# Fridman Properties: our first GEO case study, before the results — Citata.ai URL: https://citata.ai/case-studies/fridman-properties Case study · in progress · October 18, 2026 # Fridman Properties: Our First GEO Case Study, Before the Results We moved a Chicago manager’s 90-page site in 2 days. AI named the company in 8 of 132 landlord answers. T Tao, founder, Citata.ai Related party Ran Fridman owns Fridman Properties. He is also the CEO of MyRemotely, a partner of ours, and Fridman Properties is MyRemotely’s first client. We do not hide this. It is why this is our first case study: we had access, and we could show all of the work. - Site rebuild Live since 2026-10-16 - AI baseline Taken 2026-10-16 - GEO changes Planned, not started - Results Due 2027-01-14 ## TL;DR - **The client:** Fridman Properties, a property manager in Arlington Heights, IL, with 144 active units on 2026-10-16. - **The problem:** AI rarely named the company when landlords asked for a manager. Its site talked to the suburbs, but most of its units are on Chicago’s South Side. - **What we did:** moved the site to a fast static stack with no change to URLs, words or SEO tags, checked that with a script, and took an AI baseline. - **Status:** the new site is live. The GEO work starts now. We publish the results on 2027-01-14, good or bad. ## Why we start with no results Most GEO case studies show a chart that goes up. They rarely show the start, the method, or the client’s name. We want to do it the other way. So I publish the baseline first, before we change a single word. In 90 days you can check us against it. ## The client Fridman Properties LLC manages rental homes for landlords. The office is in Arlington Heights, a northwest suburb of Chicago. On 2026-10-16 it had 144 active units. Most of them are in Chicago, on the South Side. The buyer is the landlord, not the renter. Our first target is the landlord who lives far from the rental and needs someone local. That landlord is likely to ask ChatGPT or Gemini which manager to hire. ## What we found - **Search demand fell.** Google still shows about 1,900 searches a month for “property management chicago” (Keyword Planner, Chicago area, Oct 2025 to Sep 2026). But 7 generic property management terms fell 46% year over year in the Chicago area, and 43% in the US. We think part of this moved to AI answers. That is a hypothesis, not a fact. - **The site talked to the wrong area.** It had 29 city pages, most for northwest suburbs. Palatine and Skokie, for example, were 96% the same text with a new city name. Most of the units are on the South Side, and no page on the site used the words “South Side”. - **Section 8 was one answer.** The landlord FAQ had one question about Section 8. The answer may not match current Illinois law (see the note below). We flagged it for the client’s legal review. - **Little structured data.** Only 17 of 89 pages had JSON-LD (labels that machines read), all blog posts. No page said “this is a local business”. - **A heavy template.** The old site ran on a hosted template with jQuery, Bootstrap scripts, an icon kit and reCAPTCHA on every page. ## What we did The rule I set: change one thing at a time. If we change the design, the code and the words at once, we can never say which change did what. So step one was a move, not a redesign. ### 1. Copy the old site, then rebuild it (October 15) We saved a static copy of the old site: 93 HTML files. Then we rebuilt it on Astro 7, a static site builder. The new site has 90 HTML pages (89 plus a 404 page) and 87 URLs in the sitemap. Every URL, every word, every title, description and canonical link stayed the same. We kept the 4 old 301 redirects. We dropped the old scripts. ### 2. Prove nothing changed A parity script compares each old URL with the new one. It checks the title, description, canonical link, robots tag, Open Graph tags, JSON-LD, the visible text word by word, and that each internal link works. One difference fails the check. At launch it found 0 differences. ### 3. Set a speed bar of 100 A second script runs Google Lighthouse on mobile. It fails any page that scores under 100 in any of the 4 categories. I ran it on the live site on 2026-10-18. Not every page meets the bar yet: | Page | Perf | A11y | Best | SEO | LCP | | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | | / | 100 | 100 | 100 | 100 | 1.6 s | | /owner-faq | 99 | 100 | 100 | 100 | 1.9 s | | /chicago-property-management | 98 | 100 | 100 | 100 | 2.0 s | | /schaumburg-property-management | 98 | 100 | 100 | 100 | 2.0 s | | /roi-calculator | 99 | 100 | 100 | 100 | 1.8 s | 5 pages, mobile preset, one run each. LCP: time until the largest element shows. ### 4. Keep the summaries for AI The old site already had an llm-summary tag (a short page summary meant for AI) on 51 pages. We did not write those. We kept all 51, and we will check each one for facts. ### 5. Go live on Cloudflare (October 16) The site now runs as static files on Cloudflare. There is no server to break. fridmanproperties.com redirects to www.fridmanproperties.com. ### 6. Take the AI baseline (October 16) We wrote 24 questions that landlords ask, by area and by need. Examples: “Which Chicago property management companies work with Section 8 tenants?” and “I live out of state and bought a rental house in Chicago. Which property management company should I use?” We asked each one twice on ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini: 144 answers. Outside the 2 questions with the company’s own name, AI named Fridman in 8 of 132 answers. It named the company 0 times in 42 answers about the South Side, where most of its units are. It named it 0 times for the Section 8 question. In the ChatGPT web app, logged out, Fridman came first only for “no leasing fee and no long-term contract”. ## What I got wrong Our plan said: take the baseline before the switch. We took it on the same day the new site went live. The words did not change, so I think the effect is small. But I cannot prove it. We also have no Search Console or analytics numbers yet. Access is on our list. Until we have it, this study reports AI answers only, not traffic or leads. ## What comes next This is the plan. None of it is done yet. - **Write a Section 8 landlord guide.** Inspections, HAP payments (the housing authority’s share of rent), the Chicago Housing Authority steps, rent limits, and a voucher rent vs market rent calculator. A lawyer checks it first. All copy follows Fair Housing rules. - **Rewrite 8 city pages first.** Arlington Heights, Palatine, Schaumburg, Buffalo Grove, Mount Prospect, Des Plaines, Evanston and Skokie. Each gets local rent data, local rules and a short FAQ. Then add pages for South Side neighborhoods. - **Add the missing labels.** LocalBusiness and FAQPage structured data. Reviews only from real data. - **Answer first.** A 2 to 3 sentence answer at the top of each key page, and an llms.txt file. - **Fix the listings.** The same name, address and phone on Google, Bing, Yelp and the “best property managers” lists that AI cites. Submit the site to Bing Webmaster Tools, since ChatGPT search uses Bing in part. - **Track every week.** The same questions on the same engines, and a Monday report. Our goal for 90 days: AI names Fridman in 5 of 30 tracked questions. It is a goal, not a promise. AI answers change. On 2027-01-14 I will publish what happened. Note on Section 8 and the law Illinois lists source of income, including housing vouchers, as a protected class in housing (Illinois Human Rights Act, as amended from January 1, 2023). This is not legal advice. Verify the current law with an attorney or the Illinois Department of Human Rights. ## What you can do If you run a property management company, ask ChatGPT the question your landlords ask: “best property manager in [your city]”. Does it name you? If you want the full picture, we run 20 questions on 4 engines for free and send your top 5 fixes. [Get a free AI visibility audit](mailto:grow@citata.ai?subject=Free%20AI%20visibility%20audit&body=Site%3A%20%0ACity%20%2F%20market%3A%20%0AOne%20question%20your%20buyers%20ask%20AI%3A%20%0AHow%20did%20you%20hear%20about%20us%20(ChatGPT%2C%20Gemini%2C%20Google%2C%20a%20friend...)%3A%20%0A) Thank you to the Fridman Properties team for the access to their site and data. — Tao, founder, Citata.ai Baseline · 2026-10-16 144 AI answers Landlord questions about Chicago-area property managers. Does the answer name Fridman Properties? By engine By area | Engine | Named | Linked | | --- | --- | --- | | ChatGPT | 4 / 48 | 3 | | Claude | 11 / 48 | 6 | | Gemini | 5 / 48 | 5 | - South Side 0 / 42 - Chicago 0 / 18 - NW Indiana 0 / 18 - NW suburbs 6 / 18 - Niche (Section 8, fees…) 2 / 36 - Brand name 12 / 12 Without the 2 brand questions: named in 8 of 132. Section 8 question: 0 of 6. Models: gpt-6-luna, claude-sonnet-5-5, gemini-3-flash The site - 90 HTML pages moved - 0 parity differences - 4 old redirects kept - 2 days Oct 15 to Oct 16, 2026 [fridmanproperties.com](https://www.fridmanproperties.com) More [GEO for property managers →](https://citata.ai/property-management)