Independent loan officers target AI assistant search

By AI, Created 10:41 PM UTC, May 28, 2026, /AGP/ – A Lancaster mortgage adviser says AI assistants are already steering borrower choices away from big lenders and toward smaller loan officers who show up in AI-generated answers. His new audit aims to help independent originators win visibility in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Grok.

Why it matters: - AI assistants are becoming a new decision layer for home buyers. - If borrowers accept an AI answer without clicking through to lender websites, traditional ad spend and search rankings matter less. - Independent loan officers and small mortgage shops could gain business from larger lenders if they appear in AI-generated recommendations.

What happened: - A loan officer who closed $30 million in production last year won a borrower who had been working with a top-five national lender. - The lender closed more than $20 billion last year. - The loan officer did not use paid advertising on the deal. - The borrower asked an AI assistant which lender to trust, and the assistant named the loan officer instead of the larger brand. - Scott Kuhn, a 30-year veteran of bank and credit union sales, built an advisory practice around what he calls AI visibility. - Kuhn’s work focuses on helping independent loan officers and small mortgage shops show up in answers from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Grok.

The details: - Kuhn says his advisory work is designed to help mortgage professionals earn presence inside AI-generated answers that home buyers are already using. - Kuhn has scaled lending platforms from $200 million to $1.2 billion in production. - Kuhn said the largest lenders are still spending where the attention used to be, while AI visibility rewards the sources models trust. - Kuhn described AI visibility as a discipline that must be maintained weekly, not a one-time campaign. - Research released in 2026 found that more than 80% of searches involving an AI overview do not produce a click to a website. - A separate study found paid click-through rates fell by nearly 70% on queries where AI summaries appeared. - One published case study found a private lender with an intentional AI presence ranked as the top recommendation in ChatGPT and Claude for a high-value mortgage category, ahead of brands more than 100 times larger. - Kuhn’s AI visibility audit is now available to independent loan officers and small lender teams across the country. - Kuhn says the audit is the first product built specifically for the mortgage industry by a 30-year operator who has run the institutions the technology now needs to reach. - More information is available at Scott Kuhn Advisory.

Between the lines: - The pitch is less about marketing tactics and more about a shift in how borrowers form trust. - If AI assistants are the first stop for lender research, mortgage companies may need to optimize for model visibility the way they once optimized for search engines. - Kuhn is positioning independent originators to compete on trust signals and source authority, not budget size.

What’s next: - Kuhn’s advisory practice will try to help more loan officers influence AI-generated lender recommendations before borrowers choose a lender. - The mortgage industry may see more competition around how brands and individual officers appear inside AI assistants, not just on search results pages. - The key test is whether smaller lenders can keep converting AI visibility into borrower conversations and funded loans.

The bottom line: - In mortgage, the next sales battle may start inside the chatbot, not the search bar.