You have been told to fix your website so AI will recommend you, and production is supposed to be what separates you from everyone else. A study of 37,500 AI searches found that the single biggest source of agent citations is a free directory listing, and that most of the highest-producing agents in the country never get named at all.
Local Falcon ran the study: 37,500 AI searches across the 100 largest US cities. The headline result is about who does not appear — "among established agents at all levels, 91.5% never got a single mention".
Where the citations do come from is the useful part, because it is not where anyone has been told to look. Across all platforms, Google Business Profile supplies 36.6% of all citations. And on one product it is overwhelming: Google AI Mode "relies on Google Business Profile listings for 72.5% of its citations, far more than any web page".
The platforms do not agree with each other, which is why chasing one ranking does not work. "Agents cited by exactly one platform and no other: 82.6%". Even inside Google, the two products behave differently — "Google AI Overviews returns no agent name at all seven times out of ten."
Zillow citations are worth less than the raw count suggests. "Of Zillow's citations, 86.9% point to the citywide list of every agent in a market." Only the remainder point to a named agent's own profile.
And one thing the named agents were doing on their own sites: eighteen of the 25 most-cited agent websites, about 70% of them, ran a page headlined along the lines of Best Real Estate Agents in their city. Those pages are rare, and "Sites carrying this kind of page are a small share of everything cited, yet they pull in a third of all citations an agent website receives".
The study itself is published by Local Falcon and is worth opening directly, since a write-up will always carry less of it than the source.
“relies on Google Business Profile listings for 72.5% of its citations, far more than any web page”
What this costs is a wrong priority. Agents are rebuilding websites and buying content to be found by AI, while the asset that supplies more citations than anything else is a free profile most of them filled in once and have not opened since. Production does not help here at all — the models are reading directories, and directories do not know who closed the most homes.
The change is unglamorous. Complete the Google Business Profile properly, keep it current, and stop treating it as a map pin. Then, if you are going to publish a page about the best agents in your city, do it honestly with real numbers behind the rankings, because a page that inflates you is a page that eventually embarrasses you in front of the people it was meant to impress.