As featured in AutoSuccess Magazine.
Before you is a great wooden horse. Your advisors and merchants tell you it’s a great omen that will bring you unimaginable success if you embrace it. But is it filled with promise or peril?
The horse isn’t a horse; it’s the AI buzz on everyone’s mind. The advisors and merchants are your own team and the vendors who pitch you their latest wares. The potential for great success is real, but the potential peril inside comes not from dozens of Greek soldiers but simply from not understanding enough about the AI landscape to know what’s real and what’s a distraction.
In this article, we’re going to narrow our focus around the topic of AI and hone in on how it’s impacting the search landscape. I’m talking about AI Google search results, and now the significant pivot toward AI Assistants — ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, etc. — as a method for performing searches in the first place. For years, I have been teaching dealers about “conventional” search, SEO and how to succeed in search. Recently, I’ve received no less than a dozen requests from dealer group stakeholders and OEM program managers, asking when I would do an article on the state of artificial intelligence in search. Read on to avoid getting left behind in this evolving landscape.
Old Is New Again
Did you know you’ve been using AI in your marketing and your everyday life for a decade? Indeed, the AI we refer to today is generally a catch-all phrase for machine-learning-based technology. Google released its first one in 2015, called RankBrain. Starting in 2015, when you performed a Google search or paid for SEO as a marketing channel, you were leveraging what we now call AI.
The landscape has continually evolved since then, steadily becoming more advanced with time. In 2019, Google introduced its BERT model — its next-generation machine learning for Google Search. Here, the ‘T’ in BERT is exactly the same as the ‘T’ in ChatGPT: It stands for ‘Transformer,’ and it’s the ability of the machine-learning model to understand more context, like phrases or sentences. It transforms your text into meaning it can understand and process to match your intention with content on the web.
So why am I waxing about the history of machine learning when you want to know how it impacts car sales? The point is that AI came on the scene forever ago now, and it has been an evolutionary process, not a revolutionary process. You didn’t notice RankBrain. You didn’t notice BERT. You didn’t notice MUM — Google’s Multitask Unified Model, which came in 2021 to handle more complex searches. You didn’t notice until Google added a specific feature in 2024 that called itself ‘AI Overview’ while everyone was slapping an AI label on every product they sell. Did you notice how Google’s ‘AI Overview’ replaced the ‘Featured Snippet’ that had already been giving people a shortened answer to their search for a few years?
AI is not new. The label is new and it’s more advanced than ever before, but this has been and will continue to be an evolutionary, iterative process, not a radical revolution. Let me prove it…
How Marketing In Search Is Evolving
Google is very forthcoming about what they’re looking for when it comes to ranking search results. For years, they’ve followed E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness), and they’re only doubling down on this in the AI era. Websites or pages need to demonstrate they know what they’re talking about, and that’s done predominantly with written content.
The more your written content focuses on conveying legitimate value, fresh information and your store’s expertise to the consumer, the better Google will rank you. This now extends to what Google will rank in the AI Overview section, but there’s a significant wrinkle with this as it regards dealers. Google AI Overview does not appear for transactional automotive searches — think “F-150 for Sale” or “Ford Dealers.”
Funnily enough, the more AI comes into the spotlight, and the more Google features its AI Overview, the more they are devaluing content that is written by AI. Google’s SpamBrain update in 2021 started this ball rolling in a big way by more closely looking for unnatural backlinking, unoriginal content and attempts to manipulate search rankings with spammy tactics. Then, in March 2024, Google released a rare article alongside its major algorithm update in the same month. The article (find it by searching “Google Scaled Content Abuse” and clicking on the blog from March 5, 2024) specifically explains that Google is not penalizing AI-augmented content, but it is penalizing the use of AI as a shortcut to writing your SEO content. It’s spammy and does not demonstrate any E-E-A-T on the part of your dealership!
So, before AI, Google rewarded rich written content that served the consumer and demonstrated Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness. Now, with AI, Google is rewarding those things even more and further devaluing websites that cut corners with short, easy content and content generated largely or fully by AI. Google’s own AI is even getting better at detecting it!
I know, I know — I can hear you thinking it: “So Zach, are you telling me nothing has changed, and there’s no way to optimize for AI Overview? What about ChatGPT?” There are some new things, but even those are not as new as people are making them out to be. Let’s unpack what you or your vendor should be doing so you can avoid missing out.
AI-Specific Optimizations
There are some specific things that you need to be doing to ensure you’ll show up in AI search results. It starts with the basics of great quality content and avoiding old-school tactics like backlink solicitation. Next, we have more technical things that shouldn’t be ignored. Schema markup is a subset of technical SEO activities that have been inherent to all websites for a long time now but are getting fresh focus with AI-specific schema. This could get in the weeds, but I’ll keep it high-level…
When a dealership signs up for a website vendor or an SEO agency, they — you — want to know that the vendor understands and is on top of the latest tech evolutions that will give you an edge in the AI world. Schema is basically a list of qualities about a page that are filled out so search engines can understand it better. For example, if you have a 2024 Toyota Camry VDP, the “Vehicle” schema markup might include:
– NAME (“2024 Toyota Camry SE”)
– BRAND (“Toyota”)
– MODEL (“Camry”)
– VEHICLEMODELDATE (“2024”)
There are many more parameters than those four, but that’s how it works. So, what types of schema are there that are both dealership-related and useful for AI Assistants and search features?
• Vehicle Schema (Vehicle, Car, Product) – Existed since 2014
• LocalBusiness Schema (AutoDealer) – Existed since 2013
• FAQ Schema (FAQPage) – New in 2023
• Review Schema (Review, AggregateRating) – Existed since 2013
• Speakable Schema (SpeakableSpecification) – New but RARELY relevant for dealerships
• Event Schema (Event) – New but RARELY relevant for dealerships
As you can see, most of this is not at all new or doesn’t relate to dealership realities. The AI world is just enhancing the importance of making proper use of these schema types so models from Google AI Overview to ChatGPT can pick up the details. At Wikimotive and any other competent agency, this isn’t something that needs sudden correction because of AI. It was always in focus with proper SEO.
One Billion Messages Per Day on ChatGPT
Many are now aware that OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT) announced they’re now processing a BILLION individual messages EVERY DAY. That’s a lot, and it surely points to the rapidly rising market share of ChatGPT as a search engine… right?
Rand Fishkin, of Moz fame, analyzed the data in March 2025. He used analysis by Semrush about user stats for ChatGPT and Google to determine how much search market share ChatGPT now has, and the results are impressive.
30% of ChatGPT searches overlap transactional intent searches, where they’re replacing what might have otherwise been a Google search. Each ChatGPT interaction contains eight sub-messages on average. This means there are 38 MILLION prompts per day on ChatGPT, which could overlap with Google’s market share. Still a lot, right? Right?
As of December 2024, Google is sitting at 14 BILLION searches per day — yes, we’re back to billion with a ‘B’ — meaning ChatGPT has less than 0.3% market share for the purpose of a local business like a dealership. Not only that, but ChatGPT and similar AI Assistants are most useful for complex research questions, NOT transactional automotive searches like looking for a dealership or for available inventory.
AI Assistants are becoming more and more popular, but at a time when people are talking like you’ll go out of business if ChatGPT doesn’t recommend your dealership, less than half a percent of consumers are using it for discovery searches — and that number is much lower in the auto retail context. This is not a revolution; it’s a steady evolution, and it will continue to evolve…
Monetization is coming, but with that will come new consumer trust issues. Imagine asking ChatGPT who the best Ford dealership in the DFW metro is but seeing that the answer to your question has been sponsored. I’d go back to Google. There’s also the issue of rapid crowding, with every tech giant and then some launching a new AI Assistant, further muddying the waters and diluting clear market share. You need to pay attention to how AI will impact search marketing, but you do not need to throw out the tried and true fundamentals of SEO. You simply need to be feathering in new techniques as the space matures.
Embrace the Horse Wisely
Ultimately, Google search and AI Assistants, in the context of automotive search, continue to fundamentally reward all the same things they already did. If you want to rank on Google or be cited in the very small number of auto-retail conversations on ChatGPT, you’ll have to get there the same way you did before. Great content is produced by humans with experience who demonstrate Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness, all while avoiding spam tactics like AI content and forced backlink curation.
Whether you’re doing your SEO in-house or paying a vendor, the secret is that there is no secret. Focus on quality and remember that the wooden horse that is AI does signal the promise of great potential, but adopting it blindly will have you leaning on things that aren’t real while a more steady competitor adapts and molds to the steadily evolving search landscape.
If you’ve gotten this far and have questions or are wondering what to do next, reach out to Wikimotive. We offer free consultations to dealers to help you orient how you’re doing in organic search today and what needs to change for you to outpace your competition and gain durable market share in an evolving and unnecessarily noisy marketing environment.