Portals are barreling toward a filterless search experience, with Zillow being the latest contender to launch an artificial intelligence-powered home-shopping assistant.
Jeremy Wacksman
“We’re connecting the entire housing journey with AI in a way that hasn’t been possible before,” Zillow CEO Jeremy Wacksman said in a prepared statement on Wednesday.
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The feature, known as Zillow AI mode, enables buyers and renters to compare listings, estimate renovation costs, analyze affordability trends, get negotiation insights based on market competitiveness and price history, get neighborhood and market insights, schedule tours, and connect with a local professional. Users can access AI mode through an “Ask Zillow” chat box at the bottom of search results on desktop and mobile.
The portal said AI mode is meant to better prepare buyers and renters to make a transaction and complement — not replace — agent expertise. Zillow’s Fair Housing Classifier has also been integrated into the assistant, providing a “real-time guardrail” that prevents the tool from giving answers that would violate federal, state and local protections.
The feature is currently in beta mode, with the portal doing a phased rollout throughout 2026.
“Because Zillow operates across search, touring, financing, connections to professionals, transacting, and closing, we can turn insight and data into real-world action, helping people move from discovery to keys in hand,” Wacksman added.
Investment firm William Blair published a report about Zillow AI mode on Wednesday, saying it “does not seem all that differentiated” from CoStar’s Homes AI, but “should improve the overall user and search experience.”
CoStar launched Homes AI on Homes.com in February. The feature, powered by Microsoft Azure OpenAI, enables homebuyers to get listing insights backed by proprietary CoStar data, including Matterport 3D digital twin technology, images, school data, neighborhood insights, and market intelligence. Homes AI is voice-activated, while Zillow AI mode requires buyers and renters to type their questions.
The firm’s analysts also mused about Zillow Showcase, Zillow Instant Floor Plan and incremental updates to FollowUp Boss, all of which were unveiled at an investor summit earlier in the week. The analysts said the summit was “encouraging” and reflected Zillow’s dedication to diversifying its long-term strategy, which increasingly includes launching products geared toward listing agents, like new pre-marketing platform Zillow Preview.
“While Zillow has historically focused on solutions (and monetization) for buyer agents, it continues to shift incrementally to build out solutions for listing agents,” the report read. “The first major move was the rollout of Showcase in early 2025 (used on 3.7 percent of new listings in 2025, with an intermediate target of 5-10 percent), and was followed by the announcement earlier this month of the launch of Preview.”
“… It seems Zillow continues to evolve, including focusing slightly less on providing value to buyers’ agents, where we see more risk of long-term commission compression and value disruption,” it added.
