What's changing in AI search: October 2026
Resources · AI search update
What's changing in AI search: October 2026
AI assistants moved further into the places renters already search. ChatGPT, which OpenAI says 1.2 billion people now use every week[1], can suggest apps in the middle of a conversation[1], and Apartments.com is one of them[2]. Apartments.com also joined Google's Gemini as a connected app[3]. A Google model update on September 2 also removed source links from some AI Mode answers until Google fixed it two days later[4][5]. Changes like these can shift which buildings and sources the AI engines show with nothing changed on your side, which is why HaloScore measures what the AI engines show every month rather than once.
By HaloScore TeamUpdated October 2026 · 3 min readOctober 2026
What changed this month
01
Apartments.com now answers renters inside Gemini
Google added Apartments.com to the apps a Gemini user can connect on September 23, so a renter who asks Gemini about apartments can get answers straight from Apartments.com listings, as they already can inside ChatGPT, which makes a property's listing details part of what both assistants tell renters.
Source: Google, September 23, 2026
02
Google's AI answers reach billions, and ads are moving in
Google says AI Overviews now have 2.5 billion monthly users and AI Mode has passed 1 billion, and it is testing ads inside AI Mode answers on top of the ads it already shows around AI Overviews, so the unpaid recommendations in those answers increasingly share the page with paid ones.
Source: Google, September 2026
03
Google can publish an edit to your profile if nobody answers
Google now gives a business 4 days to accept or reject an edit someone suggests to its Google Business Profile, after which Google may publish the edit if other public information, such as the business's own website, supports it, so answering those notices and keeping the website current both protect the details Google shows about a property.
Source: Google Business Profile Help
04
Google is testing an AI summary in place of the business profile
In a change spotted on phones in mid-September, Google labeled some businesses' profile panels "AI Overview" and opened a follow-up AI chat from them, so the first thing a renter sees about a community in Google may become Google's own AI summary of it.
05
One website setting can hide a site from search
Cloudflare, a service many websites run behind, changed its AI crawler settings on September 15, and its strictest setting turns away Google's, Bing's and Apple's search crawlers too, so it is worth asking whoever manages your website which setting it uses, and a HaloScore assessment now checks every month whether the AI crawlers can reach your site.
Source: Cloudflare, September 15, 2026
The basics
How AI search works
When a renter asks an AI assistant for apartment recommendations, they do not get a page of ten blue links. They get a short answer naming a handful of buildings, often three to five out of an entire submarket, and there is no second page. Either the assistant names you or it does not, and the renter never sees what it left out. That is the whole shift a HaloScore assessment measures. Traditional search optimization competes for a position in a list. AI search competes to be one of the few names in a sentence, which is why the industry has started calling it generative engine optimization, or getting recommended by the machine rather than ranked by it.
The AI engines build those answers from the sources they trust about you, and they consistently lean on third-party listings and outside coverage more heavily than on your own website. Your site matters, but it is rarely the deciding voice. The AI engines also disagree with each other: the same question asked of different assistants returns different buildings, and the same question repeated can return a different answer, because retrieval is probabilistic rather than fixed. Together those two facts explain the shape of a HaloScore report. It measures the outcome across several AI engines rather than one, it re-measures on a cadence rather than scoring you once, and the work it recommends is aimed at the sources the AI engines actually read.
Get started
See where your community stands in AI search
HaloScore measures how often, and how prominently, AI engines like ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Google's AI Overviews recommend your property when renters ask the questions they actually ask. Then it shows you what to do about it.
Get started with HaloScoreUseful? Share it with your team or your management company.
Sources
- Engadget, "OpenAI Dev Day 2026: Live updates on the latest ChatGPT and Codex announcements" (September 29, 2026): Sam Altman's figure of 1.2 billion weekly users, and ChatGPT discovering apps during conversations. engadget.com
- CoStar Group, "OpenAI Features Apartments.com in GPT-6 Astra Apartment-Hunting Demo" (Business Wire, September 8, 2026): the Apartments.com app in ChatGPT, launched in early August 2026. costargroup.com
- Mai Lowe, Google, "A new wave of Connected Apps is rolling out to Gemini" (September 23, 2026). blog.google
- Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Roundtable, "Google Search Using Gemini 3.8 Flash In AI Mode" (September 2, 2026). seroundtable.com
- Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Roundtable, "Google AI Mode Gemini 3.8 Flash Not Link / Citation Friendly?" (September 3, 2026, updated when the issue was resolved on September 4). seroundtable.com
- Dan Taylor, Google, "Search's expansionary moment is here: How brands can turn AI into proven ROI", Think with Google (September 2026). business.google.com
- Google Business Profile Help, "Understand Google updates on your Business Profile" (read October 9, 2026). support.google.com
- Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Roundtable, "Google Local Knowledge Panel As An AI Overview" (September 17, 2026). seroundtable.com
- Bryan Becker, Cloudflare, "Have it both ways: stay discoverable in search while disallowing AI training" (September 15, 2026). blog.cloudflare.com