Wikimotive sat down with Co-founder and CEO Zach Billings to ask him over 50 questions about automotive search marketing that are relevant to dealers everywhere. In the first installment of this 7-part series, we take a look at AI Search in the hopes of separating real developments from industry hype.
Zach, if a dealer hasn’t paid attention to AI search for the last two years, what has actually changed?
For the most part, not a ton has changed. But two years ago, we did not have outbound links from ChatGPT and other LLMs to websites that were being cited. Now of course use ChatGPT and everyone’s familiar with the fact that you’ve got a whole bunch of links that go out to the websites that are being cited. The other major difference is that two years ago we were in the earliest adopter phase. Yes, we were a number of years into ChatGPT existing, but we were in the first few percentiles of U. S. adults using LLMs.
Today we are up to more than 50% of U. S. adults are using an LLM at least once per month and over 20% are using them at least 10 times per month. So regular users were into mainstream adoption now.
Dealer Takeaway: More shoppers are using AI, and AI answers now link to dealership websites. Measure whether that adoption is producing traffic and leads for your store before treating it as a major acquisition channel.
How much of the industry’s AI conversation is real change versus recycled hype?
So, in terms of business operations and how AI can be used for processes, the AI hype is very real and very well deserved. There is more and more and more that a dealership can do from the process standpoint in terms of efficiency, mining for new customers and getting in front of new customers on an outbound basis. But when it comes to search, 99.5% of opportunity still comes from traditional search, not from LLM search.
And so the hype is virtually undeserved on the search side. It is an evolution in the search space, not a revolution.
Dealer Takeaway: Evaluate AI tools for dealership operations separately from AI search marketing. A useful tool for improving processes does not automatically justify shifting your search budget.
What are you seeing in actual dealer data that surprises people?
The biggest surprise to people, although I think it’s a surprise to fewer and fewer people who have their finger on the pulse of their marketing, is just how little traffic is coming from LLMs, including conversion. So it’s not just the traffic, it’s also how few people are converting as a result of entering a dealership website from a ChatGPT or a Gemini, etcetera.
Google Analytics, incidentally, is right as we’re filming this, to launch, starting to roll out the new channel, which is for AI assistance, they’re basically gonna pre-bucket for you all of the referral traffic coming from [LLMs}. And it’s a miniscule fraction of the total. And, on the traffic side, we’re seeing in our studies and in macro studies outside of automotive about .3% of traffic coming from LLMs, and it’s about .5% of conversions, a virtually negligible figure in the grand scheme of the dealership’s marketing at this point.
Dealer Takeaway: Check how much website traffic and how many conversions come from ChatGPT, Gemini, and other AI platforms. Consumer adoption alone does not tell you how much business they generate for your dealership.
Should dealers be worried about losing traffic to ChatGPT and AI Overviews today?
Dealerships don’t need to worry about losing traffic to zero click features such as ChatGPT where it answers questions for you or such as an AI overview.
And it’s all baked right there into the premise of the idea. If the person didn’t need to click through to a dealership website, then by definition, their intention was not aligned to converting with a dealership website. Right? If you need to submit a lead on an individual car, if you need to see the F-150s before you make a decision, if you need to see the pricing before you make a decision to convert, to engage with that dealership, then it has to produce a click.
And if you’re using AI Overview or you’re using ChatGPT and the search or the prompt that you performed is so high funnel that you don’t need to get a dealership website yet, then it doesn’t matter whether you got that click or not. It was never going to produce a conversion, and the searches and the prompts that produce conversions are still going to produce traffic today.
Dealer Takeaway: When traffic declines, identify which pages and searches lost visits—and whether those visits previously converted. Losing research traffic carries a different business implication than losing shoppers looking for inventory, pricing, or a place to submit a lead.
What’s the biggest misconception dealers still have about AI search?
The biggest misconception that dealers have about AI search is that it replaces traditional search. It doesn’t. It can be a yes and rather than an or. And at the end of the day, when I release a study, or I do a webinar, or I do a seminar, and I explain to people using data that consumers are not coming to dealership sites in large volumes from LLMs.
I get this head scratch and this kind of sideways look, and the natural question, which I very much understand, is, well, obviously people are using it for research because the people I’m talking to use it for research. I use it for research. So the reality can be a consumer goes to ChatGPT or Gemini and uses that to compare F-150 and Silverado. And then when they’re ready to find a dealership or find the inventory, they move over to traditional search because that is the more practical medium, the practical modality to be able to find those things easily, quickly, effectively.
So it’s a “yes, and…”
People are using LLMs for research and traditional search to find the business – and the product.
Dealer Takeaway: Shoppers can use AI to research vehicles and then use Google to find inventory or a dealership. Maintain strong traditional search visibility so your store is easy to find when they move toward a purchase.
If you were prioritizing the average dealer’s marketing investments for the next 12 months, where would AI rank on that list?
If I were ranking where AI search as a marketing medium falls on a dealership’s priority list for deploying a budget, I would say it doesn’t.
And it’s not that it truly doesn’t, it’s that there are no unique practices around AI search optimization, GEO, AEO, that would warrant focus by a dealership. So let me give you a for instance, if I care about how sentiment for my dealership appears in ChatGPT or Gemini, then I need better reviews to make sure that the sentiment is good and that it says this is a good dealership to work with. So I need to invest in my reviews, treating my customers right, generating more reviews, making sure I’m getting high star ratings. That’s not for the purpose of AI, but yes, that is an ancillary benefit of that.
The same is true of other forms of GEO practices. They’re really SEO practices, local SEO practices that, oh, by the way, also benefit GEO. The reality is that only about .5% of potential opportunity to transact, to generate leads, to buy and service or to sell and service cars comes from the LLM space. So it doesn’t justify just dollars and cents, business cents.
It doesn’t justify a dedicated budget, but there are lots of things you can be doing that are already beneficial to your business, and will benefit your AI search visibility.
Dealer Takeaway: Before funding a separate GEO or AEO service, ask what work it adds beyond your existing SEO and reputation efforts. Prioritize practices that improve your business and search visibility, and require evidence to justify additional spending.
What’s the one thing dealers should be watching right now—and one thing they can safely ignore?
In the AI search space, the thing that dealerships should be watching is what an LLM says your dealership sucks at.
Ask your preferred LLM – ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude. Go ask it, “what do consumers not like about doing business with [your dealership]”? Look at the common threads that come back. This is an amalgam of what comes out as negatives in your reviews. These are the things that you need to address from a process standpoint. Pay attention to that.
What you don’t need to pay attention to in the AI search space is AI visibility scores. Any of the vanity metrics, the bundled up vanity metrics, it’s all FOMO, designed to sell you something. AI visibility scores are something that probably circulates in your emails right now, and they can be ignored because they’re based on national ranking, not local, wrong competitors, and a generic catalog of prompts that have nothing to do with your dealership.
Dealer Takeaway: Ask AI platforms what customers dislike about your dealership, then investigate recurring concerns against actual reviews and store processes. Give generic AI visibility scores little weight when their prompts, competitors, and geography do not reflect your market.