TL;DR
Rightmove’s trading statement on Friday 6 November puts AI at the centre of its story while the UK housing market stays weak. The property portal says it shipped over 60% more product releases in the four months to 31 October than a year earlier, helped by agentic tools. It also says that under 1% of its consumer traffic comes from large language models. Revenue growth for 2026 is now expected at 6% to 7%, inside its earlier 6% to 8% range, and earnings per share guidance rises to at least 7%.
What the AI tools are doing
Ask Rightmove, a conversational assistant built from several AI agents, added a comparison feature in October alongside its search and evaluation functions. Rightmove says consumers who used any part of it spent more than twice as long on the site, saved triple the number of properties and generated more than three times the leads, compared with consumers who did not. That is a comparison of self-selected users, not proof the tool caused the difference.
Agents on Rightmove Plus now get call transcription in every package, with more than 2m calls transcribed since a late third-quarter launch. An AI summary and tagging service has processed over 1m calls for partners on its Optimiser Edge package, and 14,000 agents have used an assistant that summarises how listings are performing. Rightmove has raised its productivity target for 2027 and expects to double the pace of consumer feature releases.
The market behind it
Revenue per advertiser is now expected to grow by £100-£110, down from £110-£120, which Rightmove attributes entirely to lower spending by housebuilders. Trade press coverage reported it as Rightmove revising its forecasts. The company frames revenue and profit as on track, with both growth rates inside the ranges it gave before.
Chief executive Johan Svanstrom said the business now has “a well-invested, AI-ready platform”.
Why it matters
The LLM traffic figure stands out. More than 85% of Rightmove’s consumer traffic arrives directly or through organic search. In our view, that suggests chatbots are not yet replacing destination sites for high-intent searches such as house hunting. The update also refers back to initiatives Rightmove announced in November 2025, which we covered at the time. It is the company’s case that the spending is paying off in engagement, if not yet in revenue growth.
Looking Forward
Rightmove expects 2027 revenue growth similar to 2026, and operating profit growth of 4-7% from launches, cost control and productivity gains it files under AI-powered operations. Next year’s results will show how much of that the AI work delivers.