Description
When a shopper asks ChatGPT for a vehicle, AI skips your homepage and looks for one page. If it's missing, AI guesses at your inventory. Here's the fix.
For twenty years dealers have chased the Google algorithm. Rank the site, win the click, get the shopper on a VDP, get them on the lot. Now a growing share of your shoppers start by asking ChatGPT. Wade from Kerzie.ai says that number went from 6% to 45% in a single year. And ChatGPT doesn't browse your website the way a shopper does.
Wade joins Michael Cirillo to show what AI is actually looking for when someone asks it to find a vehicle. His picture is simple. Your website is the front cover of a book, built for human eyes with video, photos, and widgets. AI barely looks at the front cover. It goes looking for the back cover, a plain-text page called llms.txt that sits at the root of your site. Most dealer sites don't have one. So AI falls back on old search data, and that's how shoppers end up getting your wrong hours and units that left the lot months ago.
What you'll walk away with:
- A quick test you can run on your own site today to see whether AI can read it, and what a 404 or 403 error is telling you
- What to ask your website provider if you're locked into an OEM program
- How to set up what AI reads in two layers: a static page for your address, hours, and departments, and a daily-updated page for live inventory across hundreds of new and used units
- Why publishing more content without the right structure gets ignored by AI
- Where your salespeople still win once shoppers' AI agents start narrowing the list to two stores worth visiting on Saturday
Michael also asks the question every dealer running a website should sit with: if more than half of internet traffic is now machines, are you still filtering out the visitors doing your customers' shopping for them?
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Timestamps
00:00 AI Findability Matters
01:26 Podcast Sponsor Break
02:52 AI Upside For Dealers
05:15 Search Shift To ChatGPT
09:46 Structure Beats Content
11:26 Inventory Data For AI
12:36 Author Your AI Profile
20:18 Future Of Websites
25:18 Human Value And Upskilling
29:17 Wrap Up And Contact
29:43 Final Outro