New Data: Only 4 of 101 Real Estate Searches Produced an AI Overview

I made an interesting discovery over the weekend: AI Overviews are practically nonexistent for real estate searches.

Beginning Friday afternoon and continuing into Saturday, I did 101 searches, each with a unique real estate keyword/phrase/question. I searched buyer keywords and seller keywords. I searched agent-focused keywords and homes-for-sale keywords. I searched navigational queries like "zillow" and "redfin," plus long-tail informational queries.

Amazingly, only four out of my 101 real estate searches produced an AI Overview.

Here are the four:

Keyword: where should i retire

You can see above that Google is listing and linking to three source websites for more information. Interestingly, while the AIO mentions WalletHub in the Florida info, WalletHub doesn't get a link.

Keyword: do i need to be preapproved for a mortgage

I didn't expand the AIO in this example because I wanted to show that the top-ranking organic result, Investopedia, is also the first source listed and linked in the AIO. This isn't always the case.

keyword: what is a mortgage pre approval

It's interesting to me that two of my AI Overviews are about mortgages, because Google said in the early days of the SGE experiment that these answers may not show for "your money, your life" searches.

keyword: structural things to look for when buying a house

So those are the only four keywords in my group that produced an AI Overview. Does anything catch your eye in those answers? Did you notice that each one includes links to three different source sites?

Keywords That Did NOT Produce an AI Overview

My group of 101 keywords was pretty varied. Here are some examples -- and remember that none of these produced an AI Overview.

Buyer keywords:

• how to buy a house

• do i need a realtor to buy a house

• pre approval vs pre qualification

• first time home buyer programs

• what is earnest money

Seller keywords:

• is it a good time to sell a house

• why isn't my house selling

• things to do before selling a house

• is home staging worth it

• how to improve curb appeal

Geographic keywords:

• homes for sale raleigh

• moving to nashville

• cost of living seattle vs portland

• who are the best real estate agents in kennewick

• military relocation realtor tacoma wa

Many of those keywords are exactly the kind of informational searches where Google could show an AI-generated response -- and where it did show AI answers during the labs/experimental days. I was stunned to find so few of them actually did this weekend.

I posted screenshots on Twitter of a couple AIOs from last year -- check them out if you want to see what it looked like for the keywords "kennewick zestimates" and "tri-cities homes for sale." (BTW, you'll laugh at how wrong it got "kennewick zestimates.")

If you want to see my full list of 101 keywords, I put them in this Google Sheet. I might add to that over time since AI Overviews are so new. And saving this list now will give you and me a way to compare if and how Google's search results change in the future.

Your takeaways: After a year of testing, Google finally launched AI Overviews this month in regular search results for all U.S. users. It's been a train wreck. Dangerous answers. Misinformation. People searching for how to get rid of it. Bad coverage in national, mainstream media outlets. TBH, I wouldn't be surprised at all if Google shuts it down completely. For now, they might be rolling it back quite a bit -- only four of my 101 real estate searches produced an AI Overview.

Bottom line: I don't see anything to worry about right now. If you're blogging and doing SEO on your website, carry on.