Grading our own AI search predictions

We published two reports on AI search this year. Both made predictions a reader can check, so we checked them.

On April 28 we published our first report, "The AI Visibility Gap in Multifamily Real Estate." On June 12 we published our second, "The Zero-Click Era."

We checked every number against its primary source on October 26, 2026, and each one carries its source and its date.

Report one: the AI visibility gap in multifamily

What held up

Our JavaScript claim held for GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot. Our first report said AI crawlers cannot read content a page loads with JavaScript. Vercel's December 17, 2024 network study, "The rise of the AI crawler," measured how the major AI crawlers fetch pages. GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and ByteDance's Bytespider fetch the raw HTML and never run the JavaScript on the page. GPTBot downloads JavaScript files on 11.5% of requests. ClaudeBot does on 23.84%. Neither runs them. Applebot runs JavaScript in full. Google's Gemini does too, because it uses Googlebot's crawling infrastructure. We know of no change since then to GPTBot, ClaudeBot or PerplexityBot.

Our first report named two states that require advertised rent to include mandatory fees. Both laws are in force. Colorado HB 25-1090 took effect January 1, 2026. Its title is "Protections Against Deceptive Pricing Practices." It requires a clearly disclosed total price covering all mandatory fees. It covers landlords.

Connecticut has a similar law. Public Act 25-44 requires landlords to include every default monthly fee in the advertised rent, including fees a tenant may opt out of. It excludes a short list of fees, such as pet fees and submetered utilities. Section 9 of the act took effect October 1, 2025.

What we cannot grade yet

Our server-side rendering prediction is still open. We said server-side rendering would stay the fix for 18 to 24 months. Six months in, nothing we found contradicts it, and 12 to 18 months of the prediction remain.

Report two: the zero-click era

What held up

We had the zero-click number about right. Our chart put zero-click searches near 70%. SparkToro found that 68.01% of US Google searches ended without a click between January and April 2026. Its data comes from a Similarweb clickstream panel. Our chart was within two points of it.

Google says optimizing for AI search is still SEO for Google Search. We argued for keeping the SEO work going. Google's optimization guide, last updated July 10, 2026, agrees. In its words, "optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO."

What we cannot grade yet

Our measurement advice is untested. Our second report argued for reporting AI citations next to clicks. It also argued for reporting branded search and assisted conversions alongside them. No study we found tests that advice, so it has no grade yet.

What the sources say today

In one Ahrefs study, cited pages carried structured data more often, but adding it did not raise citations. Ahrefs looked at 6 million URLs. Pages cited by AI were almost three times as likely to carry structured data as pages that were not. It then tracked 1,885 treated pages that added structured data against matched control pages that did not. It found no lift. AI Overview citations on the treated pages fell 4.6% relative to the control pages, and Ahrefs says it does not know why. Our reading is that pages with structured data tend to be pages that earn citations for other reasons. We rank this study as a lead because Ahrefs sells an AI visibility product.

Google lists tactics a site can ignore. Its guide names five for Google Search: llms.txt and other special files, chunking content, rewriting for AI, chasing inauthentic mentions, and overfocusing on structured data.

One vendor's count says listing services supply most apartment citations. The only published count we found comes from piiq Technologies, which sells an AI visibility product. We rank it as a lead. Its June 2026 count draws on 795 of its own subscribers' properties. It puts listing services at 81% of Perplexity's citations, 73% of Gemini's, 65% of ChatGPT's and 55% of Claude's. In the same count, property websites are the second-largest source.

What changed in how we work

Every number we publish names its source and the date we checked it, and we grade a claim again before we repeat it. Where a number does not exist, we say so.

We now rank our sources before we publish. Statutes and government records count as fact. A company's statement about its own product counts as fact too. We treat research by a company as evidence, and our source list names the company so a reader can weigh its interest. When the company sells an AI visibility product, its study is only a lead.

Server-side rendering is still the fix

The Vercel study is the reason server-side rendering is still the fix for GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot. Those three crawlers cannot see pricing that a property website loads with JavaScript.

Does ChatGPT see the pricing on your property websites? We check that for multifamily portfolios.

Source list