One in five first-time buyers say they would trust an AI chatbot for mortgage advice. That finding, from Barratt Homes' First Time Buyers Report 2026, was mentioned by Nathan Reilly in Financial Reporter on 7th October. It is about advice, not about finding a firm. So by the time some buyers sit down with an adviser, they may already have been told something that sounded like advice, and the firm will usually have no record of what it was.
This piece is about keeping that record. It offers no view on products, lenders, rates or affordability, and no view on whether anyone should trust a chatbot for mortgage advice. It is about two practical things: knowing what a buyer may have heard before they speak to you, and checking that what the assistants say about your firm is accurate.
Why does one chatbot answer tell you so little?
Advisers are not being replaced. In the same Barratt survey of 660 prospective first-time buyers, 68% named a mortgage broker as a key source of information. But for some buyers the chatbot answer is now part of the journey, and that answer is not fixed.
Earlier Barratt Homes research found 24% of Brits had used AI for mortgage advice, while only 7% were "very confident" in its accuracy. The same piece put one scenario to Copilot, ChatGPT and Grok. One leaned towards a five-year fix, another towards a two-year fix, and they disagreed on how affordable the target loan looked. As Terry Higgins of TNHG Mortgage Services put it, different tools "could make different suggestions with the same prompt."
Replies also shift with the wording, the location, the account and the month. A single screenshot is an anecdote. A dated record, built the same way each month, is evidence.
What does a useful monthly check look like?
It takes about an hour a month, and it needs no software.
1. Write down how your first-time buyers actually phrase the question. Use their words, not the industry's. Ask your clients what they already looked up. For example: "Can I get a mortgage with a 5% deposit?", "Do I need a mortgage broker as a first-time buyer?", "How much can I borrow on £35,000 a year?" and "Mortgage adviser for first-time buyers in [your town]". Eight to twelve questions is plenty.
2. Put exactly the same wording to ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity on the same day, each in a fresh chat.
3. Keep a dated record: the date, the assistant, the exact question, the full reply (copied or screenshotted), whether your firm was named, which other firms or sources were named, and anything that reads like a figure or a recommendation.
4. Repeat it every month with the same questions. After three months you have a pattern rather than a hunch.
What should you do if your firm is named?
Check the description line by line. Is your regulatory status right, and if you are an appointed representative, is the principal firm named correctly? Are your locations, specialisms, fees, team and contact details current?
When something is wrong, it usually traces back to an old page on your own site, an out-of-date directory listing or a profile nobody has touched in years. Fix it at the source. Keep one plain, dated page on your website that sets out the facts about your firm, and make sure it matches your entry on the FCA Register, your Google Business Profile and the directories buyers actually use. When those sources disagree, the assistant has to guess. Then check next month whether the correction has held.
And if your firm is not named?
The record is still useful, arguably more so. It shows what a buyer may already have been told before they speak to an adviser: a deposit figure, a borrowing multiple, a view on fixed rates. That is context for the first conversation, not a threat to it. An adviser who knows the common chatbot answers can ask "Have you looked anything up already?" and pick up from there, rather than discovering halfway through a fact-find that the client arrived with a number in their head.
A word of balance. For most firms, AI assistants still send far fewer enquiries than search, referrals and word of mouth. This is a small, growing channel, worth an hour a month, not a reason to panic.
What should firms avoid?
As interest grows, so do the shortcuts. Avoid all of these:
• Copy written to look like regulated advice, published in the hope a chatbot repeats it. Anything you publish is still your firm's communication.
• Made-up client reviews, on your own site or anywhere else.
• Paid mentions or "best broker" lists passed off as independent guidance.
• Anyone promising guaranteed placement in ChatGPT or Google's AI answers. Nobody outside those companies controls what the assistants say.
The honest work is less exciting: accurate, dated information about your firm, kept consistent in the places buyers already check, and a monthly record of what the assistants are telling people.
So here is the question to start with. If a first-time buyer asked a chatbot the question your clients ask most often, what would it tell them today? If you don't know, that is the first entry in the log.
