If you’ve been tracking the number of website visits, pageviews, and clicks from traditional sources like organic search (Google, Yahoo, Bing), then you’ve probably noticed a downward trend in your metrics. But you’re not alone. This trend is not property management-specific; it’s affecting every industry and company. How and why? Because the way your customers search online and gather information has shifted.
That shift is why we hosted AEO Unlocked: A Growth Playbook for Property Managers in 2027, a live virtual session from VPM Solutions in partnership with Geekly Media, built around one question: how does a property management company stay visible when buyers ask AI instead of scrolling Google?
Our CEO, Pete Neubig, moderated a panel with Heather Park, co-founder of VPM Solutions and founder and CEO of Geekly Media, and Juli Durante, Geekly Media’s head of growth. Pete asked the questions most owners and operators are wondering about, and attendees added plenty of their own through the live Q&A.
Below are the 10 questions that came up most, with the panel's answers, lightly edited for clarity. Whether you attended and would like a refresher or you missed it entirely, this is the short version of what you need to know to start with AEO heading into 2027.
AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimization: optimizing your website and the content you own so AI tools can find, understand, and recommend you. As Juli put it, in AI search, "there is no more number one." Results are personalized to the person asking.
Heather offered the best analogy of the session. Old-school SEO is like using Google Maps five years ago: turn left, go 1.3 miles, turn right. AEO is like using Waze today, which asks whether you want coffee on the way or want to avoid tolls. AI weighs the searcher's context, recent searches, and needs before it gives an answer.
No. Heather said it twice for emphasis: "SEO is not dead." AEO is an expansion of SEO, and if you're doing AEO well, you'll handle your SEO in stride. Google Business Profile, "People Also Ask," and quality content still matter in both worlds.
Because buyer behavior has already shifted. In audits Geekly has run, people starting their search with an AI tool jumped from about 6% roughly 18 months ago to 45% today. And when Google shows an AI summary, 38% of people don't scroll down to the results below it (this is the zero-click world - clicks are no longer needed to find the answer).
Juli shared a real-life example from a Manhattan leasing client. On the results page, the AI Overview pulled in listing photos and price ranges, and she had to scroll three times before reaching the first organic result. Here’s a fun and quick exercise (after you’re done reading this article, of course):
Quality and depth matter more, while volume of content matters less. Juli said AI rewards original research, statistics, and information only your business has. What's falling out of favor is publishing lots of similar pages on the same topic. To AI, that can look like keyword stuffing, or "gaming the system."
Geekly tested this on its own site by pulling back duplicative older content. Impressions dipped slightly, but clicks held steady and then rose, indicating the traffic they retained was higher quality.
Neither, by rule. Heather's answer: "Less is more, more is more, but better is better." Length isn't the goal. The goal is to answer the question as completely, accurately, and as helpfully as you can. AI learns from how people follow up on answers, so content that truly solves the problem is more likely to be surfaced. Hint: when developing your content, think of it as a two-way conversation, because that’s how people are communicating with AI.
Add FAQs where they help; add schema if it's easy. Juli likes on-page FAQ sections because they hold useful details that don't fit the main story of the page. On the VPM homepage, for example, the FAQs cover practical items like how to work with VPM, recruitment models, and virtual assistant payments. Solve for the human first, then help AI understand.
On schema, both panelists agreed it won't make or break you, and it won't hurt. Once the questions and answers are written, Juli said the schema takes about five more minutes, so why not do it now?
Yes. Third-party validation counts, and AI factors in sentiment. Great reviews and positive mentions help you get surfaced; poor reviews show up too, sometimes word for word when someone asks how you compare to a competitor.
Juli noted that AI lets people drill into specifics. An owner could ask whether a company's reviews mention slow response times or tenant placement problems. On local press, Heather said AI "evens the playing field": a hyper-local neighborhood publication may surface more readily than a big-city paper because it answers the question more directly.
AI looks at anything publicly visible, including social posts. Reddit was heavily cited a few months ago, but it's appearing less since Reddit restricted crawler access. Juli's takeaway: platform access can change overnight, so over-optimizing for any one channel is a mistake.
You really want to measure two sides: business results first, visibility second. Heather and Juli were clear about that order. You could show up in AI answers all day and still generate no business, so start with what turns into leads.
To begin on the business side, set up analytics (Google Analytics or within your CRM) to separate AI referrals from your other traffic. Then you’ll want to track three numbers: AI referral sessions, session-to-contact rate, and leads or customers whose original source was an AI referral site (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, etc.). Juli mentioned that she saw the biggest difference from AI-referred traffic. Across her clients, AI-referred traffic is converting at 4 to 10 times the rate of other sources. Another surprise? One of her client’s AI referrals converts at 7.5%, compared to 1.5% from organic search.
And it’s important to understand, that volume may still be low, so this doesn’t replace SEO. Visitors from AI-referred traffic are converting at a higher rate because they arrive more qualified with higher intent: they’ve already been through several rounds of research with AI before they ever reach your site. That’s why Heather also suggested watching the trend lines. If your organic traffic is declining, is your AI referral traffic rising, and how does lead quality compare between the two?
On the visibility side, start with tracking prompts. You can measure how often AI mentions your company, how often it cites a page on your site, how you compare with competitors (share of voice), and how it describes you (sentiment). Heather said a basic spreadsheet is a fine place to start: take the 10 questions your buyers ask most and run them in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity using a private browser window. HubSpot’s AEO tool is one option for a central history of mentions and citations. Whichever you use, run it repeatedly, because results change week to week.
That repetition is where remote team members come in. AEO measurement isn’t complicated, but it is steady, and it requires consistent attention that busy owners rarely have time for. A trained virtual assistant can run your buyer questions each week, log mentions, citations and competitors, ask AI why your company wasn’t included, monitor new reviews, and pull a monthly scorecard from your analytics. And you keep decision-making authority: which questions matter and what to change on your website. Your remote team keeps the tracking consistent. That’s why we launched our AI visibility course for virtual assistants on the VPM platform, and over 550 VAs have already enrolled - and this number continues to grow.
You need to start with a baseline. Juli recommended an audit of where you stand today: can AI access your site, does it understand who you are and what you do, and how do you compare with others in your market? Geekly offers a free AEO audit for this.
To do it yourself, open a private browsing window and search the way your owners, tenants, or investors would. Then ask a follow-up: "Why didn't you include [your company]?" AI will often tell you, for example, that your pages don't mention pricing. Just take its advice with a grain of salt. Juli noted AI may tell you to add an LLMS.txt file, then admit that no one is really using it yet.
Heather's simple version: write the 10 questions your buyers most often ask, run them today, and again in one and two weeks. Track how often you're mentioned and cited, and make incremental changes based on what you learn.
VPM Solutions also offers a free course on AI Visibility for Property Management in our VPM Academy. It’s three short chapters on how best to get started with your AEO strategy.
If there was one theme running through the whole hour, it's that AEO isn't a reason to panic. It's a reason to get back to fundamentals. Heather joked that "83.4%" of AEO is overhyped, and Juli agreed that at its heart, AEO is about being a good content organization and treating your business like a publisher. But as Pete put it, "It may be overhyped, but it's not something you can bury your head in the sand about."
So here are my three takeaways as a marketing strategist + a bonus prediction:
The digital world never stands still. AI search won’t wait for you to develop a 2027 marketing plan. Watch the full AEO Unlocked session to see where to start, what to track and why AI traffic converts so well.