At Inman Connect they said the quiet part out loud. Pittsburgh agents, I told you so.

Jeff Lobb walked onto a stage at Inman Connect San Diego last week and said what I've been telling Pittsburgh-area agents for months: traditional search is being rewritten, and most real estate agents have already lost ground without knowing it.

As reported by Nick Pipitone in Inman on July 30, 2026, buyers and sellers are increasingly asking ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity directly for agent recommendations, home valuations, and referrals. They're skipping the portal. They're skipping the blue links. Industry estimates put the drop in traditional search-and-click behavior at 20 to 40 percent as AI answers absorb those queries.

The session reinforced the work required: Answer Engine Optimization (AEO). The core problem, according to Lobb, isn't just that consumers changed how they search. It's that the vast majority of agents aren't set up to be found in those answers at all.

One specific risk stood out. AI doesn't just rank pages. It reads and synthesizes language, including the exact wording in your online reviews. An old, negative characterization from years ago can surface unprompted as a "con" when someone asks for top agents in a market. Different models pull from different sources. Once that language is in the training data or retrieval layer, it's hard to scrub.

The practical recommendation from the session was consumer-first and specific. Write down the exact questions a buyer or seller in your market would ask an AI: "Who's the strongest agent for a Peters Township move-up buyer?" or "Best listing agent for a Washington County new-construction home?" Then create content that directly answers those questions. Publish on a crawlable site. Strengthen the Google Business Profile (it feeds Gemini). Treat YouTube Shorts and managed presence on platforms AI already leans on as part of the same system.

Test your own visibility the way a stranger would: logged out, incognito window. It might make you mad when your name doesn't come up.

I've been saying a version of this to Pittsburgh agents since the spring. The gap between "we have a nice website and post on social" and "AI systems can confidently identify, trust, and recommend you" is real infrastructure work: consistent NAP and entity signals, clean schema, a deliberate review strategy, answer-first content, and a Google Business Profile that actually supports the way AI pulls local results.

That's exactly what the AI Visibility Foundation at Dugan AI is built to do. It's a fixed-scope, 30-day build of the foundational layer: Google Business Profile, review strategy, NAP consistency, and schema. The rest of the content and authority work has something solid to stand on. I'm currently working with one of Pittsburgh's top realtors on this exact initiative. The goal is simple: when a buyer or seller in the South Hills, Peters Township, or Washington County asks an AI who to call, the right name has a real chance of being in the answer.

Most agents will keep optimizing for the old game a little longer. The ones who treat this as the new Yellow Pages-to-Google moment will own the next decade of discovery.

If you want to see where you currently stand, start with the free AI Visibility Snapshot or the scored Readiness Audit. Full details on both are at dugan-ai.com/realtors.

The opportunity is still open. The window won't stay that way.

Source: Nick Pipitone, "Forget SEO. Jeff Lobb says agents need to win at AI search now," Inman, July 30, 2026.