More than a third of Australia's largest real estate agency websites are invisible to the crawlers used by AI tools such as ChatGPT and Claude, according to new research from Foundable, an Australian AI visibility firm.
While the audit focused on real estate agencies, the findings carry a clear warning for mortgage brokers, whose own websites may be just as exposed without their knowledge.
Foundable tested 100 of the country's biggest agency websites against 11 live AI crawler identities, including bots used by ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity, simply to see whether AI could find and read the sites at all.
Thirty-five of the 100 sites failed outright. A further 25 sites loaded normally in an ordinary browser but blocked AI crawlers on the same page moments later, and 11 of those were running the identical WordPress SEO plugin version, suggesting a shared technical setting rather than a deliberate business decision. Seven sites went further, explicitly telling AI crawlers to stay away via their robots.txt file.
Foundable founder Sandy Abram said the pattern was more revealing than the raw numbers.
"In many cases, nobody at these agencies appears to have decided to block AI," Abram said. "A setting may have done it for them — buried in a plugin, firewall or security configuration nobody's thought to check. This isn't a strategy problem. It's a marketing hygiene problem, and most agencies don't know they have it."
The concern extends beyond whether a site loads. Of the 83 sites that did return content to AI crawlers, the vast majority provided no structured data identifying the business, its services or how to contact it, meaning even accessible sites gave AI little to work with.
Abram argued this matters increasingly because consumers are shifting from search engines that offer many options to AI tools that narrow decisions down sharply.
"AI isn't a search engine. It's a recommendation engine," Abram said. "It doesn't hand a vendor a list to work through — it hands them one to three names."
The findings are specific to real estate, but the risk isn't. A broker's site could pass every human test while staying invisible to the AI tools a borrower now asks to recommend someone to arrange their home loan — and nobody at the brokerage would know.
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