All Talk, Little Traffic: What PPW Madrid 2026 Said About AI

When Simon Baker opened Property Portal Watch Madrid 2026 on the 28th of October, he told the 460 people in the room that all eight of the conference themes had been built around AI. Given the year the sector has had, that was hardly a controversial choice.

What was surprising, over the next three days, was how little AI traffic anyone could point to. Every residential portal that shared a number put the share of visits arriving from AI tools at 2% or less. The more interesting fight turned out to be about something else entirely: what keeps a portal in business if listings stop doing the job.

Lots of AI talk, not much AI traffic

Mike van der Heijden of Portal Ventures, which tracks traffic across the sector, put AI's share at 0.3% to 0.6%. Worse for the hype merchants, AI referrals "peaked in October and then it sort of dwindled down". If portals should be nervous about anyone, he said, it is Google, which keeps more clicks for itself every year.

The operators broadly agreed. Francesca Cortesi of Vend said LLMs bring 0.5% of Finn's traffic, and Imran Ali Khan put Dubizzle Group at 1% to 2%. Portal Brain, our database of portal claims, shows Rightmove below 0.5% all year and Hemnet well under 0.1%. Scout24 has actually gone the wrong way for the AI optimists, from 1.5% to 2% in October 2025 to 0.7% in June.

The big numbers came from the edges of the industry. Ivo Perts said 1001 Square Network, a commercial property marketplace, gets about 8% of its traffic from AI, which he puts down to its newsletter and editorial content. A year ago at PPW Madrid, OLX Brazil's Marcos Leite said LLM traffic was close to 10% of organic.

Building AI into the product hasn't been plain sailing either. Finn's conversational search had a 70% drop rate and won't be rolled out as it stands. Dubizzle replaced its search form with an AI bar, "And the feedback was really bad," said Khan. Cortesi's conclusion was that "when AI is not in the front row is when it works best."

The numbers probably understate things a little, since LLMs pass on so little referral data that some of their visits get logged as direct traffic. But nobody suggested the true figure is ten times higher.

Calm, or complacent?

Giles Thorne, the Jefferies analyst, was perhaps the most bullish person in the building. He rated the chance of AI assistants disrupting any business in the room as "close to zero", and put the fall in portal shares down to mood rather than results: "It wasn't overvalued. There was no profit warnings. It was just AI fear taking an axe to terminal values." Silvio Pagliani of Immobiliare.it agreed that portals "shouldn't be scared of ChatGPT or Anthropic".

Mike DelPrete wasn't so relaxed, and came up with the most quotable line of the three days: "a portal knows your clicks, but Claude knows your life."

By the closing panel, the AIM Group's Jonathan Turpin had heard enough reassurance. "I think the biggie for me is how much the tone has been AI isn't a threat to portals. And I worry quite a bit about that because I think we haven't really seen the consumer grab AI yet." He gives it about two years.

Are portals in a tricky spot? The traffic data backs the optimists, but, as Turpin said, it only describes how people behave today.

If not listings, then what?

Hardly anyone defended listings inventory as the thing that protects a portal. The favourite alternative was data about the people using it. Turpin said it's "all about what you know about the individual", and Alexander Playford, who is building ImmoUnited, a new portal in Austria, said, "building has become cheap, good data has not." Both Volkan Oktem of Property Finder and Emre Ersahin of Tapu.com called the AI models themselves a commodity.

Trust came up too, though not always as a compliment. "Nobody likes property portals. Doesn't mean they don't trust property portals," said Ryan Gallagher of iovox.

Where portals genuinely disagree is how much to let AI agents in. Danila Rudenka of iHuus called them "your next 1 billion user" and wants the doors open, but Cortesi fears that a portal which opens up too far ends up as "only a data provider".

Life after the price rise

Thorne warned that above-inflation price rises have "a natural limit", which makes the hunt for new revenue streams a bit more urgent.

Everybody had a route. Malcolm Myers of European Internet Ventures expects pricing to become value-based. Simon Bray wants Kleinanzeigen to "create a trading agent, not just a market window". Michael Kenner, co-founder of FazWaz, wants to own everything from search to close, and DelPrete pointed to Rocket and Redfin, where he said the mortgage attach rate roughly doubled within months of the deal. Turpin, who four years ago told portals to steer clear of agent software, now says "CRM should be at the heart."

Andrew Rechtman, formerly of REA Group, offered a reality check on all of this: "we [the portal industry] are actually really shit at real estate".

The number twos

The challengers were among the most candid speakers of the week. Tony Blamey wants Fotocasa to be a profitable number two to idealista, and said four engineers used AI to rebuild Habitaclia, the group's Catalan portal, in three months. Sarah Wood's team at realestate.co.nz shipped image search in four weeks. Wiehahn Koch of PrivateProperty said his real competitor is affordability in South Africa, not another portal.

Pagliani, who has been at it for 20 years, doubts AI evens things up. Building fast is easy now, he said. Keeping a team motivated three, four or five years in is not.

Then there are the paying customers. DelPrete told the portals in the room that "your customers don't like you and they want out." Lukas Rose of ProperBird has found that 2 in every 100 Australian homes never reach the big portals at all. "This room is kind of like Fairfax in the '90s, and this is your slide."

Shopping season

Myers thinks "now's a great time to buy", and Baker pointed to REA Group's deal for 35% of Distilled, owner of Daft.ie, agreed in September.

Getting closer to the transaction may well be high on the agenda for PPW Bangkok in March. Some themes travel well. Ersahin pointed out that it was also the theme in Lisbon in 2017.