A few years ago, getting your shopping centre found online meant one thing: ranking on Google.
You optimized your website, kept your Google Business Profile updated, ran some paid search, and called it a day.
That world is gone.
Today a shopper might find your property by asking ChatGPT for "best malls near me with good food options." Or by snapping a photo of a storefront and doing a visual search. Or by saying "Hey, find me somewhere to take my kids this weekend" to a voice assistant. Or by typing "chill vibe mall Toronto" into an AI-powered search engine that interprets intent, not just keywords.
The question isn't whether your property shows up on Google anymore. It's whether your property shows up anywhere a shopper might be looking. And for most shopping centres right now, the honest answer is: we don't know.
Why This Is Harder Than It Looks
Traditional SEO was built around a clear mechanic. You put the right words on your pages, earned links from credible sites, and Google rewarded you with rankings. It was technical, but it was learnable.
AI-powered search doesn't work the same way.
Generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews don't just index pages. They synthesize information from across the web, including social media, reviews, news articles, influencer content, and community forums, and generate answers. They're making editorial judgments about which properties, brands, and experiences are worth recommending.
If your content ecosystem is thin, outdated, or only lives on your own website, you're essentially invisible to those systems.
As Margaret Cooper from Cushman and Wakefield put it in a recent podcast conversation: "There aren't enough hours in the day to generate the kind of authentic content that would get us found strategically by the AI tools out there." She's right. And she named the solution in the same breath: influencers.
Content is the Infrastructure Now
Here's the reality. AI search engines are trained on the web. The more rich, relevant, authentic content that exists about your property across multiple platforms, the more likely you are to show up when someone asks an AI a question you should be answering.
That content can come from several places:
Your own channels. Your website, blog, and social profiles are the foundation. They need to be current, detailed, and written in the way people actually search, not in corporate property-speak. "Family-friendly shopping in Pickering" is more useful than "premier retail destination."
Your tenants. Every tenant that mentions your property in their own content, tags your location, or promotes an event you're running is adding to your content footprint. This is underused by almost every property in Canada.
Influencers and creators. This is the fastest way to scale authentic content about your property. A local food blogger covering your new restaurant tenant. A family lifestyle creator posting about your March Break event. A fashion creator doing a haul from three stores inside your mall. Each of those posts is a data point that AI search engines use to understand what your property is, who it's for, and whether it's worth recommending.
Reviews and community content. Google reviews, Reddit threads, community Facebook groups. These are messy and hard to control, but they feed AI search. A property with hundreds of detailed, positive reviews is more likely to show up in an AI recommendation than one with 40 generic ones.
The Frugal Shopper Angle
This matters even more in a market where consumers are selective about where they spend their time and money.
When someone asks an AI "where should I take my family this weekend," they're not in passive browsing mode. They have intent. They're ready to go somewhere. If your property shows up in that answer, you've just won a visit before the shopper even opened a map.
That's the opportunity. Most properties aren't positioned to take it yet.
Where to Start
You don't need to solve this overnight. But you do need to start building.
A few practical steps:
- Audit your current content footprint. Search your own property name in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overview. What comes up? What's missing? What's inaccurate?
- Update the basics. Your Google Business Profile, website event listings, and tenant directory need to be current and detailed. These feed AI systems directly.
- Brief your tenants. Ask them to tag your property in their social posts, share event promotions, and link to your website where relevant. It costs nothing and it compounds.
- Build an influencer program with content in mind. The goal isn't just reach. It's indexed, searchable, AI-readable content about your property that lives on the web and keeps working after the post goes up.
- Track where your inquiries are coming from. Your guest services data, including what people are asking about through web chat and voice AI, tells you exactly what shoppers want to know. That's your content brief.
The question is no longer just how do we market to shoppers. It's how do we make sure we show up wherever shoppers are looking. The properties that treat content as infrastructure, not just a campaign tactic, are the ones that will answer that question well.
Want to talk about how DRH helps retail properties build their content and AI discoverability strategy? [Link to contact/book a meeting]
