How AI Is Changing Property Search: The Arbuthnot Latham Panel

Last week our founder Oli Yeates was invited to join a panel at the Arbuthnot Latham Property Breakfast in Manchester, hosted high above King Street with a room full of the people who finance, build, value and advise on property across the North West. The brief was a big one: how is AI reshaping real estate, and how are buyers and investors changing the way they search?

Big thanks to Sarah Prescott at Arbuthnot Latham for the invite, and to fellow panellists Chris Weights of Cluttons (on the market outlook) and Mark Braund of BDP (on the Manchester development pipeline). Oli took the part of the conversation closest to what we do every day at Clicky: how AI is quietly rewiring the way people find, research, buy and finance a home. Here is the gist of what he shared, with the real numbers behind it.

First, a quick game: real or AI?

Oli opened by showing the room a run of images, some genuine photographs, some entirely AI-generated, and asked people to call it. As you would expect, most of us got several wrong. A "product shot", a "living room", a "couple with their dog on the sofa": some were real, some did not exist at all.

The point was not to embarrass anyone. It is that if a room of senior property professionals cannot reliably tell the difference, neither can your clients. Almost every property decision now begins on a screen, with an image, a listing or an answer that may be partly or wholly AI-generated. That single shift is the thread running through everything below.

The buyer journey has quietly flipped

Three numbers set the scene:

• 82% of consumers now use AI before or during a property search (Newsweek, 2026).

• 65% of UK buyers discover homes on social media before they ever reach a portal (Rightmove Consumer Survey, 2025).

• 93% of Google AI Mode sessions end without a single click through to a website. This is the "zero-click" problem in one statistic.

Search used to be a list of blue links. Increasingly it is a conversation. Someone will type a full sentence into ChatGPT, Gemini or Google's AI Mode, something like: "I want to find a nice place to live in Manchester near a good primary school and good transport links, ideally close to a coffee shop and some mums' groups." And the answer comes back complete: areas, schools, commute times and vibe, with names of places like Altrincham, Didsbury, Sale and Prestwich, and often no website visit at all.

Compare the two journeys. The old one was portal-led: type a postcode into Google, click into Rightmove or Zoopla, scroll dozens of listings by hand, work out the schools and transport yourself, then enquire and wait. The new one is AI-led: ask in full sentences, get a shortlist with the trade-offs already summarised, and go straight to the agent, developer or broker the answer happens to name. The portal, for a growing share of buyers, gets skipped entirely.

AI tools are already operating at portal scale

This is the slide that made the room sit up. Using live Semrush data for the UK (June 2026), here is how monthly search volume now stacks up:

• Rightmove: 11.1M searches a month

• ChatGPT: 11.1M, now matching Rightmove exactly

• Zoopla: 1.8M

• Gemini: 1.5M, growing around 643% year on year and within touching distance of Zoopla

• Perplexity: 246K

• OnTheMarket: 110K

For scale, Google still handles roughly 15 billion searches a day, against around 3.2 billion ChatGPT prompts, which is a big reason we think Google and Gemini, rather than ChatGPT, ultimately win the consumer AI race. But the headline is hard to ignore: a chatbot that barely existed a couple of years ago now matches the UK's biggest property portal for search demand.

Oli's prediction: AI breaks the portals

This was flagged clearly as a personal view rather than a Clicky data point, and it is a deliberately provocative one. The whole model of Rightmove and Zoopla rests on being where the search begins. As more buyers ask ChatGPT, Gemini and AI Mode "where should I live?" and go straight to the answer, they skip the portal. Within a few years, Oli expects AI search to do to the portals what the portals once did to the local newspaper property pages.

You do not have to take his word for it, because the market is already pricing it in. Rightmove (LON:RMV) closed at 424p on 12 June 2026, down roughly 46% in twelve months from an 827p high. Plenty of things move a share price, but the underlying usage is sliding too: estimated monthly organic search visits to Rightmove fell from a peak of around 41M in summer 2025 to a low near 34M in March, recovering to about 37M now. Seasonality plays a part, but the direction of travel matches the share price.

Who actually wins "best places to live in Manchester"?

Here is where it gets practical. "Best places to live in Manchester" is searched around 880 times a month, and it is exactly the kind of conversational query AI answers are built from. So who ranks for it today (Semrush, UK, June 2026)? The live top ten is led by Upstix, a quick-sale startup, followed at number two by a Reddit thread, then Goodmove, Accord Property and, at number five, Miller Homes, a housebuilder. After that comes the Manchester Evening News (twice), Sotheby's and I Love Manchester.

Two lessons jump out. First, a Reddit conversation outranks almost the entire property industry, and not a single traditional estate agent makes the top ten. These are precisely the pages AI assistants read and cite when they answer. Second, Miller Homes proves a developer can absolutely win these queries with genuine local content about areas, schools and commutes. Nobody owns this ground yet, which makes it the cheapest visibility in property right now.

Manchester is the UK's new-build search capital

For a room financing and building in this city, one stat landed hard: more people search for "new build homes [city]" in Manchester than anywhere else in the UK, London included (Semrush, UK, June 2026):

• Manchester: 2.9K a month

• Birmingham: 1.9K

• London: 1.9K

• Leeds: 1.0K

• Liverpool: 720

Manchester also has the country's most expensive "property investment" click at £4.27, versus £3.67 in Liverpool, £2.79 in Birmingham and £2.36 in London. Investors' money is already voting for this city. The head terms (rightmove manchester at 12.1K, houses for sale manchester at 9.9K, flats to rent manchester at 4.4K) are dominated by the portals. But the conversational tail, "where should a young family live near a tram stop?", is wide open, and it is exactly what AI answers are built from.

AI drafts. You decide.

A grounding note for anyone now using these tools at work: AI is brilliant at the first 80% of a task and confidently wrong on the rest. Verify anything that carries your name, and mind what you paste into public tools. Used properly it is AI-powered and human-led: faster work, with your expertise and accountability still firmly in charge.

What we'd do about it in 2026

Oli left the room with four questions worth asking about your own brand:

• When did you last really look at your SEO strategy? Ranking on Google is now table stakes. Audit where you stand and rebuild the strategy around how people actually search today.

• Does it include GEO? Generative Engine Optimisation is getting your brand cited inside ChatGPT, Gemini and AI Mode answers. Almost nobody in property is doing it yet, which is exactly why it works.

• Can your site even be listed? AI assistants can only cite what they can read. Check that your site is structured, fast and machine-readable enough to be surfaced, then fix what is holding it back.

• Talk to someone who does this daily. We are a Manchester B Corp, Google Premier Partner and Meta Business Partner agency, and we are happy to show you where the quick wins are.

The thought Oli left the panel on sums it up: AI has not changed what people want from a home, or from the people who finance and build them. It has changed how they find it. The property businesses that show up in the answer, not just on the results page, will win the next five years.

If that is a conversation you would like to have for your own brand, get in touch, we would love to help.