Payotte study · Open data

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

Surveyed 2026-09-04 · 468 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 468 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.

55 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 11
  • 20–39 101
  • 40–59 211
  • 60–79 125
  • 80–100 20

Median 49. A quarter of firms sit below 41; one in ten clears 72. The best reaches 97.

Where it breaks

  • AI crawler access 22.3/30
  • Structured data 10/25
  • 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 % (439) no marked-up question/answer — nothing an engine can lift as-is
  • 71 % (330) no identity link (sameAs) — the entity connects to nothing else on the web
  • 33 % (153) no structured data of any kind
  • 25 % (116) block at least one AI crawler in their robots.txt
  • 9 % (43) content injected by JavaScript — a blank page to most AI crawlers
  • 23 % (109) 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=104
  • Real estate brokers50/100n=104
  • Home inspectors49/100n=104
  • Notaries and real estate lawyers49/100n=103
  • Certified appraisers49/100n=95

By province

  • Nova Scotia54/100n=19
  • Alberta53/100n=87
  • British Columbia52/100n=74
  • Ontario50/100n=153
  • Saskatchewan50/100n=19
  • Manitoba49/100n=26
  • Quebec45/100n=123

The benchmark

On the same scale, a Payotte profile page scores 100/100 and its homepage 100/100 — 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 ↓

And your site — what does it score?

The same scale, applied to your domain, in ten seconds. Free, no account, no email.

Score my site

In the professionals' space

This page is written for listed professionals. The rest of what concerns you:

Related reading — our data dossiers