fixes them for free.
Correct markup for reviews and the company, a complete sitemap, and faster mobile listing pages.
Pages for the questions sellers and buyers ask, by district, written for people, readable for AI.

The plan came to 74 hours of work, with each finding assigned to its owner: the agency, the platform vendor, or us.

How we work on every audit

Every number comes from a file we can show you. Findings are labelled verified, seen once, unknown or not checked. We list what we could not check. Our methodology

Start with the free version

The free audit runs the most important of these checks in about a minute.

AI search for real-estate agents · Pricing