The Mortgage Homepage Sameness Study

We built this site on one argument: the reason most websites don't win in search or AI answers isn't missing basics. It's sameness. When hundreds of sites say the same things in the same order, nothing makes any one of them the best answer.

So we tested it on one industry. Mortgage is a good test because it's crowded, expensive to buy leads in, and heavily regulated, so every site has to get the same basics right. The question was what happens after the basics.

What did we find?

NMLS ID visible on the homepage

95%

Equal Housing statement or logo

78%

Link to a mortgage calculator

75%

Testimonials or reviews shown

73%

A named loan officer or owner

67%

"Apply now" as a button

52%

City, state or region named in the headline area

51%

A row of three or four short benefits

41%

Shares copy word for word with a site in another city

21%

A specific number in the headline area

20%

Interest rates shown on the homepage

8%

Percentages are of homepages where the item could be determined (between 99 and 106 for each line). "Headline area" means the headline plus subheadline; place names include regions such as the Twin Cities or New England. Red bars mark the measures of specificity and sameness. Full method and limits below; the data is downloadable.

Are mortgage websites getting the basics right?

Mostly, yes. Nineteen in twenty showed an NMLS ID on the homepage, three in four linked a calculator, and nearly as many showed reviews. Two in three named a real person. If a mortgage website's problem were missing compliance basics, this sample would look very different.

That matters for anyone selling "mortgage SEO." The checklist items most audits lead with are already done on most of these sites. They're necessary, and almost nobody is missing them, so they can't be what separates one site from the next.

How alike are they?

The headline area is where a site says who it is. On about two in five of these homepages, 42 of 102, the headline and subheadline named no place and contained no number: no city, no rate, no years in business, no count of loans closed. Apart from the occasional business name, those headlines could move to almost any broker's site in the country.

The vocabulary is narrow too. "Mortgage" appeared in 61 of 104 headlines, "trusted" in 12 of the headline areas, and the most common button on the page was "Apply now", on 52%. "Learn more", "Get pre-approved" and "Contact us" followed.

Headline area with no place and no number

42 of 102 (41%)

Specific number in the headline area

21 of 103 (20%)

Interest rates on the homepage

8 of 106 (8%)

Identical headline used by another site

3 headlines appeared twice: two across different states, one on two sites in the same city

Are brokers using the same websites?

Often, in the literal sense. We compared every pair of sites in different cities for headlines, headings, buttons and benefit lines of four words or more that appear on no more than eight sites in the sample. At least 22 of the 106 homepages, 21%, shared two or more of those lines word for word with a site in another city. Every match we found crossed a state line. The real share is likely higher, because we only counted copy we could capture verbatim.

The shared lines read like one template filled in by different businesses. A few examples, each found on sites in at least two different states:

• "Get a rate quote in just 30 seconds" and "Get a free personalized rate quote now" (Georgia and Texas)
• "What is your why", "Tell us your story" and "Fresh from the blog" (Maryland, Ohio and Utah)
• "Meet the experts behind your mortgage journey" and "Affordable rates, flexible options for you" (California and Washington)
• The same four-item benefit row, word for word, on a Massachusetts broker and a California broker

Why does sameness matter for search and AI answers?

Google's guidance on helpful content asks whether a page provides original information and substantial value compared with other pages in search results, and it has spam policies against pages built mainly to rank. AI assistants assemble answers from sources and cite a few. Neither has a reason to prefer one of a thousand interchangeable pages. Our guide on why most AI-built websites don't rank covers the mechanics, and what Google says about AI-written content covers the rules.

This study doesn't measure rankings, so it can't show that the more specific sites rank better. What it shows is how few sites give search engines, AI tools or borrowers anything specific to choose them on.

What should a mortgage broker do with this?

1. Put a place and a number in the headline area. Your market, your years licensed, your loans closed, your actual rate range. Only true numbers, with compliance review: some numbers in mortgage ads trigger required disclosures. See our mortgage advertising rules checklist.
2. Run your copy through a sameness check. Paste it into our free AI sameness checker and rewrite every flagged line with something only you could say.
3. Find out whether you're on a shared template. Search a few of your section headings in quotes. If other brokers come up, those lines aren't yours.
4. Answer the questions borrowers actually ask. Rates, programs, costs and timelines in your market, kept current. Our guide to SEO for mortgage lenders and loan officers covers which pages to build.
5. Keep the basics you already have. NMLS IDs, Equal Housing statements and real names are why this sample looks good on compliance. Don't let a redesign drop them.

How was the study done?

In October 2026 we searched for independent mortgage brokers, local lenders and loan officers in 28 US metro areas across four regions, and took the first four or five qualifying sites in each. Some cities yielded only two or three usable homepages. We excluded national lenders, bank homepages that aren't mortgage-focused, directories and marketplaces, branch pages hosted on a national lender's domain, and any business already counted. Loan officers' own sites were included even when the loan officer works under a larger company.

The sample is 75 brokers, 15 local lenders, 15 loan officer sites and one other. For each homepage we recorded the headline, subheadline, section headings and button text exactly as written, and whether eight details were present (the trust details charted above, plus rates, a specific number in the headline area and a benefit row), recording "unknown" rather than guessing when a page didn't make it clear.

What are the study's limits?

• It isn't a random sample. We found sites through search, which favors businesses that already rank. That may make this group more polished than average.
• Metro areas are approximate. Some businesses sit in a suburb of the metro they were found under, and a few serve several states.
• It reads text, not images. An NMLS ID or Equal Housing logo shown only as an image may have been missed, so those figures may be slightly low.
• Body text wasn't captured in full. Our page reader captured headlines, headings and buttons word for word but often summarized longer paragraphs, so we didn't count stock phrases in body copy. Where a headline or subheadline came back paraphrased we left it blank, and a few headline-number calls rest on the reader's description of a subheadline we couldn't capture word for word. The shared-copy figure is a floor for the same reason.
• It measures homepages, not results. It says nothing about which sites rank or convert.

The anonymized data, one row per homepage with region, business type and each trust detail, is free to use with credit: download the CSV. We left out site names and URLs because the point is the pattern, not any one broker.

Common questions