What AI Search Means for Marketplaces, with Esteve Castells, Founder at LLM Pulse

About this episode

Ed Keith is joined by Esteve Castells — former Head of SEO at Adevinta and founder of AI search visibility platform LLM Pulse — to work through what generative search actually means for real estate marketplaces.

Chapters:
00:00 Intro
01:53 From Adevinta's global SEO lead to founding LLM Pulse
04:01 What running SEO across a portfolio that size was really like
05:59 Evangelising SEO inside a business that didn't believe in it
09:32 How LLM Pulse started, and what it does now
11:55 Executives vs operators: who's actually taking AI search seriously
13:10 Will portals lose the search phase to LLMs?
16:58 The strategic case for — and against — building ChatGPT apps
22:23 Real estate vs other verticals, and the unique inventory problem
26:15 Domain authority is out. What replaces it?
29:26 Why 96% of what an LLM sees about your niche is other brands
33:54 Scraped listings, attribution, and whether to block AI crawlers
37:38 Will ChatGPT pick a favoured marketplace in each country?
41:54 Ed's theory: portals will lose the consideration phase
45:00 What portals can actually do about disintermediation

The evangelist's job never really ends
Esteve joined Schibsted Marketplaces in January 2019 into an organisation with almost nobody working on SEO full time — a business that had grown on brand and TV without needing it. The hardest part of the job, he says, was never the SEO itself. It was getting resources and getting people to care. The eBay Classifieds Group acquisition brought a stronger SEO culture with it, and the team finally had a tailwind. He now sees the same cycle starting again with AI search, except this time nobody has the playbook.

The disintermediation question
The boardroom worst case is straightforward: ChatGPT serves every house on the market by going straight to the agency, and the aggregator in the middle disappears. Esteve points out that real estate is unusually exposed here because almost nobody has unique inventory — the same listing sits on the agency site, several portals and the meta-aggregators on top of them. Generalist goods marketplaces are far better protected, because they're the canonical source and they own payment and delivery.

SEO and GEO are the same ingredients, a different dish
Esteve's view is that SEO is the foundation for AI search, but the actions diverge. LLM Pulse data shows 96% of what an LLM sees when answering a query in your niche is about other brands, not yours — which pushes the work off your own site and onto third-party sources and PR. He also flags the brands that quietly went invisible because an IT decision blocked ChatGPT's crawler.

The attribution problem, and who ChatGPT partners with
Citation CTR is under 1%, so the marketplace that sourced an answer rarely gets credit for it. Esteve's research has found ChatGPT typically favours one media partner per country — Prisa in Spain — and the open question is whether that pattern extends beyond media. If it does, he argues it may favour the number two or three player rather than the incumbent, since the big marketplaces are the most hostile to partnering with OpenAI.

Guest:
Esteve Castells, Founder at LLM Pulse — LinkedIn

Presented by:
Edmund Keith — LinkedIn