A three-point-three star car wash won the answer.
Annie Jackson of GatherUp asked Google for a no-touch car wash in Norfolk, Virginia that would fit an SUV. Google returned exactly one business, with the clearance height and the opening hours answered inline, above the star rating.
The rating was 3.3. It did not matter. The business had answered the question, and the question is what gets answered now.
That one result is the whole shift in miniature, and it applies to you more than it applies to a car wash.
People stopped searching and started asking
The old behaviour was a category and a list. "Realtors near me," then ten results, then a human comparing them.
The new behaviour is a full question with conditions attached. An agent who has sold in this specific development. Somebody who works with first-time buyers on a particular loan type. An agent who speaks Portuguese. Somebody who handles estate sales.
The answer to that question is not a list of ten. It is one or two or three names, chosen because something readable about them matched the conditions in the question.
The quiet demotion of the star rating
Here is the part that will annoy people who have spent years collecting reviews.
A rating is a single number describing general quality. A question has conditions in it. Matching the conditions beats being generally well thought of, because the conditions are what the person actually asked for.
Your 5.0 average across forty reviews is a lovely thing and it is not an answer to "who handles probate sales in this county."
Which does not mean reviews stopped mattering. It means what is inside them started mattering more than the average of them.
Your reviews are invisible until you move them
Most agents have their best material trapped somewhere it cannot be read.
A past client wrote three paragraphs about how you talked them through a difficult inspection on a 1920s house with knob and tube wiring. That is exactly the text that would match somebody's question. It is sitting inside a third-party platform, behind a widget, in a format built for humans to skim.
Get it onto a page. In text. With the specifics intact.
The playbook
Ask for specific reviews. Not "would you leave a review." Instead: would you mention which neighbourhood, what type of property, and the one thing that was hardest. You will get shorter reviews with far more usable content in them.
Answer the conditions in plain text. Somewhere on your site, in sentences: the developments you have sold in, the situations you handle, the languages you speak, the price bands you work. Not a badge. Text.
Keep every listing of yourself identical. Same name, brokerage, phone and spelling everywhere. Inconsistency is how you get downgraded from a fact to a guess.
Stop chasing the average. Going from 4.6 to 4.8 will not win you an answer. Being the only agent in your county who has written down that they handle estate sales will.
Any road up
There is a version of this that sounds like despair, where the machine decides and you are at its mercy. I do not think that is what happened.
What happened is that being specific started beating being popular. That is a fairer contest than the one before it, and it is one a smaller operator can actually win.
A 3.3-star car wash won because it answered the question. Answer the question.