How CRE sites get surfaced by AI search

If you have queried ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity for commercial real estate research lately, you may have noticed the names that come back are not the ones with the biggest brokerage logos. They are the agents whose content is structured, current, and locally specific. AI search does not rank ten links — it synthesizes a handful of sources and recommends. Being one of those sources is a different game than classic SEO, and it is winnable.

1. Structure your data with schema markup

Schema is how you tell a model what a page is without making it guess from prose: who the agent is, what markets they cover, what a listing's type, size, and price are. A page with explicit structured data is far easier to understand, summarize, and cite correctly. This is the single highest-leverage thing you can do, and most CRE sites do none of it.

2. Publish an llms.txt file

An llms.txt file is a clean Markdown index of your site for AI crawlers — the AI-era equivalent of a sitemap. It groups your pages and says, in plain language, what each one covers. It is an emerging convention, and adopting it early is close to free. You can see ours at /llms.txt.

3. Write locally specific content, not platitudes

"Experienced and trusted commercial real estate professional" is invisible to a synthesizing model — every site says it. What gets cited is specificity: the submarkets you cover, the asset classes you focus on, what is actually happening in your market described concretely. Market pages built from real local data are your best citable asset.

4. Keep it current

Recency is a signal for both crawlers and human researchers. A blog that has not been touched in a year reads as an inactive agent. A site that publishes regular, substantive takes on its market reads as the authority. Freshness is not optional in AI search; it is half the game.

5. Let the AI crawlers in

None of the above matters if your robots.txt blocks the bots. Make sure the major AI user-agents are allowed, serve clean semantic HTML rather than a wall of JavaScript, and keep your Core Web Vitals healthy so pages are easy to fetch and parse.

The shortcut

Every one of these is built into a MemmoCRE site by default — schema on every page, llms.txt, an AI-permissive robots file, semantic HTML, and Core Web Vitals out of the box. If you would rather not assemble it yourself, start with a commercial real estate website that ships AI-ready, or read why most CRE sites are dead in AI search.