We Spent $60,000 a Month on Bankrate and Zillow Ads. Then They Changed the Game.

Key takeaways

• Paying to rent attention on a platform you don’t control is fragile: the owner can reprice or remove it anytime, and Zillow and Bankrate did exactly that to us.
• The same kind of shift is happening again for loan officers: borrowers now research inside AI chat tools before they ever call.
• Getting considered by the AI chat engines does not cost $60,000 a month. The barrier is low right now because almost nobody in mortgage is doing it right.
• You don’t outbid anyone. You give the engines custom, structured, consistent content tied to your name, and you own the answer instead of renting the click.

For years, when we ran our mortgage company, we spent about $60,000 a month on ads with Bankrate and Zillow, driving borrowers to our own landing pages. For a while, it worked great.

Then they changed the game on us.

Zillow pulled the banner placement we relied on and gave that real estate to their own mortgage rate tables. Bankrate hiked their ad costs. Almost overnight, what we were paying to acquire a customer stopped making sense against what we actually made on a loan.

So we pivoted. Because that is the job.

Anthony Balsamo holding the welcome booklet from his old mortgage company.

The real lesson wasn’t about the ads

The $60k was not the lesson. The lesson was that you never really control a platform you are renting from. Zillow and Bankrate could change the rules any time they wanted, and they did, because it was their platform, not ours. The borrowers opted in on our own landing pages, but the traffic that reached those pages was theirs to reprice or reroute. And they did.

Part of staying in business is staying nimble. The ground moves and you move with it. I have watched it happen over and over: the channel that prints money today gets more expensive, more crowded, or taken away tomorrow.

And it is happening again, right now, to you

Here is why I am telling you this. The ground is moving again, and if you originate loans, you are standing on it.

Borrowers are starting their research inside AI chat tools now. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google’s AI. They are researching before they ever fill out a form or call anyone. The front door is moving. Same kind of shift I lived through, new channel.

How much does it cost to show up in AI chat tools?

Here is the part I would have loved to hear back then, when we were writing those checks. Getting considered by the chat engines does not cost $60,000 a month. It does not cost anything close. Right now the barrier is low, because almost nobody in mortgage is doing it right yet.

You do not outbid anyone. You give the engines what they want:

• custom content, tied to your name
• structured so a machine can read it
• published consistently
• about the markets and loan programs you actually serve

Do that, and when a borrower asks an AI tool for a loan officer in your area, you are the name that comes up. You are not renting the click. You own the answer. And unlike a Zillow banner, nobody can take it away from you or triple the price next quarter.

Aren’t the AI engines just the next rented land?

Fair question. I asked myself the same thing.

The honest answer is that the distribution is always rented. You never control Google, ChatGPT, or any platform, and someday they will change the rules too. Some of them will probably start selling placement in their answers.

But there is a difference between renting the channel and renting the result.

When we bought leads, we owned nothing. Stop paying and we were back to zero that day, and every dollar built Zillow’s brand, not ours.

When you build authority, the channel is still rented, but the asset underneath is yours: your content, your domain, your reputation, your audience. When the channel shifts, you carry all of it to the next one. The same structured, credible content that gets you cited in ChatGPT today is what ranked you on Google yesterday and what will get you found wherever people look next.

That is what staying nimble actually means. You cannot control the channel. You can own an asset good enough to move with it. So the goal is not to find land that never changes, because it does not exist. The goal is to stop renting results that vanish and start building something you can re-point when the ground moves.

What I’d do differently today

If I were originating right now, here is where the money and attention would go instead:

Being found, not being seen once. A fraction of that old budget into a site built to get cited by Google and the AI engines, so the borrowers I used to rent now find me on their own.

Feeding the engines. Custom, structured content under my name, published consistently. Treat the engines like a referral partner: feed them and they send you business.

Winning the Point of Research. Everyone looks you up before they commit. I would make sure what they find (real content, real reviews, a real licensed person) is what closes them.
Controlling my tools: Calculators and a digital business card, capturing my own leads, instead of forms on someone else’s platform.

Treating it like an asset. Buying leads resets to zero every month. Content and authority compound. Every piece keeps working whether or not I spend another dollar.

Where the Authority Plan comes in:

This is exactly what we built the Vonk Authority Plan to do. It feeds the engines for you: custom, structured content multiple times a week under your name, the loan-program and market pages that get cited, and a dashboard so you can watch it working. It is the version of “what I’d do now” that runs without turning you into a content creator.

The tools changed. The lesson did not: stop renting attention on a platform someone else controls. Start owning it.

Want to see how it works? Book a call and I’ll walk you through the Authority Plan.

Frequently asked questions

Does it cost money to show up in AI chat tools like ChatGPT?

Not in the pay-to-play sense. “Some of them will probably start selling placement in their answers the way you buy a Zillow banner . The paid layer always comes. That’s why you want to earn your spot with content before it does.” You earn it by publishing custom, structured content tied to your name that the engines can trust and cite.

How do loan officers get recommended by AI search?

AI engines crawl websites, decide which ones are trustworthy, and cite them when a borrower asks a relevant question. Loan officers get recommended by publishing custom, structured, consistent content under their own name, reinforcing trust signals like NMLS and licensing, and building local market depth.

Is buying mortgage leads still worth it?

Paid leads can and do work, but you are renting attention on a platform you do not control, and the price can rise or the placement can disappear, as it did for us with Zillow and Bankrate. Building your own authority is slower but compounds, and you own the result.

Aren’t AI search engines just another platform that could change the rules?

Yes. Every distribution channel is rented, including AI search. The difference is what you build on top of it. Buying leads leaves you with nothing when the platform changes. Building your own domain, content, and authority gives you an asset you can carry to the next channel.