By Dominic Pollard, Director of Communications, City Road Communications
Real estate companies looking to engage with investors need to consider how they appear in artificial intelligence (AI) tools, because that is increasingly where investors start their research.
Globally, there has been a huge shift in the past two years, with more people turning to AI assistants built on large language models (LLMs) to inform their investment decisions. That might be stating the obvious. But many still drastically underestimate how widely used chatbots are in the investment space.
Recent studies show that 54% of UK investors use AI for investment-related guidance and research. In the US, SoFi’s 2026 AI investing survey found the figure is even higher, at 75%. This trend extends beyond retail investors, too. Asset managers, fund managers and advisers are also turning to LLMs to inform their decision-making and how they engage with clients.
This poses some important questions. Which sources are the LLMs citing in their investing-related responses? And which investment options and providers are being recommended, and why?
Ultimately, we are talking about AI discoverability. AI discoverability is how likely an AI assistant is to find, mention, describe and recommend your business when someone asks it about your sector, your market or your track record. It is – or should be – a critical part of real estate companies’ PR, marketing and sales strategies in 2026. For those that recognise this, there are significant opportunities to be had.
Why does AI discoverability matter more for real estate in 2026?
After a record year for overseas investment in 2025, UK real estate investment slowed sharply at the start of 2026, particularly in commercial property.
A report by Real Estate:UK and CoStar released earlier this year found that overseas investors put £27.2 billion into UK commercial property in 2025, a record 56% share of all investment. But total UK commercial property investment fell to £9.7 billion in Q1 2026, almost 40% below the five-year first-quarter average, and overseas investors spent £3.6 billion, around 30% less than a year earlier. A slowdown in investment from the US was a key factor; the weaker US dollar affected exchange rates and, in turn, dampened investor confidence.
The data points towards greater competition for available investment among UK real estate firms. That will place pressure on a wide range of businesses, from developers who rely on overseas capital to finance projects through to lenders seeking new funding lines.
In such a climate, AI discoverability becomes ever more important.
Where do AI assistants get their information?
For me, this feels like something of a throwback to search rankings ten years ago. If your competitor is mentioned but your company isn’t when key search terms are used, then you have a problem. Today those conversations are happening on ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity or, just as pertinently, in the answers shown in Google’s Gemini-powered AI Overviews above its search results.
The key question, then, is where AI assistants are drawing their information from when answering investors’ questions. Not from advertising, that much is clear.
Muck Rack’s What Is AI Reading? research, which tracks tens of millions of links cited by ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, found in May 2026 that 84% of AI citations come from earned media: journalism, research, reference sites and third-party content. Paid and advertorial content made up just 0.3%.
For real estate companies, especially those wanting to appear in front of investors, this puts a premium on earned media coverage in trusted titles. And that’s not just the highly-coveted top-tier national and international publications, but also specialist property and investment trade media, which are frequently cited as trusted sources.
How can real estate companies generate the right sort of coverage?
Real estate companies need to focus on two goals. Firstly, making sure your brand is seen as credible, and linking it to the topics, trends and issues that your desired audiences are likely to be researching. Secondly, making sure you are producing the right media coverage and content to educate LLMs about your proposition and why you can be trusted.
At City Road Communications, a London-based B2B PR agency working with property, financial services and technology businesses, we see three core components of a successful PR strategy to boost AI discoverability, and, in truth, they all align with the fundamentals we have been championing for years:
- Press office. You need to ensure your own news is seen in the trade press, informing the market (and LLMs) about what you do, who is in your team, what deals have been completed, what milestones have been achieved, and so forth.
- Thought leadership. Your senior leaders need to be visible by writing guest articles and opinion pieces, or featuring in interviews, discussing both your business and what is happening in your industry.
- Research. If you can commission independent studies into interesting topics and trends, that data, once featured in the media, is like gold dust in terms of generating AI citations, which in turn will notably increase your brand’s visibility and credibility.
There is more to it, of course. Your website copy, social media posts and wider content marketing strategy (blogs, reports and so on) are all important. But when it comes to earned media, it makes sense to start with the three above.
How do you know if it’s working?
As with any PR strategy, it’s extremely important that brands – or their PR agencies – are constantly analysing results and testing theories.
When it comes to AI discoverability, that means regularly asking the main AI assistants the questions your investors ask, both directly about the brands directly and also about market insights, investment trends and financing questions that brand wants to be associated with.
You have to track whether your business appears in those answers, how it is described, and which sources the assistants cite. Over time, you should see the earned media coverage you generate translating into better AI discoverability. At City Road Communications, this tracking is now a standard part of how we measure our work for clients.
You learn, iterate, improve and continuously push forward.
Dominic Pollard is Communications Director at City Road Communications (CRC), a London-based B2B PR agency specialising in financial services, technology, property and professional services. A former business and technology journalist, Dominic has been with CRC since its launch in late 2017. City Road Communications is part of MVI, the media business that publishes PropertyWire.
