Real numbers from a client site, and the one thing that wins no matter which platform people use.

By now you’ve heard it a hundred times. Borrowers are asking AI about mortgages. The Point of Research™ moved. You should “optimize for AI.”

Some of that is true. A lot of it is panic dressed up as urgency. So instead of one more take, here is real data from a site we run, showing what is actually happening, and the honest conclusion it points to.

First, the part nobody selling AI wants to say: Google still wins (today)

Before we talk about AI, look at where the traffic actually comes from today.

Real traffic, last 30 days. Google is still the giant. Direct, referral, and organic search drive the vast majority of visits.”

Google is not dead. On this site, traditional sources, led by Google, drive the overwhelming majority of real visits.

So why does AI matter today? Because of what it’s doing in the background, and where it’s heading. I know I want to make sure I show up everywhere my ideal clients are searching for the things I offer and assume you do too.

What AI is doing right now

When an AI tool answers a mortgage question for a real person, it often goes and reads pages on the web in that moment to build its answer. That activity is trackable. Here is the same site’s AI activity over the same thirty days.

“In 30 days, ChatGPT alone pulled this site’s pages 686 times while answering live questions, part of 2,292 total AI reads across seven engines, every day of the month.”

A few things in that picture matter more than they look.

It’s not one tool. The reads came from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google, Apple, and others. This isn’t a single-app story you can wave off.

It’s real-time. Those 686 ChatGPT “live fetches” are the AI going out to grab pages in the moment, while answering someone’s actual question.

And look at which pages it grabbed

This is the part that tells you what to do. AI didn’t pull random pages. It reached for the specific, useful ones.

The most-read pages weren’t clever marketing. They were plain answers to real questions: how down payment assistance works, why refinance applications get denied, what a USDA or Non-QM loan is, amortization explained in simple terms, the documents you need for a loan application. Clear, specific, genuinely helpful pages, pulled by name.

That is the whole lesson. AI isn’t impressed by slogans. It reaches for the pages that plainly explain something a borrower wanted to know.

What this does not prove (and why I’m telling you)

This data shows AI is reading this site. It does not prove AI recommended anyone, and it does not prove these reads turned into closed loans. On this same site, confirmed clicks from AI were a small number next to those hundreds of reads. Anyone who promises you guaranteed leads from AI is selling certainty that doesn’t exist yet.

The honest claim is narrower and more useful: AI is actively reading content like this, every day, and being read is the first thing that has to happen before you can ever be mentioned. It’s smaller than the hype and far more solid, which is exactly why it’s worth building on.

Here’s the secret: the work is the same on every platform

Here’s what ties the two screenshots together.

Google rewards content that is clear, structured, credible, and useful. AI rewards content that is clear, structured, credible, and useful. The platforms are different. The thing that wins on them is the same.

That means you don’t have to predict the future or chase the trend of the month. You build the asset once, the right way, and it performs where people are looking today (Google) and where they’re looking more and more (AI). The destinations shift. The fundamentals don’t.

For what it’s worth, my read is that Google’s own AI, Gemini, ends up a major long-term player, simply because it’s built into the tools people already use every day, their phone, their browser, their email, their maps. But notice that I’m telling you my guess and calling it a guess. That’s the point. Nobody knows which assistant wins, and you don’t need to know. If your content is clear, credible, and useful, it works on Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and whatever comes next, the same way it already works on Google. Betting on a single winner is the mistake. Building content that works everywhere is the move.

So what actually gets you read, on any platform?

It’s less about doing more and more about being easy to understand everywhere someone, or something, checks.

Be genuinely clear

Say who you are, who you help, where you work, and what makes you worth calling, in the words a borrower would use. If a person has to dig for it, they won’t, and a machine won’t either.

Be specific and local

Generic pages get skipped. The pages that got pulled in the data above were specific: this loan program, this city, this borrower situation. Specific is what makes a page worth quoting.

Be credible, with a real person attached

Mortgage is a high-trust topic, and both Google and AI judge it by a higher standard. A named, licensed human behind the content matters. Your name, your credentials, your track record, consistent across your site and profiles.

Be useful before the ask

The questions borrowers have before they’re ready to talk are the moments to show up for. Calculators, plain explanations, honest tradeoffs. Content that helps someone think gets referenced earlier than content that just tries to convert.

Be consistent everywhere

If your name, focus, and story change from your website to your profiles to your reviews, confidence drops, for the borrower and for the machine trying to summarize you. You don’t have to be everywhere. You have to sound like the same person everywhere you are.

Keep it current

Stale content gets passed over. The pages that get read are the ones kept fresh and added to over time. This isn’t a one-time project. It’s an asset you maintain.

The honest bottom line

Google still wins today. AI is reading you for tomorrow. Both are true, and the smart money builds for both instead of betting the business on either one.

The work that wins is the same on every platform: clear, specific, credible, useful, kept up over time. Do that, and you stop chasing whichever tool is loudest this year. You become the kind of source they all reach for, and the kind of professional people trust the moment they find you. There’s no shortcut to it, and that’s the best news in this whole article, because it means the people willing to do the real thing win, not the ones with the loudest pitch.

PS: Did you know we do this work for clients? If I have learned nothing else in my past 20+ in this industry is that originators, brokers, and company owners do not need more tasks on their plate.

If you are interested in turning your website into a long term asset that abides by best practices and is built for discoverability across the web (traditional and AI) then check out our Authority Plan. You can schedule a walk through of all this with me here.

As someone who has run his own businesses for over 20 years I always suggest building the right way for the long term.

Anthony Balsamo

Anthony Balsamo is the co-founder of Vonk Digital, a website and marketing platform for mortgage professionals. He's a business owner with two decades of hands-on experience building and marketing companies. First his own mortgage company, now a software company and agency serving loan officers, brokers, and lenders across the US. He writes from the operator's seat, not the sidelines.

Anthony spent the last 20 years in the mortgage industry. In 2006 he co-founded a four-person brokerage and grew it into a multi-state lender that made the Inc. 500 and Inc. 5000 lists, was named the San Diego Business Journal's #1 Fastest-Growing Company, and earned a spot on Entrepreneur Magazine's Entrepreneur 360 list of the most entrepreneurial companies in the country. After selling the company in 2018, he stayed on for over a year to help merge the two organizations.

His focus is how mortgage professionals actually generate business, combining online and real-world strategy across websites, paid ads, email, retargeting, content, SEO, and increasingly AI search.

Vonk provides one part of that picture; but Anthony writes and practices the whole process, from a deliberately skeptical, evidence-first point of view shaped by watching every platform shift, and the recycled "certainty" sold with each one, since 2006.