In my last article, I shared one of the biggest ideas I brought home from CXAUTO and Automotive News Congress: AI visibility comes down to three things—content, infrastructure and monitoring.
Before we get into what happens when ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity tries to access your website, I want to start with the piece every company has the most control over.
The content itself.
An entire industry is forming around terms like AEO, GEO and AI optimization. And just as we saw in the early days of SEO, there will be plenty of people selling shortcuts.
I would be careful with that.
I don’t think the best first question is, “How do I write for AI?”
I think it is, “What do I know that is useful enough to become a source?”
That changes the conversation.
Search almost any automotive business topic and you will find dozens of articles covering the same ground. Five ways to improve customer retention. Ten tips for dealership marketing. The future of AI in automotive.
Those subjects can be useful. But when everyone repeats the same advice, what makes your article worth referencing?
This is where experience becomes valuable.
I have been in the automotive business since 1986. I have worked on the dealer side, the vendor side and the marketing side. I have watched programs succeed, watched others fail and learned that the difference often comes down to details you won’t find in a generic list of marketing tips.
If I am writing about dealership email marketing, that experience should be in the article. What have I seen work? Where do campaigns break down? What do companies consistently misunderstand? What would I do differently today?
That is the knowledge worth sharing.
The same opportunity exists inside dealerships and vendor companies. A service director understands the questions customers ask before approving a repair. A technician can explain a problem in ways that come from diagnosing it every day. A BDC manager sees where conversations stall. A vendor handling thousands of customer interactions may have evidence of patterns that have never been published.
Your company may already have valuable source material. It just hasn’t made it onto your website.