Payotte study · Open data

Real estate professionals’ websites vs AI: median 49/100

Surveyed 2026-08-18 · 446 firms audited

The number

94% of the firms audited have no marked-up question and answer anywhere on their site. An answer engine finds nothing it can lift as-is — so it goes elsewhere.

What this study is not

The sample is not “the Canadian market”. These are the 446 reachable firms in the Payotte directory — one professional per sector, selected on a published editorial grid. It is therefore a FAVOURABLE sample: the best-rated in their market. The real market is likely worse, never better.

This study measures CAPABILITY: can an answer engine enter, read, understand, lift? It does not say whether an AI actually cites these firms. Capability and outcome are two different things — Payotte is the proof: its own profile pages score 100/100 and it remains held back by its lack of authority.

77 sites did not respond and are excluded from the calculation, never counted as zero. Refusing to answer is not a bad score.

The distribution

0–19 10
20–39 101
40–59 201
60–79 116
80–100 18

Median 49. A quarter of firms sit below 40; one in ten clears 72. The best reaches 97.

Where it breaks

AI crawler access 21.9/30
Structured data 9.9/25
Liftable answer 7.6/20
Machine-readable local presence 1.9/15
Technical hygiene 9.2/10

Technical hygiene has been solved for years — HTTPS, mobile, canonical. What is missing is everything addressed to machines.

Seven findings

94 % (419) no marked-up question/answer — nothing an engine can lift as-is
71 % (317) no identity link (sameAs) — the entity connects to nothing else on the web
33 % (149) no structured data of any kind
26 % (118) block at least one AI crawler in their robots.txt
9 % (41) content injected by JavaScript — a blank page to most AI crawlers
24 % (106) have an llms.txt file (usually generated by a plugin, not by choice)
1 % (4) certificate rejected by the browser — visitors see a security warning

By trade

Mortgage brokers53/100n=97
Notaries and real estate lawyers49/100n=99
Real estate brokers49/100n=97
Certified appraisers49/100n=92
Home inspectors48/100n=103

By province

Nova Scotia53/100n=18
Alberta52/100n=79
Ontario50/100n=149
Manitoba50/100n=24
British Columbia49/100n=72
Quebec45/100n=121
Saskatchewan44/100n=16

The benchmark

On the same scale, a Payotte profile page scores 100/100 and its homepage 88/100 — 51 points above the market median. Both figures come from the same script, and are published here so they can be challenged.

Method

Five pillars, 100 points: AI crawler access (30), structured data (25), liftable answer (20), machine-readable local presence (15), technical hygiene (10). One request per site, honest User-Agent, robots.txt respected. The heaviest single test is “is the text in the HTML, or injected by JavaScript?” — most AI crawlers do not run JS, so a site can be beautiful and blank to them.

The data

Full aggregate as CSV, licensed CC BY 4.0. No firm is named: individual results go to the professional concerned, privately.

Download the CSV ↓