Organic Search Intent Study of the Property Industry 2025

Alex Moran Head of Organic Growth

5 min read

MediaProperty

Introduction

As an SEO team that works with many property clients it is important that we fully understand the search landscape to ensuring that our SEO strategy is in line with common trends. When doing property marketing there are a lot of unique considerations to make that may differ from wider SEO trends. This research is just part of that understanding. If you want to gain further insights see our ultimate guide to SEO property marketing. Head of Organic Growth, Alex Moran takes us through the latest trends in property in the SEO industry

What research was conducted?
What are the most popular property sites in 2025?
What property site appear in position #1 on Google the most in 2025?
What search features appear on Google in the property industry?
What makes up the ‘other’ search results appearing for property related searches?
What are the most popular search terms related to property?
What are the most popular searched areas to live in the UK?

Key Takeaways

• The property portals are even more dominant than before

• Google Business Profile remains very important for housing developers as local packs are prevalent

• AI Overviews are not very common at all for the types of searches used

• ‘Houses for sale’ remains the most used search phrase in the industry

• New home builders will not appear for terms that don’t contain ‘new’

• Housing developers are more likely to rank 1st for key commercial terms than estate agents

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What research was conducted?

This study looks at a range of commercial, property related terms on Google, assessing which brands appear in the top 10 and in which positions.

The resulting findings will outline the industry trends in 2025 that should be a consideration when developing an SEO strategy in the property industry.

The terms used for this test were:

houses for sale
homes for sale
houses in
new homes in
new builds in
property in
new homes for sale
homes in
new property in

These were then appended by every town* and city in the UK, such as ‘new homes in Manchester’, ‘houses in Manchester’, ‘houses in Altrincham’ etc. amounting to:

1039 different locations
9,351 searches in total
A dataset of over 45,000 rows to look at (the top 10 of each, including search features).

Please note that the terms determined by Ahrefs (the analytics platform used in this study) to have 0 search volume will not have a top 10.

It is important to also note that ranking data changes significantly based on personalisation as well as general ranking changes. This data is taken from the 1^st of October 2025 but may not be reflective of the current search results you are seeing.

*Definition of a ‘town’ is non-specific therefore for the benefits of this study we used the list here: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_towns_in_England

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What are the most popular property sites in 2025?

The study found a change since the 2023 data in that Zoopla is now the most prominent in the marketplace, superseding Rightmove. However, both have grown in their market share as has OnTheMarket.

Zoopla now appears for 15% of the search results, up from 9% in 2023
Rightmove appears for 14% of search results, up from 11% in 2023
OnTheMarket appears for 11% of search results, up from 10% in 2023

The dominance of these three brands is staggering, accounting for over a 3^rd of the total visibility. Meaning, they are appearing for almost 50% of all searches, or in many cases, appearing multiple times.

Zoopla are appearing twice in the search results over 1,500 times

For example, for the ‘homes for sale crosby’ they have both of these URLs in the top 10:

https://www.zoopla.co.uk/for-sale/houses/merseyside/crosby/
https://www.zoopla.co.uk/for-sale/property/merseyside/crosby/

The main difference being that the ‘houses’ page has just filtered the results for semi-detached, detached and terrace houses.

To see how many times your brand appears please contact us on [email protected]

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What property site appear in position #1 on Google the most in 2025?

The research found that despite not appearing as much as Zoopla, Rightmove is far away the most popular in terms of appearing in position #1 in the search results. This really emphasises the current dominance that Rightmove has over the property industry, both from an SEO perspective and from a public perception. Some of the factors include:

Rightmove has the highest Domain Rating in property

Some exceptions from the research include Government affiliated sites. But their Domain Rating of 85/100 is a very clear indication of the authority of the site online. Domain Rating is an Ahrefs metric used to measure backlinks to the site and simulates Googles PageRank algorithm factor. Zoopla at 83 is close, but other sites such as Taylor Wimpey or Prime Location are much lower at 72 and 74 respectively. This will also dwarf smaller independent Estate Agents, who may only have a basic website present.

NavBoost

This is a metric Google uses to understand click-through-rates (CTR) on the search results and then, from this understanding this data improving the rankings of pages that get a better CTR. With Rightmove also having an incredibly strong brand, it is likely to gain a naturally better CTR as a result, which will continue to strengthen its rankings.

I personally believe this to be an issue with Google’s use of NavBoost when looked at on a large scale as it is causing the larger brands to monopolise disproportionately on search in certain niches.

Rightmove’s coverage

Although this is true for Zoopla and several other sites, it’s important to note that Rightmove does cover all the UK and, as a result, has more market penetration overall.

When looking at the top 10, most of the sites (outside of Rightmove, Zoopla and Property Pal) are housing developer sites. This is showing that, as a housing developer you can appear in the top position even with the dominance of Rightmove and Zoopla. Though seemingly this is significantly harder as an Estate Agent.

There is also the opportunity for housing developers to appear in the top position of Google via the ‘local pack’ as covered in the next section.

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What search features appear on Google in the property industry?

AI Overviews in the property industry

While AI Overviews and LLMs are currently dominating the conversation in the SEO industry more broadly, this study has shown that for commercial property-related terms such as these, AI Overviews are in fact not very popular at all.

In fact, with all 45,000+ rows of data, AI Overviews only appeared a total of twice! For the terms: ‘new homes in birmingham’ and ‘new homes in dartford’.

The table below shows total appearances in search results and therefore, and in the case of AI Overviews, both results have multiple citations appearing.

These terms are very commercial in nature and therefore an AI Overview isn’t generally suitable, both from the perspective of Google deciding whether to show the AI Overview and then the engagement with the AI Overview (with less engagement meaning that it will be less likely to show).

Below is an example of what an AI Overview in the search results looks like. There appears to be a lot of duplication of the normal search results, failing to offer anything new.

Example of AI Overview in the property industry:

Local results in the property industry

While AI Overviews aren’t as popular, the Google Maps listings embedded directly into the search results (known as the ‘local pack’) remains prevalent, especially as it was in 2023, specifically in the new build housing industry.

In fact, for all 299 results that have shown a local pack, only 1 does not contain the word ‘new’ which is ‘homes in blackpool’. The reason for this is that housing developers have specific locations they have created (i.e,. the developments themselves) which often have marketing suites on. Whereas with estate agents, they have houses they are looking to sell in many different locations and therefore cannot create a Google Business Profile for each house they are looking to sell. Instead, it is just their offices which have a physical location, which aren’t relevant to show to searchers for these types of keywords (instead they will appear for a term like ‘estate agents surrey’.

Furthermore, the local pack is appearing in the top position for 67 different keywords, making it the second most prominent type of result in the top position. This shows the real importance for housing developers in optimising their local listings.

An increase in sitelinks in SEO as a whole

The other noteworthy data point is how frequently sitelinks now appear since the dataset in 2023. This is happening across multiple different industries and not just property. However, it illustrates the importance of auditing your websites internal linking to help influence these sitelinks as much as possible.

What types of search terms do estate agents and housing developers appear for?

When working on any type of search, whether it be paid search or organic search, it is important to know what type of keywords to use in order to rank. With paid search, you can always pay more to ensure that you appear, but your CTR may be low which will conversely affect your Quality Score. However, from an SEO perspective what is shown is very much dictated by the perceived search intent as well as the engagement from users on the search results i.e. ‘NavBoost’.

When comparing the data from 2023 to now we can see very little change in the overall landscape, with housing developers still dominating the search results when the term ‘new’ is used in the search but barely appearing when it isn’t. The same applies, vice versa, for estate agents

For estate agents, the picture is looking a little bleak, with their percentage of the search traffic being further eclipsed by the search portals. Some examples include:

‘Homes for sale’ related terms previous accounted for by 54% of estate agents, this has now decreased to 44%, and portals have increased from 44% to 55%.
‘Property in’ related terms have decreased from 57% with estate agents to 46% and in turn the portals have increased from 41% to 54% of search results.

However, in the housing developer industry the figures remain much more stable, with ‘new homes for sale’ going up from 60% in 2023 to 64% in 2025. This means that targeting these terms organically for house builders is still very much worth it and investing in your SEO efforts is still a must for housebuilders.

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What makes up the ‘other’ search results appearing for property related searches?

While a much smaller slice of the overall traffic, the ‘other’ section includes housing associations and social housing making up a large proportion of the remaining data. The social media sites, construction and government related businesses making up a smaller but not insignificant proportion.

What are the most popular search terms related to property?

The data regarding the actual sum of the total volume of searches for the different terms is, in fact, very similar to what appeared in 2023, with ‘houses for sale’ being far and away the biggest, at around 1,800,000 searches a month.

While these generic ‘houses for sale’ terms seem attractive, at least by search volume, it is offset by the data showing how the property portals dominate the market from an SEO perspective. Especially if you are new home builder.

The term ‘new property in’ also received very little search volume proportionate to other terms. Meaning that if you are a housing developer, using terms like ‘property’, as opposed to ‘home’ or ‘house’ is overall not the best strategy when trying to target key phrases.

Search volume trends over 2 years

Most terms have seen a decline in search volume overall when looking over the last two years, with terms like ‘property in’ and ‘new builds in’ seeing particularly large decreases. This may be in part to people using a variety of different mediums outside of Google, such as LLMs, to navigate their purchase journey. But also could be related to more macroeconomic factors such as house price increases, other cost of living concerns and the end of the Help to Buy scheme in the UK.

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What are the most popular searched areas to live in the UK?

Because we have reviewed a wide range of terms incorporating every town and city across the UK it has given a good indication of where the most searched places to live in the UK are.

The data shows that the places with the most search volume are not just the big cities. In fact, Cardiff has come out as most popular place people are looking to move based on this data set. And, surprisingly, Telford is the sixth most searched area to live.

However, we can see that London, Birmingham and Manchester do all appear in the top 10 most searched for places to live, but these results certainly aren’t proportionate to the population of each city. A reason for this might be that in the larger cities, users are more likely to search for a specific suburb. For example, rather than search for ‘Manchester’, users might search for ‘South Manchester’.

Conclusion

While the SEO industry has seen some large changes over the past two years, including the increasing prominence of AI overviews, this doesn’t appear to have had a significant impact on the search terms in this data set. However, we do see it having a broader impact on the search landscape, even for housing developers, but, for the most part, on their non-commercial queries. As these queries are primarily high-volume commercial terms, this is only a small section of the industry, if you were to search something more information such as ‘Average house price Cardiff’ you are much more likely to see the AI Overviews. With the decrease in overall search volume there may also be a proportion of this share of traffic now going directly to the LLMs.

The remained prominence of local results for new homes related terms also shows how these remain popular for consumers, and why continuing to keep these accurate and up to date is essential for a housing developers SEO strategy.

It is clear that the major property portals continue to dominate the industry and, in fact, have taken an even greater proportion of traffic since 2023. Because they operate across both new builds and second hand homes, they can stretch their coverage much further, and with more incoming revenue, continue to invest in SEO efforts. It is interesting to note that while Zoopla has a wider coverage, Rightmove is the one appearing in position #1 much more often. Whether this is driven directly by Domain Rating or NavBoost or other factors is unclear, but all will likely play a part.

Nevertheless, being in position #1 isn’t everything and the housebuilders do have the opportunity to still gain search visibility, seemingly much more so than estate agents currently. But both business types should look at targeting beyond just the headline phrases of ‘houses for sale Manchester’ and look to take up a more targeted approach with smaller regions, longer keyword targets and reaching users via different mediums, such as LLMs.

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