The team AI recommends for moving to Wilmington NC.
How a three-agent team in Wilmington, NC became the name ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI give people relocating to the coast. The prompts, the timeline, and what it took.
By Anna Curry
12 min read
July 2026
S omewhere in Ohio, or New Jersey, or Denver, a family has decided they’re moving to the North Carolina coast. They don’t know a single person in Wilmington. So they do what buyers do now. They open ChatGPT and type:
“What’s the best real estate team for relocating to Wilmington NC from out of state?”
That is a real prompt. We track it every day, across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, along with fifteen more just like it. And when the answer comes back, the team it names first is not the market’s largest brokerage. It’s not a franchise with a national ad budget. It’s a boutique team of three women agents: Gillespie Group Real Estate.
That didn’t happen by accident. It took three and a half years of deliberate work. This is the story of how it was built, and the actual prompts AI is answering about the Wilmington market right now.
AI visibility for the Relocation to Wilmington NC topic, ahead of every legacy brokerage in the market
visibility score. When AI names any brand for Wilmington relocation, Gillespie Group appears nearly half the time
closed volume across 141 sides in 2025, with a 2026 RealTrends Verified ranking of #5 in North Carolina by sides
The prompts AI is answering about your market right now
Most agents have never seen the questions AI answers about their market. We watch them daily through Profound, the AI visibility platform we run for clients. For Wilmington, the tracked set includes sixteen real consumer prompts. Here are the ones that matter most, with how often Gillespie Group is named in the answer.
And the climb is the point. On the relocation prompt, Gillespie Group appeared in roughly one answer in six when we started measuring in late May 2026. Six weeks later it was in nearly two of every three. AI answers move fast when the underlying evidence moves.
The rest of the tracked set covers Carolina Beach, Wrightsville Beach, Topsail, short-term rental investors, first-time buyers, luxury, and second homes. Some of those, the team leads. Some are the next campaign. That’s what a visibility program is: a live scoreboard of which questions you win, and a work plan for the ones you don’t.
Every market has its own sixteen prompts. Most teams have never read them.
How it was built
It started with a house key.
Before Gillespie Group was a client, Danielle Gillespie was my realtor. She helped me buy my first Wilmington home in the fall of 2022, and she was so good at the human side of the work that I did what marketers do when they meet an undermarketed talent: I ran a search audit as a thank-you.
The gap was obvious. A team with this level of service and production was almost invisible in search. In January 2023 we signed a partnership: fractional CMO leadership for a team that was ready to grow.
Year one was foundations, not fireworks. A new brand home at gillespiegrouprealestate.com. A real CRM with fifteen hundred imported leads and saved searches. Professional email on the team’s own domain. Agent bio pages built as entities. A review engine. A YouTube education series. None of it glamorous. All of it the foundation that everything since stands on. The year closed at 116 homes and roughly $50.8M in volume.
Become the local publisher.
The second year the team stopped marketing like agents and started publishing like a media company. Beachtown, Gillespie on the Street, Gillespie Gold, WaveWatch, and Surf, Sand & Sell. A Wilmington school guide built with a local education expert, launched with live webinars. Co-marketed guides with local businesses. A listing launch system that gave every property its own lookbook, landing page, and film day.
That year Wilmington noticed. Readers of Wilmington NC Magazine voted Gillespie Group the Best Realtor Team of 2024. The award mattered twice: once as a trophy, and once as a fact on a page that AI engines would later cite over and over.
We are innovators and marketers. Nowadays, you have to be an expert in digital marketing in order to get your story, your point and your product across the table.
Feed the machines proof.
Here’s what most marketers miss about AI search: the engines don’t take your word for anything. They triangulate. They read Zillow, FastExpert, RealTrends, local press, and your own site, and they recommend whoever the evidence agrees on.
So 2025 was the year of third-party proof. A FastExpert profile powered by real transaction data. RealTrends Verified submission and ranking. Zillow Showcase. Cornerstone buying and selling guides on the team’s own site. And in November 2025, we put the whole thing on a scoreboard by moving Gillespie Group onto Profound to measure AI visibility the way you’d measure rankings.
In the July 2026 data, that citation stack is exactly what shows up. Across sixteen tracked prompts, the sources AI cites most for Wilmington real estate answers are FastExpert, Zillow, and gillespiegrouprealestate.com itself. Third place, out of every website on the internet, for answers about their own market. The most cited single page is the team’s Best of Wilmington awards page.
AI engines don’t take your word for anything. They triangulate. The job is to make the evidence agree.
Build the relocation engine.
Everything so far made the team findable. The last piece made the attention monetizable. In December 2025 we launched the Wilmington Relocation Guide: a genuinely useful downloadable guide, a dedicated relocation cornerstone page, a Moving to Wilmington newsletter, and a modest paid media budget to prime the funnel.
Guide downloads started stacking up within days and haven’t stopped. Within a quarter, the team’s overall inbound website leads had multiplied several times over, and the relocation guide had become their single largest lead source. Relocation leads are long-horizon by nature, twelve to twenty-four month timelines, which is exactly why owning the relocation answer early compounds: the team is building a pipeline of future buyers who already feel taken care of.
And because the guide, the page, and the newsletter all deepened the relocation evidence, the AI answers followed. That’s the climb from one in six to nearly two in three on the relocation prompt you saw above. The funnel and the visibility feed each other.
I take your suggestions like they are gold.
About this engagement
How long did this take?
Three and a half years from the first audit to the number one relocation position. Year one was foundations. Year two built the publishing engine. Year three stacked third-party proof. The visible AI results arrived last, once everything underneath them was in place.
What moved the needle most?
The relocation launch in December 2025, because it combined a genuinely useful guide, a cornerstone page, a newsletter, and paid media at the same time. Visibility on the relocation prompt roughly tripled in six weeks. But it only worked because three years of foundation and third-party proof were already underneath it.
Is Gillespie Group a fractional CMO client?
Yes. This is a fractional CMO engagement, which is why it covers brand, content, CRM, paid media, and listing marketing alongside AI visibility.
Do you work with other real estate teams?
Not in Wilmington. One client per vertical per market is how this practice works, and Gillespie Group holds real estate here. In other markets, yes.
Can this be repeated in another market?
The sequence transfers directly: read the prompts, fix the foundation, stack the proof, own one high-intent answer. What changes is which question is worth owning first, which depends on what is already claimed in your market. The real estate field guide walks through how to decide.
Anna Curry is the founder of Top of Search, a marketing consultancy in Wilmington, NC that helps owner-operated local businesses get cited by AI search engines. She has worked in marketing since 2008 and writes Cited, a weekly newsletter on AI visibility for local business owners.
More about AnnaYour market has its own sixteen prompts.
Find out what AI says when buyers ask about your market.
The AI Visibility Audit is where every engagement starts. We run the real prompts for your market across five answer engines, score where you stand against the teams you compete with, and hand you the evidence, whether or not we ever work together.
Or read Cited, a weekly newsletter on AI visibility for local business owners.