Autonomous Growth documented 36 AI assistant answers to six borrower questions in Cleveland and Phoenix, finding that nearby businesses are listed without sources, while authored pages addressing a specific borrower situation are the ones cited.
-- Autonomous Growth has published the results of a two-city study of how AI assistants answer mortgage questions, based on 36 documented responses. The study tested six borrower questions in Cleveland and Phoenix across three AI assistants, recording which mortgage professionals were named and what sources, if any, sat behind each name.
The full study is available at https://www.autonomousgrowth.io/being-listed-is-not-being-recommended
The central finding is that two separate mechanisms produce names, and they behave differently. One of the three assistants renders a places panel above its written answer, showing nearby businesses with a rating, a category, an open-or-closed status and a one-line description, with no source links attached. The prose beneath then repeats those names. Separately, and across all three assistants, the names that carried a citation came from a page whose address matched the borrower's specific situation: bank-statement loans, ITIN mortgages, DSCR rental financing, divorce buyout refinancing.
A single Cleveland answer showed both mechanisms at once. Asked about a self-employed borrower, the places panel returned three companies, one of them Mutual of Omaha Mortgage's Seven Hills office. The written answer named an individual, David Goldberg, and cited goldbergmortgage.com, where a page addresses bank-statement lending for self-employed borrowers in Northeast Ohio. Goldberg did not appear in the panel. His employer's office did.
The same question asked in Phoenix returned five local brokerages in the panel and no individual anywhere in the answer. Phoenix has substantially more independent brokers and more local business visibility than Cleveland. What the study did not find was a comparable authored page, and the citations went to national lenders instead.
The study also recorded that the descriptions on the panel cards were hedged. Local brokers were described as businesses that "may discuss" ITIN mortgage programs or "may explore" non-QM options. On one answer, the assistant stated directly that it had found the businesses as active mortgage brokers in the area, and would not assume any of them actually offered the programme the borrower had asked about.
Two of the three assistants tested have no places component. Those two named only parties they could cite, and across both cities and all six borrower situations they named no individual mortgage professional at all, including for the control question, an ordinary first-time buyer with good credit and stable employment.
The questions were asked in a borrower's own words rather than in industry terms, for example, "I filed Chapter 7 two years ago, and I want to buy a house, who can actually help me?" and "I'm self-employed, and my tax returns don't show what I really earn." Each was asked to log out, in a fresh session, with no instructions added to the prompt. Every citation that appeared was volunteered by the assistant rather than requested, which means those were the sources an ordinary borrower would have been shown.
The study carries clear limitations. It covers two metropolitan areas on a single day, with one run per question and no repetition, so it cannot report how much answers vary between sessions. An initial hypothesis, that borrowers in difficult circumstances would find no named professional, held in Cleveland and was contradicted in Phoenix, and was abandoned as a result.
Autonomous Growth is a client acquisition platform for local high-ticket service businesses, including US mortgage professionals, and conducted the study as part of its own research into AI search behaviour. Mortgage professionals can read the full study and its methodology at https://www.autonomousgrowth.io/being-listed-is-not-being-recommended
Contact Info:
Name: Arnold van Loon
Email: Send Email
Organization: Autonomous Growth ( part of RReputatioNN )
Address: 109 Sint-Lenaartsesteenweg #1 1, Rijkevorsel, Antwerpen 2310, Belgium
Website: https://autonomousgrowth.io
Source: NewsNetwork
Release ID: 89200411
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