Australian real estate websites fail AI visibility audit

A recent AI visibility audit conducted by Foundable revealed that over one-third of Australia’s largest real estate agency websites failed to be accessible to AI systems. Out of 100 major agency websites tested, 35 received an ‘F’ grade for their ability to be found and read by AI crawlers.

The research found that while 25 sites functioned correctly on standard web browsers, they actively refused AI crawlers such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. In some instances, seven sites explicitly instructed AI systems to stay away via their robots.txt files. Foundable founder Sandy Abram noted that many of these failures appear to be unintentional ‘marketing hygiene’ issues caused by buried settings in plugins, firewalls, or security configurations rather than deliberate business strategies.

Additionally, the audit highlighted a lack of structured data. Of the 83 sites that did return content, 90 percent published no real estate agent structured data, and 46 percent published no business structured data, making it difficult for AI to identify business locations or contact information.