Rightmove is quietly building a moat around UK property data before anyone else can
Rightmove has become the first UK property portal to launch an official app directly inside ChatGPT.
Users of both the free and paid versions of OpenAI’s chatbot can now access Rightmove by simply typing “@Rightmove” in a prompt, allowing them to discover properties for sale or rent through natural, conversational queries.
For example, users can type in “Find me a three-bedroom house in Manchester under £400,000 with a garden”, before being directed to Rightmove’s platform for deeper exploration.
The integration, which went live after a rapid approval process of under two weeks, follows Rightmove’s February announcement that it had built and submitted the app as part of its broader AI innovation push.
It builds on the company’s recent beta launch of conversational search on its own website, powered by 25 years of accumulated property data.
Building a moat
Rightmove has long enjoyed near-monopolistic status, commanding around 75-80% market share in property searches and attracting billions of site visits annually. Its platform lists over one million residential properties each month, generating vast proprietary datasets – including detailed listing histories, user behaviour, search patterns, and performance metrics – that competitors struggle to replicate.
Analysts at RBC Capital Markets recently described this data advantage as “bigger and better than previously thought,” noting that about 90% of Rightmove’s information is proprietary and not easily “scrapeable” from the web.
Basic listing details might be harvestable elsewhere, but the deeper insights such as trends in buyer preferences, predictive signals on market movements, and enriched overlays like energy efficiency ratings, planning data, and flood risks, form the “iceberg” beneath the surface.
This data fuels Rightmove’s high-margin business model, where estate agents pay subscription fees for advertising, delivering some of the most profitable economics in global marketplaces.
By embedding itself in ChatGPT, Rightmove is positioning its data at the very start of consumers’ property journeys.
Early discovery happens inside a conversational AI environment, where Rightmove captures intent in natural language, refines understanding of user needs, and funnels qualified traffic back to its site.
Global peers such as Zillow, Redfin, and Scout24 have pursued similar ChatGPT integrations, but Rightmove’s status as the first in the UK underscores its proactive stance in a market where it already holds the richest dataset.
